Chicago

In Fowler there was -- and holy crap, still is! -- a restaurant called The Hundred Mile House because it was about 100 miles from both Indianapolis and Chicago. (One of my brothers, I don't remember which one, cracked "Yeah, a hundred miles and fifty years.")

One hundred miles on paved, four lane highways to each city with a lot less traffic in the 1970s would have put both within a two to three hour drive from Fowler, but you would never have known. Indianapolis was considerably the smaller of the two and just didn't have anywhere near the same cultural and media institutions that Chicago -- a cultural and physical behemoth, the sprawling second largest U.S. city at the time and home to a lot of media, sports teams and cultural sites that simply loomed large over the landscape -- had. Or the same cachet, let's be honest. I don't remember regular trips to Indy (as it was universally known) as a kid the way there were regular trips to Chicago. 

There were once-a-summer trip to Cubs game with all of the altar boys from Fowler; a once-every-other-year-or-so trip to the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry; a once-in-a-childhood trip to see the Nutcracker Ballet (though how we afforded that is a mystery); a once-in-a-lifetime trip to see Pope John Paul II when he came to Chicago in 1979 (I remember getting on a fancy coach bus before dawn on a school day in front of Sacred Heart Church, and my dad and I went, just the two of us -- well, just the two of us from our household and at least a literal one million other people for a mass in Grant Park). Indianapolis trips from Fowler were either rarer, or less memorable, or both. Indy wasn't as cool -- or as fraught.

Because there was another side of it, too. We were country mice -- by which I mean that my parents seemed to have if not a fear than at least an anxiety about cities in general and that meant Chicago in particular: it was The Big City and therefore alluring but also not to be trusted. They were Jeffersonian -- Thomas, not George -- in their worldview at least of where there lie virtue between urban and rural. Chicago induced stress and was feared, almost, for the traffic and the crazy drivers and the perceived crime -- recalling this now I can't help but wonder if there is some racism to ascribe to this, as well, and fear of the other. 

They could do it -- navigate Chicago, that is -- and they did do it, but they didn't like it. Driving hours (so many hours) to downstate Illinois to see my rural cousins and both sets of grandparents? No problem. Driving less distance across Chicagoland to see my northwestern suburban Chicago cousins? Decidedly more challenging, and decidedly less frequently done. I could feel the tension increase the closer we go to The City, as we called it; our thirty cents at the ready for the tolls on the Tri-State and the radio tuned to WBBM all news for traffic reports. 

As a passenger and not the driver? I loved it. I loved seeing the different cars and the different people in them, I loved trying to be the first one to espy the world's tallest building and the rest of the skyline from miles away on the prairie (a game that really only I was playing, so I usually won), I loved the energy and accompanying frisson and everything about it.

It simply loomed large as large over the landscape as its skyline did over the prairie, even in isolated Fowler, even in the 1970s.  

And I'm so grateful that my parents made the trips, because Fowler was isolated. I was shocked at the number of hands that were raised in my fifth grade class when Mrs. Muller, our teacher, had asked how many had never left the state of Indiana. There were kids in our class who lived three miles from the Illinois border and they made it in to Fowler every day. Benton County was on the border with Illinois. How had some of my classmates never been to Illinois -- it was right there! Did the state line loom so large in imaginations that it made it difficult to cross? Had so many peers' parents not take them for Dairy Queen Dilly Bars in Watseka from time to time? 

My world view was much broader due to the occasional journeys to or even around Chicago. These helped prise open my imagination and show me who I was sharing the world with. They lubricated my curiosities about others' stories -- and about what life paths were possible. It was assumed to be a little scary, yes, but we went anyway -- which laid groundwork for me. 

I was still very much a country mouse, let's be clear -- I hadn't pieced together that if a room number started with a three it was likely on the third floor until I was looking for my classrooms before my first semester of university, for example -- but I was one who could pack his bags for parts unknown: to Germany for a home stay after high school, to downtown Milwaukee for college, and yes to Chicago for a couple of years in the 90s. Sometimes jammed into CTA's 145 bus, headed to work on the Magnificent Mile, looking out over the Lake or towards the stately line of apartment buildings lining Lake Shore Drive, I'd wonder how a kid from Fowler ever ended up there -- and upon reflection and at least in part it was due to our trips to the Second City as kids. We were desensitized to its challenges and made aware of its opportunities. And my life was never the same, once I saw them. 

 

 

Riding Bikes

 

My bike was that rare thing in a house with ten kids: mine. Unlike ball gloves or sweatshirts or rosaries it wasn’t shared; it wasn’t “the blue bike” or “the little Schwinn”, it was mine. This wasn’t because I’d bought it (there was no money) or because it was given to me specifically for a birthday or Christmas (there would have been howls of protest), it was simply a matter of dimensions. My sisters, closest to me in age and size, each had access to newer, larger and mechanically sounder bikes, so they never needed to borrow one. I was by far the smallest -- my hulking big brothers were between seven and thirteen years older, a literal lifetime when you’re a kid -- and my bike was the smallest and therefore out of the pool of the borrowable.

 

And that little single-geared Schwinn was freedom. 

 

It was a more-or-less convincing blue, multiple sloppy paint jobs not completely hiding what it had been new (or newer) at some point in Michigan, or Memphis, or greater Buffalo. I didn’t have a bike lock and counted on it being right where I’d left it, wherever I’d left it: at home unborrowed in the side yard by the tire swing, at the town pool at the bike rack, at Sacred Heart in the small yard between the school and the church, at the Little League park -- anywhere, all over town, balanced on its sturdy, after-market hand-installed kickstand, waiting for me.

 

Mostly, though, I was on it. It was something to do – in all but the deepest snow or most dramatic lightning storm or tornado warning, I could go “riding bikes” without asking or telling; between nine and nine, I could just go. Not to go anywhere in particular, usually, was the point; it was just to go. Maybe you’d call a friend and ask if they wanted to ride bikes, but more often you’d ride bikes over to their house and ask, or you’d ride through town until you found someone else who was also, literally and currently, riding a bike, and ask them if they wanted to “ride bikes.” If they said yes - if they weren’t on an errand, say - then you’d ride to the town park, or past the Sacred Heart school playground, or maybe over to the Little League field, or to the town pool depending on the time of year. And when you got to where you were going, you’d ride around it, languidly, and see if any other kids were around who wanted to “ride bikes”, and talk about the next destination.

 

Kids in Fowler in the ‘70s had terrific cardiovascular health.

 

It was safe -- opaquely safe, by which I mean it was so safe we never thought about it as being safe, an all-encompassing safety so complete it was invisible, unnoticeable and unremarked upon. It’s not that drivers were used to looking for pedestrians (they weren’t), or that we were safety conscious (we weren’t) or that we wore helmets (we didn’t own any and no one else in town did either). In town the houses were set in the middle of ample lots, so approaching each corner at little kid bike speed you could see if there was anyone coming. In the country, you could hear (in the summer when the corn was high) or see (the rest of the year - it was flat and tree-less) any vehicle from far enough away to have plenty of time to pull over from your path down the middle of the road to get out of the way.

 

And wave, of course, because you knew them, or you might know them, or they knew you, or maybe neither of you knew if you knew each other but you waved anyway. Why take the chance? You wouldn’t want to seem rude. 

 

There were dangers, I guess. There was a traffic light you could cross against, but it was just the one, and it was set to flash yellow at the cars coming up US 52 and red at those on Fifth Street, and the very – very – subtly undulating prairie meant that you could literally see three miles down the road to the massive grain elevator at Swanington and two miles up the road the other direction toward the bend in the road. It was safe.

 

I don’t remember any parameters on where I could ride. There were no “Don’t go past…” and few “Be back by…” restrictions that I remember. I was the youngest of ten kids in a family headed by two parents who both worked outside the home as they struggled to make ends meet, so triage, fatigue and resignation could have been factors. But Fowler was so isolated no restrictions were needed.

 

How was a kid on a bike going to get into trouble, and would he or she have gone? The next closest clump of human habitation was Earl Park, seven miles northwest up a slight but noticeable-on-a-bike incline on US 52. It had fewer than 500 people in the ‘70s and -- except for the Labor Day Fall Festival -- there was nothing there worth riding your bike seven miles to discover. Oxford, Indiana (southeast, population 1,098, Dan Patch Days) and Boswell, Indiana (south-southwest, 998, Benton County Fair) were both nine miles each, and between them and past them was more of the same. The closest chain retail outlet of any kind was the Dairy Queen in Hoopeston, Illinois -- twenty eight miles away. I never even dreamt of riding my bike there, or anywhere outside of Fowler. There was nowhere to go, and I had no money to spend even if I’d gotten there. Someone with a driver’s license and a car could get to the county fair grounds in Boswell in 12 minutes; for me it simply didn’t exist.

 

Perhaps I’ve been so compelled by island living as an adult because I essentially grew up on one. Fowler was effectively an island, one of an archipelago of small towns set in a sea of tamed prairie and corn and soybeans. Immense, interminable, impossibly fecund fields lapped up against gravel and asphalt shores.

 

I never thought about any of this as a kid, of course. I just knew, after the age of four or so, that I could get on my bike and go: whenever I wanted, as far as I wanted, for as long as I wanted.

 

I didn’t know then what a gift this was, of course – the freedom, the mobility, the safety of it all. And it’s unknowable, as well, how things in our childhood will redound in our future lives. Is it a stretch to draw a line from my trusty blue Schwinn to my willingness to explore as an adult? Am I peripatetic by nature, or did all that freedom as a little boy nurture the confidence to do things as an adult that I found unremarkable but which in which others found involved a modicum of risk?  

 

Years later, I was spending my summer on a friend’s couch in Bangkok when I had a jolt of recognition reading David Malouf’s gorgeous “Southern Skies”: His narrator comments “Looking back on those days I see myself as a kind of centaur, half-boy, half-bike, forever wheeling down suburban streets”, and that was exactly right. Every day in the summer and many days the rest of the year I was welded to that old hand-me-down Schwinn, safe and free.