Highpoint #29: Timms Hill, WI (1951')

From L'Anse I headed south to the MI/WI border, then on down US-45 towards the Wisconsin high point. Along the way, I realized that the Great North Woods are basically Finland. They've got the same climate, same low hills, same boreal wildlife, and the same endless forest. The immigrants who settled here must have thought the same: I passed a Korpi Rd. (Finnish for "forest") and a handful of Finnish flags hanging from houses and mailboxes. A broader Scandinavian influence was visible all the way down in the names on billboards and businesses and the old Lutheran churches in every town.

Like this one in Ogema, the town where I spent the night.

The roads to Wisconsin’s high point, like the ones I’d driven the previous day, passed straight through essentially nothing, just acres and acres of forest broken by the occasional farmhouse or tiny junction-town. I can see why the Packers wear green and gold: all they've got up here is trees and cheese. Further north those trees grew wild, but as I neared the high point park they separated into rectangular patches in various stages of growth--timberlands, I assume.

Around mid-afternoon, I pulled off WI-86 onto [RR], or “Rustic Road,” a twisty parkway that surrounded Timms Hill County Park. From that road I turned onto a narrow, one-way asphalt track that led me up through a grim gauntlet of trees. The thick forest closed around the road like Mirkwood come to life--passing through them, I understood how the ancients came to fear certain forests as evil, haunted places. But soon enough I pulled out of that gloomy patch of pines and into the parking lot. Just behind it, a cross-country ski trail crossed the road--maintained, a sign informed me, by the local high school's cross-country (running) team. It seems they practice here, no doubt so they can run hill repeats up their state's high point(!!!).

Highpoint #28: Mount Arvon, MI (1979')

Leaving behind the Land of Lincoln, I drove out from the canyon and over the border into the legendary dairy-land of Wisconsin. Seriously, the first town I hit after crossing the border had a monument to the Swiss settler who first made cheese there:

Good ol' Nicky Gerber.

Other than that, the roadside terrain was much the same farms-and-fields deal as yesterday. I sped over the Sugar River (are all the local rivers named after pie ingredients? If so, I totally approve) and through Madison, then stopped for lunch in Fond du Lac at the foot of Lake Winnebago (another large Midwestern lake just short of greatness). Seagulls circled above the parking lot, hinting at waters beyond the horizon.

From there it was a relatively (and, at times, absolutely) straight shot up I-41 to the Upper Peninsula. Never had I seen an interstate highway so hypnotically flat and level--certainly none with four lanes of traffic on each side. Without curves or hills or any meaningful change in scenery, there was nothing to hold my attention to the road--even at 80 mph it felt like I was barely moving. I had to sing to keep my mind from straying. Up I shot through Oshkosh, Appleton, Green Bay...

Side Trip: Apple River Canyon State Park, IL

That night I camped in Apple River Canyon State Park, a quiet little place tucked, as the name suggests, into a canyon carved by a tributary of the Mississippi. Though I'd found the place by my usual unselective method of pulling up Google Maps and zooming out until I spotted a patch of green, it turned out to be another hidden gem of the state park systems, much like Tishomingo State Park in Mississippi. No flush toilets, but the campsites were cheap and spacious and self-registrable (for which I was grateful, having arrived, as always, after staffed hours). Tired from the day's drive, I pitched my tent, chowed down on my now traditional peanut-butter tortillas, and conked out.

-

So that was the first day of my journey away from home. It felt oddly normal, I must say, like any other "there and back" trip, only without the "back" this time. I felt no internal sense of how far I'd come, no twinge in my gut to tell me I’m going the wrong way. But the Midwest doesn't feel all that different from home, so far. There's still the same humidity, the same trees, and the same road signs (those, at least, will be a constant all through my trip across the US)--nothing to say that the Sleepy Hollow Rd. I passed in the Chicago suburbs wasn't just some unknown stretch of the one that runs by my house. At least not yet...

-

I woke in the night to a scuffling sound just outside my tent. My ears pricked, listening through the blind night and my tent's opaque rain cover. The sound continued; something was out there. A bear?--no, not here in Illinois--possums? Raccoons? Perhaps. I sighed in relief. No doubt the critters would soon move on, for there was nothing in my camp to interest them, not with all my food sealed up in...

...my car, whose windows I'd left cracked after dinner. That's what they were after.

Highpoint #27: Charles Mound, IL (1,235')

I began my Western leg in earnest with a long drive from Lake Erie to western Illinois. My first challenge, as I headed out at dawn, was getting to the interstate. Shouldn’t be hard, I’d thought, since this Cleveland suburb’s streets were on a grid... but they turned out to be a grid drawn by an attention-deficient toddler, full of three-way intersections, missing links, and random squiggly river-roads. After minutes of circling I finally found a ramp onto I-90/80W and immediately realized why there were so few of them: each one required a plaza to collect the highway’s toll.

Just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

$10.50 later, I was back in Indiana, this time on the Indiana Toll Road that runs across the state just south of the Michigan border. A sign at the border welcomed me to "The Crossroads of America"—a proud flyover state. Even its toll tickets were helpful, with a handy grid printed on the back that listed all the exits and the cost to travel from one to another. This is how toll roads ought to be done—if they must, only if they must. Certain other states (*cough cough* Illinois) ought to listen up.

From here, as expected, things got flat and rural. Not the grand open flatness of the Great Plains, though, but an odd claustrophobic flatness hemmed in by trees and buildings. The world seemed to shrink: there were no distant hills on the horizon to remind one of its vastness and no sudden panoramas around the bend, nothing but whatever lay between you and the nearest vertical structure... corn, most likely, for the good ol’ Midwestern Monoculture held sway here.

Low Point: Great Lakes Region (600-246')

...But first, a quick spin around the Great Lakes. There are five of them, as I'm sure you recall from grade-school geography:

Formed by glacial activity at the close of the last ice age, these lakes cover 94,250 square miles of land and contain 21% of the world's surface freshwater by volume. This water flows first into storm-driven Lake Superior,

Guess what?

I made it to Seattle without falling off any mountains! Three cheers for me, 'cause now I get to... hunker down and churn out more posts for y'all.

It might take a while.

So keep refresh-spamming this blog, and in a few days I'll take you on a vicarious visit to the magical foreign land of the Midwest...

Side Trip: Gobbler's Knob, PA (~1300')

In order to avoid the toll-heavy Pennsylvania Turnpike on my way to Ohio, I detoured through the dull, woodsy, modestly mountainous heart of Pennsylvania. Halfway through, I found myself in a strange little town with an inordinate fondness for deformed beavers:

or so I first thought. A storefront on Main Street cleared up my confusion:

This wasn't just any Alleghenian hamlet. It was the weather capital of the world, a mecca for marmot prognostication, and home to the most famous of my mutant mountain groundhogs' untainted brethren: Punxsutawney, PA.