Home from the MW

Back in NC after a quick tour of a small chunk of the upper Midwest, where I focused more on seeing people than things. But I did see a few things.

On the one hand, my impression of Ann Arbor, aside from the joy of hanging out with Kate and Kim and seeing their boys and finally visiting Zingerman's, was that the romance of the college town has faded for me a bit. Which is not surprising, given that I've always lived in one. Also, admittedly, the world was suffused the whole time with the oppression of near triple digit temperatures, which rob almost any place of most charm. My visit to Bordeaux and the Dordogne in 2023 was also crushed by mad heat, as well as Mary's regrettable if tremendously delayed initial encounter with COVID.

Driving from Ann Arbor to Chicago, I had hoped to drink in the countryside and groove on the Midwestern gestalt, but in the end Google Maps and the need to make dinner at Lou's in Berwyn more or less forced me back onto the interstate. I then made a valiant attempt to find a local sandwichery in Battle Creek, MI, but all I could find was brew pubs that would have blandished me with burgers and fries, so I ended up at a Subway, where I was served by a very tan woman about my age with remarkably white and tightly spaced teeth. When I complemented her on them, she said that they were implants because she had raised two kids and now it was time to take care of herself. No doubt. I am sure she worked a ton of hours to pay for them and they looked great.

I continued on towards Chicago with the full intent to check out the beach scene on Lake Michigan. I did so at New Buffalo, after getting coffee at a cute little place where the woman handling the register laughed when I told her my name was Clark because she thought I looked a little like Chevy Chase: "so like Clark Griswold, you know." I was most impressed with her cultural literacy, though nobody had ever likened me to Chase before and even she knew that it was not necessarily a shining endorsement because, and I quote: "I hear he's a total douchebag." Which accords with what I've heard.

Anyhow, I carried on and went down to the shore of the Great Lake, where the beach was emptying out after an afternoon thunderstorm passed. The sand was different from ocean sand, much more like dirt, though still sandy enough. When I put my feat in the water, it kind of blew my mind that it was fresh, not salt water, as I trained my gaze on the horizon and saw nothing but water and more water.