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To Hell And Back Posting Date: Nov 12 2007 2:30AM If half the fun is getting there, then it stands to reason that the tough part of going to hell and back is the journey. In fact, if you do the math, since there’s a trip to hell and trip back from hell and just one stop in hell, the journey makes up a full two-thirds of the full torturous value.
And based on my experience, that’s pretty much accurate.
No activity other than blind dating and battlefield surgery has more potential to cause suffering than travelling, and in my experience, the less attractive the destination, the more likely the travel grief. I just got back from Cleveland, so you probably know how well that went.
The tragedy of Cleveland is not so much in the city itself, which has an unfortunate reputation which is most undeserved. It is in the fact that the city is on the wrong side of Erie, Pennsylvania.
Erie, unlike Cleveland, has no reputation to speak of, and this comes from a person who grew up watching Erie television due to the oddities of my local cable company. You could watch Erie TV for hours, as I did, and all you would learn of the city of Erie (actually, it’s a county) is that every commercial enterprise that buys local TV time is on Peach Street. I can’t tell you anything about Erie other than that, except that the county slogan is … wait for it … “Feel the lake effect.”
For those of you not familiar with “lake effect,” it’s generally considered a bad thing, along the lines of “frostbite effect,” “high wind warning effect” or “downstream from a toxic spill effect.” Mentioning lake effect in your county marketing slogan is a little like bragging that your trailer park is located right on tornado alley, or that your basement is part of floodplain city.
While the marketing geniuses of Erie see the lake effect as creating picturesque shoreline, natural resources and recreation opportunities on the smallest of the Great Lakes, the truth is that meteorologically, the “lake effect” means that Erie pretty much takes it up the wazzoo weather-wise.
In fact, the southern shoreline of Lake Erie generally gets the crap beat out of it by the forces of nature and Erie gets it the worst. As the prevailing winds rumble from the west across the lake, they gather up the damp and chill from that expanse of open water and then dump it like a can of whoop-ass on our favourite Pennsylvanian county.
Normally, this wouldn’t bother me, but for one day this past week, I cared deeply. I had to go to Cleveland. That’s on the other side of Erie. That means I left the warm sunshine of home and arrived in the blinding snowstorm of Erie two hours later.
As I white-knuckled it through the slushy mire of I-90 through Erie, I started thinking about why travel holds such hell-like potential. I think I figured it out. Most of us (and by “us,” I mean the internet-using public) are blessed with lives which rarely put us in peril. A bad day for us is when espn.com loads slowly or we get carpal tunnel from clicking too often on www.jessica-albanearlynude.com. The only time we rationally believe our lives may be at risk is when we board an airplane, or pass between two transport trucks on the highway, or drive in a snow storm through Erie, Pennsylvania.
When the risks of your normal day include paper cuts and a stiff neck because you slept funny, dealing with your own mortality has to be considered a bad day. Doing that someplace you don’t want be, away from home, is our own little version of hell.
And if you think about that for a second, you realize how totally, magically, miraculously lucky we are. When driving on slippery roads in an automobile with heated leather seats and The Beatles playing on an eight-speaker stereo is hell, it makes you want to drop to your knees and thank the people who know far better what hell is all about … the men and women who have fought and died for our country. Next time I see an ad for the Carvel Ice Cream Shop on Peach Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, I’m going to remember those people … and not just because today is Remembrance Day. |
