I came to the town of Niles, Michigan, expecting another rendition of the small town pattern, but its buildings grew more tightly knit than I'd expected. A four lane road threw me south, toward Indiana, but Niles didn't come to an end. On both sides by the sidewalks were half-built fireworks stands, shabby little restaurants, pawn shops, and a pedestrian promenade rustling about the streets. I sped through the repeating street lights, searching and waiting for the end of the town. Instead I found an unexpected green sign reading “Indiana,” posted on the road's right side and the crowds of buildings went on.
South Bend, Indiana was a bigger piece of this mass. Traffic began to stream more heavily by and the spaces between buildings faded away. This was a bigger city of a cheaper essence, and I was becoming lost in its puzzle-like maze of roads.
Stopping on a street corner at the interstate exit, I pulled out my Indiana state map. It didn't tell me about anything but the highways so I went into the nearest shop, hoping to find some help.
The lady at the counter was genuinely kind and she wanted to help, but she commuted from outside town and didn't know the best way west. She passed me onto a familiar customer, a tall guy, with a shaved and waxed head like a cleaned up motor-biker. With the clear booming voice of an Northeastern city man he rattled off every route in a hundred miles to get from South Bend to the other side of Chicago.
“They used to call me the Navigator. I could tell you how to get anywhere. Now, you got a pen?” I pulled mine out of my shorts pocket and began to transcribe the particulars of what he said would be my best possible path. Specifying every landmark for each turn along the way he planned the whole route for me.
Before going, he decided it best to tell me a harrowing account of his experience with Gary, Indiana, an upcoming city on my way to Chicago. Once at a show there, he said, immediately upon stepping through the venue door, the man standing directly in front of him in line had gotten shot up and killed. His suggestion was that when I got there, I wake with the sun and ride straight through in the early morning, not taking any stops.
“But, I was kind of looking forward to exploring some abandoned buildings,” I objected.
“To everybody else it'll seem like 'Look at me, White Boy on a bicycle, admiring the architecture.' It's not a good place. Go to a museum in Chicago instead.” Everyone to whom I'd mentioned I was going through Gary had offered me some form of warning. Their impact by now had become somewhat dulled, but his story did become stuck, nervously pacing about my mind.
My way west afforded a brief but welcome departure into freshly budding farm stretches before the stifling concrete cityscape commenced. From the rural roadside shoulder, I sang travel songs aloud to the corn and bean bed audience, dancing on the breeze. But too soon the afternoon was ended on the doorstep to the cities. All varieties of busy buildings reached up, haplessly intertwined. From dilapidated houses, to factories, plants, and mills, there were no distinct sections, everything pressed together in a fragmentary blend. This all abruptly ended at a thin forested coastline when I found myself at the watery foot of Lake Michigan.
Toward the fringe of beach stretched a thin swampy road. The body of trees fell behind me, and opened up onto a sky blue water which stretched forever out to the great Canadian north. I peeled off my shoes and descended the path to the beach between the prickly dune grasses. What struck me first was the deep blue shade of the distant water. To the west, the shore was obstructed by the outlandish, tall, sooty form of an operating steel mill. A white gas plumed from its smokestack and a blaze of orange fire was kindled on the top of a lower tower, throwing a trail of expanding smoke on the sky. I walked on the stony beach to the end of a sandbar, looking on past the mill. Nearly hidden in the dull drifting haze, the miniature silhouette of Chicago stood meekly on the lake's horizon. From the small inlet behind me came the sound of water, spilling out from a drainage pipe into the lake. Looking down at the waves as they lapped on my toes, I saw the water's color in the shallows was shifted to a coppery tint. I walked back, passing the few beach-goers, who seemed to me curiously content, and returned to my bike wanting to get started pedaling away through the city.
Afternoon waned into evening as I arrived on the outskirts of Gary. Adhering to the advice of the biker-man, I found an abandoned lot behind an entrance blocked with a concrete slab. Lifting my bike up onto this slab, I hopped over it myself, then lowered my bicycle in, hauling it along through the lot between piles of old tires, shattered concrete and beams, and all the other various junk which littered the ground. In the lot's far corner I saw some scraggly trees, went over behind them, and pulled together my tent, hiding from the open as well as I could.
I assembled my stove, and boiled some water, dropping in two packs of noodles to cook, and then walked around the place examining the contents that had been dumped into it. In the rubble I found an old trove of books strewn over the dirt, their paperback covers faded from long nights of rain, and moist undersides eaten away by the bugs. The Call of the Wild was part of the pile, its rippled pages peeling away from the binding, abandoned to this place by every mind who ignored its wisdom. The graveyard of books somehow tired me, and inside me, a preemptive dislike for this town was violently being stirred up.
Against my pot's metal lid, my phone buzzed away with the five o'clock alarm the next morning. I slowly awoke, returned my things to their bags, and got to riding on the daybreak highway. The sun was just crawling into the pale blue east when I came into town, confronted by more spouting steel mills and a sparse, shabby, motionless commercial perimeter. Most every window and door of what scarce buildings there were were covered with weathered and worn planks of plywood.
I was rushed along the highway as it flooded with the morning masses bound for Chicago. Pressed finally into downtown Gary, and seeing immediately to the south the dark skyline buildings, I pulled onto the sidewalk and came to a stop. The buildings stood tall above their surroundings like any downtown, but I noticed that one of the largest buildings, a big block hotel bending upward, had many missing windows and was obviously abandoned. It showed no trace of reclamation and no tethers tied or signs posted to obstruct its entrances. It simply sat, empty, dark, still, in seemingly forgotten disarray.
Going a few blocks on, My attention was pulled to a church. It displayed collapsed sections of roof. Its gateway walls were shrouded and overgrown with years of ivy and vines and defaced by scattered graffiti. Looking around, I saw the downtown streets were still empty, and I was overtook by temptation. I briskly hopped off my bike and jogged it into the small courtyard, laid it down, and then roped my lock through the spokes of both wheels, effectively tying the bike to itself. The stone entrance, marred by hasty swastikas and tags, expanded inside to a hallway. I grabbed my camera and went in. Two broad post and lintel doorways to further rooms stood on the left and the right of this hall. The left room was an auditorium, empty of seats, with a dark and broken stage at its fore. From the splintered glass panes in the eastern windows the dim morning light was just beginning to lean into the room. A shallow glow was dispensed on the damp clothing, blankets, shoes, and bottles which were scattered over the blotchy concrete floor. The balcony above remained suspended and intact, but I left it alone, thinking that to test the stairway which led up to it may be pushing my luck.
I returned to the hallway, and peered out the entrance to check on my bicycle, then crossed into the main sanctuary. My gaze was pulled immediately upward, led by the lines of colossal pillars which stood on either side of the chamber. The stone bent upward to the high apex of the ceiling, replicating the contours of the luminescent windows, posted broad and high in the east and west walls. White sunlight dripped through onto the carpet of grass, sprouting from the earth between the brick walkways. Tiles and shingles and beams were contentedly resting on the floor, having fallen long ago from above. Vacant spaces were left in the roofing where now the patterns and colors of rotating sky for decades had pierced the room. Here was an unintended garden shrine. The full holy dignity had been retained from its past and was enhanced by the absence of human maintenance, allowed to grow into its natural and delicate sanctity.
Broken and distressed, this cathedral was filled with a transcendent stillness, a tangible soundless symphony. This was the stillness that Elijah had known on the mountain after the wind, and the earthquake, and fire had gone. God had whispered to him through the silence. All motion put out, the silence had filled him, and solace was found in this void! That same truth resounded in the fallen room here and now. A truth that every shallow word of man could never describe. In its dilapidated emptiness the sanctuary was fulfilled. The immutable echoed in the absence of words, exceeding description of both everything and nothing. This silence went on through the morning stillness as I stood and remembered, “Those who know don't talk, those who talk don't know.” The sun rose more bright on the sky, and so I returned to my bicycle and continued on the way.
Any novelty I'd enjoyed here at my first sight of the boarded up houses and blocks was sapped away as the distance went on. In every domestic section every other house sat blank and empty, unoccupied or un-occupiable. Dormant cars, parked parallel to the curb sides, beside the toppled, tangled fence posts, were evidence of a resolute community. In this early hour the neighborhood streets were resting, pale and forsaken. I passed a row of houses, their once burnished stucco faded and worn, every opening nailed tightly shut. A sign, “For Rent,” was posted behind the loosely ajar screen door of a house perched at the middle of a block, neighboring vacancies adjoined. A layer of gray clouds had covered up the sky, diffusing the thin daylight over the stripped facades and age-peeled paint. It was peaceful in a way, but a porous kind of peace, a kind distilled in dysthymic apathy. This place played home for a lingering few. I hurried to leave, becoming disgusted with my lack of respect for their dignity and the trivial, naive approach I'd adopted concerning this peoples' community.
Train tracks ran beside me, passing decrepit mills and plants, transitioning into the relative wealth of East Chicago, Whiting, then finally Chicago. These streets were lined thickly by houses. Each corner harbored the typical side shops, grocery markets, and repair stores. I turned left at 95th, avoiding the abrasive bustle of a big city downtown, and stuck to this street for the rest of the day. An incessant westward flow of traffic streamed on with me. City buses rumbled about the commuters, jutting and buzzing at every corner and junction, and the sidewalk people turned heads as I rambled on through flashing and beeping cross signs and shuffling ped crowds. This went on for hours and hours.
For lunch I escaped from the bustling motion at a classic deep dish joint. The directions to get there had been waiting in my pocket, jotted down on a tattered receipt a few days old. I ordered and ate a whole spinach stuffed pizza, surviving to regret it. My stomach swelled up, rumbling with uncomfortable noises through the rest of the day, and making riding on a bicycle a painfully difficult business. In the late afternoon I once and for all had escaped from the grip of the city. The traffic was behind me, the road went on west into the shaded quiet of a forest reserve. Exhausted and full, I rode down a drive off into the first public area I came upon. The sun had come out and the light breeze shuffled a hot air about the open field. I flopped onto the grass in the patched shade of a tree, tilted the brim of my hat to cover my eyes and laid still, hoping my bloated belly would pass with the time. I fell quickly to sleep having finished a long and wearisome day.
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