Thursday, April 11, 2002
I'm posting from a Microtel in Lafayette, Indiana, not far from Purdue University. I was surprised to find they had data ports in the rooms. I thought that I'd have to write this tonight in MS Word and post it from Chicago tomorrow. Lucky me.
It's depressing driving backwards through the seasons. We left Birmingham at 1:15 this afternoon in mid-spring, with temperatures in the low 80s. By Nashville it was looking like very early spring. Here in Indiana, it looks more like late winter. The Inconveniences of Latitude. Ugh.
Some sights on the road, though. Moving north along I-65 the geology can be spectacular, but somewhat monotonous. Towering road cuts exposing thick, fossiliferous layers of gray Ordovician and Mississippian limestones, but it all starts to look the same after a few hundreds miles. You can only say, "Wow, look! There's another two-hundred feet of Ordovician-aged limestone," so many times before people want you to shut up. Fortunately, humanity is somewhat more colorful and varied in the scenery it provides. My favorites of the day: exotic livestock - an emu and two bison; just across the Alabama/Tennessee state line, huge and lurid billboards advertising a strip joint called The Boobie Bungalow; somewhere in Kentucky, a sign on a gate declaring: USED COWS FOR SALE; a few miles farther along, just off an exit, a 24-hour Adult Megamart. There seems to be quite a pornucopia along I-65.
A day of crossing rivers - the Tennesee, the Cumberland, the Kentucky. Small cities clustered about rivers, cities with almost interchangeable skylines (though the Bell South building in Nashville was pretty bizarre). Jennifer drove and I read to her from a book on the "first wave" of Gothic novelists - Lewis and Radcliffe and so on (research for her Ph. D.). It was dark by the time we reached Indianapolis.
Tomorrow, Chicago.
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