As on the previous day, when I’d visited the large hotel to check my reservation, the Hertz car rental desk was unmanned. A young black guy joined me to form a two person queue. He mentioned out loud, to himself but not really to himself that he really needed to move to a warmer climate when he graduated. I was happy enough to nibble at the conversation bait and he told me about his study in Chicago, a general degree which would allow him to teach. He ultimately wanted to build his own school for under-privileged kids in Central America and strongly believed in a hands-on method of teaching employing music and touch.
A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car. This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced. So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in. Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before. I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview. Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know. Don’t worry about the rest. With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.
It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool. I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.
I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact. Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide. Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick. I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever. On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.
With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead. This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago. Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape. The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.
Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’ The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723. (That one isn’t accurate). They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!
Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me. It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.
Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha. Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city. When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.
From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls. This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon. Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent. A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.
It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not. Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times. She looked at me like I was retarded. I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.
Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully. It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in. The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock. She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.
This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like. Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were. Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.
The radio songs didn’t range too widely: old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.
Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay. Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago. Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped. Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found. So, after a brief stroll I headed on. Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town. There was bound to be something there.
By this point I was tired and not thinking straight. I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel. It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.
Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts. Or at least I did. There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.
An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks. One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude. I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home. A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly. Young guys sat round watching sport. I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.
Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it. I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene. I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
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