22 April, Chicago IL

Arrival. One final entry is required. Left Kansas City around noon yesterday. Would have camped in one of the state parks near Peoria except for a delay caused by a dead battery. Pulled into a rest stop in the middle of Missouri and when I returned to the car, only feeble clicks emerged from the started. There is a certain relief, I find, when things finally break, as something abstract and impending is replaced with something concrete and, as it were, consummated. Of course with cars, especially as old as mine, there is always some abstract notion of mortality attending them, and with 400 miles to go I prepared myself for the worst. Fortunately the repair shop was close, the problem was easily diagnosed, and the mechanics honest. All the same this delayed me enough that I checked into some roadhouse in Bloomington (IL), and arrived in Chicago proper around 10 this morning, in time to find the neighborhood where I have an appointment with a rental agent, grab a quick cup of coffee, and write this. Chicagoland, as they call it, begins some fifty or sixty miles earlier, at least on I-55; a bit south of Joliet the exurbs start to pop up and you know you have entered the orbit of something. Careful eyes could detect this gravitational field at a much larger distance, in the orientation of power lines, railroads, and interstates, which ignore the (relatively) Cartesian world of cardinal directions and begin to converge. So here I am. All roads may lead to Rome, but on this continent we have to substitute the Windy City for the Eternal City. There is, now that I write it, something of Rome about this place, as there is something of Rome about London, though I cannot quite put my finger on it. Perhaps there is something of Rome in anything that is urban, in anything that resembles that thing created by the people who gave us the word Urbs. But I shall certainly have plenty of opportunity to think on this.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 22April2006 )