October evening -- Madison, Wisconsin
Chalk it up as a smart move (Smart move, George!) — that decision I made Thursday morning to cancel my scheduled travel-day from Madison to Milwaukee to Chicago.
Just to get to Milwaukee on the west shore of Lake Michigan, Harley and I would have had to travel 90 miles due east across the Wisconsin dairyland, which just then was being scoured by a strong northerly out of Canada.
As I’ve mentioned before, tail-winds on a motorcycle are welcome, while head-winds are do-able if not all that much fun, getting constantly buffeted a little bit left and right. At least you’re pointed into the wind and balanced in a miserable sort of way.
But cross-winds are different, and a powerful cross-wind — like the 30- to 50-mph gusts being predicted that day — can be dangerous. At least on a motorcycle. So I decided to remain in Madison one day more.
How windy was it?
“Giant Waves Sink Nine Boats,” the headline on a front-page story in the Chicago Sun-Times reported the next day.
“Winds gusting to 60 mph and 25-foot waves ripped sail and motor boats from their moorings, tangled them together in knots and dragged them to the south end of the downtown harbor, where they smashed against concrete harbor walls next to the Shedd Aquarium,” the story said.
“The waves were so powerful,” said boat-owner (and onlooker) Kirk Kessler, “that one boat was jumping out of the water like an orca.”
Yes, not a bad reason to see a little more of Madison.
Where I found myself liking just about everyone I met, especially in the cheerful little hostel where I’d taken up residence. That was another good decision. Hostels cost less than half of an inexpensive hotel, and they’re immeasurably more interesting. All ages and ethnicities of travelers arrive there from all around the world and some have amazing stories to tell.
But the Madison hostel is better than most — clean, freshly painted, well-lit — and hostel manager Carlos Rodriguez Lewison and his staff were full of excellent recommendations. They’re the ones who filled me in quickly on the current political scene in Madison (including a Senate hearing that very morning on a sex-education bill before the state legislature) and they also told me where I’d find the best meals within walking distance at the least expense.
That’s how I found my favorite spot for breakfast, a little working-class Greek cafe — the Plaka Taverna — two blocks from the hostel. The breakfast special there was perfect, and the few customers catching a bite to eat before heading off to work were friendly and interesting. News of the capture and killing of Libyan dictator-for-life Muammar Gaddafi was on the TV set overhead just then, and so the conversation naturally began with international politics.
But it didn’t take long for that to evolve into a discussion of domestic politics and the economy and more specifically the local economy in Madison and whether the person speaking had a job.
It’s almost impossible for a professional in Madison to make more than $40,000 a year, a small businessman named Paul told me. But he himself didn’t receive any salary at all.
“I probably won’t for a couple years,” he said. “That’s how it goes when you try to start a new business.”
But it’s worse for his employees who receive the minimum wage ($8 in Wisconsin) with no other means of support.
“I mean: Do the math,” he said. “You can’t live on that.”
Sometimes he’ll help out some of them on the side, maybe slip them $200 to help pay the rent, he said.
A grad student in his late 20s who’d just earned a masters degree with a specialization in climate modeling just learned that the one and only government agency he thought could hire him is reducing staff levels due to spending cuts.
“So I have a masters that’s focused on performing a specific job in which the only agency that could hire me now says it can’t,” he said.
“Maybe you should go back and get a different masters,” a friend sitting next to him suggested.
“No,” he said. “I’m done with college.”
But a third diner, Nathan, was more optimistic. He’d recently started a new business of his own, a micro-distillary in Madison that specializes in liqueurs and a little rum and retailing them in a pleasant atmosphere.
Micro-breweries that make and sell home-grown beer are popular in college towns all across the country, and may even be at risk at saturating the market in some regions, like the Pacific Northwest. But micro-distillaries like his are relatively new, Nathan said. “It’s really catching on.”
Trying one in Madison, he thought, might be a good idea.
Friday morning, the day after the storm, started off crisp and clear with a rosy-fingered dawn (as Homer loved to say) and no wind at all. A perfect day for traveling. I was hoping to make it all the way to South Bend, Indiana, that night to catch up on lost time — maybe even arrive in time for a pep rally on the campus at Notre Dame in preparation for the USC football game the next day.
But I didn’t get as early a start as I’d hoped and didn’t make good time at all (lured in as I was around Milwaukee by the biggest cheese shop I’d ever seen). So, approaching Chicago near rush hour on a Friday night was less than ideal. Then the traffic on I-94 slowed to a crawl, until finally, around 5 p.m., it stopped.
For the next hour the traffic barely moved. That might not mean so much in a car, but on a motorcycle, when you slow to a 1-to-3-mph crawl, you’re constantly holding in the clutch to coast and your left wrist begins to tire. It got so I began looking forward to pulling off at each and every “food and gas oasis” island that offered itself on the freeway system that circles Chicago.
Then the congestion moving counter-clockwise around the lower rim of Lake Michigan began to ease a little as it grew dark and everything speeded up. Including the largest trucking flotilla I’ve ever personally been a part of. In the headlamp-glare of early evening the truck drivers pressed hard to make up for their own lost time. One giant tractor-trailer rig after another tried to pass me.
I’d already decided I would stop at a closer destination about 50 miles west of South Bend, but even that was a bad idea. The whole scene was pretty wild. I began to picture my bike as a very small fish trying to swim in the same current as the sharks and whales, and suddenly that image of an orca slamming itself against the concrete wall of the Chicago harbor seemed both real and very personal. As I checked into a sad little hotel later that night I vowed not to make the same mistake again.
But what about this whole trip I’m on, I thought. Was that a mistake too? Was that a bad decision?
The answer, I decided, is probably not a whole lot different than the one that former Chinese prime minister Zhou En-Lai reportedly gave President Nixon — when Nixon asked the Communist leader whether he regarded the whole 18th-century French Revolution as a success or not.
Maybe it’s too soon to tell, Zhou En-Lai said. Time will tell.
Yes, time will tell.
Travels with Harley 