Grey mist and drizzle met me as I pulled apart the curtains the next morning, any remnant snow finally dribbled away. Having plotted a loose south-easterly diagonal return, I trailed the westerly edge of Lake Winnebago before pressing further south.
Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend. (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?) This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland. It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets. However, there were no surrounding mountains here. The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones. I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress. She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money. “Cheers” was my charmless reply.
Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee. Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions. You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself. Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything. Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.
The freeways were simpler. I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly. You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening. The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.
I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum. Has the internet killed museums? There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey. Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance. I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.
With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river. Big but not that big. I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago. And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank. Stress was simmering.
The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense. After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address. It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic. The car was due for return at 5pm. At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.
I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system. I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him. I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged. Ask inside. Thanks. I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster. I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas. I felt stupid and panicked.
Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic. Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver. As if. Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.
Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster. Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station. Wow. Look what we’ve done!
Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident. SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok. It was only 4.50. It might be ok. I hit downtown proper at about 4.57. As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there. As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.
“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before. She didn’t mention I was half hour late. I said yes and she wished me a good night.
‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
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