All Things Considered

Roadtrip

I'd been driving overnight since the show ended, and it had been eventful - afew unexpectedly tight corners, and some desperate swerves to avoid assisting in the suicide of several small mammals and a stolidly determined frog.

But Chicago took the biscuit........ye gods, it snatched the plate as well and threw it against a wall. The I-90 starts to wake up as it hits the north western suburbs of the city, and very quickly, I picked up a fresh decoy, an elderly Chevy Checker cab heading rapidly into town like some grubby and dented off-course Moldavian moon-rocket held together by nothing more than the coincidence that all the parts were in the same orbit. I sat on its tail at a discreet distance, ready to dodge any rusty chunks of sheet metal it might shed. If anything was going to spook a traffic cop, this wasit - there must have been half a dozen violations just around his rear fender. But he knew his area; not a light flashed nor siren wailed as we hurtled city-ward at ninety plus.

And it became common cause as the stream of us burgeoned and swelled, fed by tributary on-ramps from dormitory suburbs, each leaking a premonitory splash of early commuters, steadily raising our south-easterly river towards flood levels. Everyone was at the same game; an exhilarating, joyfully illegal and wonderfully defiant swerve, dodge and dash to beat the early morning thrombosis that clogs Chicago's furred old arteries.

Downtown suddenly erupted like an upward bursting clash of tectonic plates, while the radar detectors, nervously twitching alongside the mass transit rail line that runs in the median of the 90, burst into a frantic chorus of bleeps and rasps - X band, K band, Ka band and a few terrified Guinea-pig squeaks of infra-red laser - as they picked up the city's security systems and motion detectors. The Sears building towered over the rip-tide of traffic like a huge, demented light-house as we rushed through our concrete runnels, and as it slid by over my left shoulder, the sky behind it reddened and burst out of the night into another bright blue day.

But still the roaring metal tidal wave surged onward, racing and breaking around the roadworks barriers and the off-ramps, fresh streams rushing in from other roads joining the freeway's casually announced transmogrification from JFK to Ryan to Calumet Expressways, and I clung on to my rented Buick, grabbing at the overhead road signs and fighting in the white water of traffic to hang on to my direction, until some of us hit the ramp onto the 80 East, aiming across Indiana to Ohio and Pennsylvania, and beached ourselves briefly at the George Ade service area to catch our breathand a coffee whilst drying out our nerves in the rapidly warming early morning summer sun.