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Road Trip I - Border Crossing Posting Date: Jun 8 2008 7:01PM Almost exactly sixteen years ago, in 1992, I took a road trip to celebrate graduating from university. Nothing much happened, and it was sixteen years ago, so naturally, I thought reconstructing the events of the trip through a series of internet columns would be a good idea. Turns out it takes five columns to tell the story. This is the first. All the events described here are true … I think. Only the names have been changed to protect people who are now good friends of powerful lawyers.
Maybe I should have stayed at home. The American customs officer seemed to think so.
My faithful travelling companion and I inched my mother’s gleaming 1989 grey Toyota Corolla towards the American border. It looked benign, but oddly lurking, like a buried sprinkler system waiting to soak the paperboy.
As we pulled up to the big booth separating the outside world from all of America, I was pleased to see the booth was “manned” by a woman. I could use my masculine wiles, I figured, if push came to shove. “Citizenship,” she said, scowling full-on.
“Canadian.”
“Occupation.”
“None,” I said. “We’re students. Both of us are students.”
“Get out of the car and open the trunk,” said Border-Hilda . The clock started ticking to the strip search.
Without making any sudden movements, I exited my vehicle and opened the trunk, into which both Hilda and I stared while I tried not to soil myself.
“You ever had trouble crossing the border before?”
“Am I having trouble crossing the border now?”
“Close the trunk and return to the vehicle.” I scurried back to the driver’s seat, looking for the sign that said, “Body Cavity Searches – This Way.”
Hilda re-perched on her stool and said without looking at us, “Enjoy your trip.” With that sudden and unexpected burst of empathy, we were unleashed on an unsuspecting nation.
First stop, Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, a university that devotes an entire building to the marching band. I peed in it (the building, not the band) to express my disagreement with their spending priorities. Onward Ho!
Not too long after you exit the Eastern Time Zone, you bump into Chicago. “Chicago,” legend has it, is the Iroquois word for Oprah. Chicago is a diabolically well protected city. Approaching drivers must navigate a series of remarkably signage-free on-ramps and off-ramps, any one of which could land you in Lake Michigan or send you careening off into Indiana. There are punishingly narrow bridges, merge lanes so short you can measure them in inches, and signs you must see to believe – “No Left Turn” on the freeway, “No Parking” above the middle lane of the expressway.
Unlike Toronto, which beats its lakefront into submission with tall buildings, Chicago separates the lake from its downtown with a beautiful strand of parkland that appears to be the unofficial rollerblade headquarters of the world. After dodging yuppie joggers and preteen skaters, my travelling companion and I plunged into the heart of the Chicago shopping district where oddly, all the stores were closed. Apparently, nothing is ever open in Chicago because if it were, people would actually come downtown and get their cars stolen or something.
Not wanting to get our car stolen, we left Chicago and drove into the darkening underbelly of Illinois. Pausing for sleep in Kankakee, Illinois – a place where, I swear, I watched a police officer pump gas while holding a rifle – we ploughed into the American heartland with the precision of a Civil War surgeon.
In daylight, Illinois is remarkably flat and boring and flat and boring and boring. The reward for getting through Illinois, however, is St. Louis which is refreshingly boring. The “Gateway to the West” offers not only a confusing hub of woven highways which split and rejoin in an effort to make it appear that even more roads lead to St. Louis, but the city also offers a beautiful waterfront where you can eat the river with a fork.
St. Louis provided an interesting view of urban race relations in the American mid-west. In the St. Louis Center Mall, all the white men wore ties and all the white women wore dresses. They all spoke like network news anchors and gave the impression that they live constantly in the middle of a long lunch. In order to see an African-American, you had to order fast food. Every employee at every fast food counter was black. The only white person in the mall with a uniform and a name tag was the security officer, and he had a gun.
Leaving St. Louis would be a much more satisfying experience if it didn’t mean driving thought Missouri. Luckily, if you keep going, Missouri ends and Kansas begins and suddenly you have a 50/50 chance of “I-Spy” by guessing “toll booth.”
Once you pay your admission fee at the state line, Kansas is so flat, you can actually see the ground curve towards China. Even the sky looks flat in Kansas. Only around the edges does the sky fold down to meet the land at some far off, invisible and magic point, leaving you in a huge green-brown-blue-grey envelope.
It was oddly magnificent.
Next Time: Welcome to the Rockies |
