The Big Trip: The Return of Henry VIII

Ah, the flatlands! Driving east from Rockford, I’m finding the prairie very refreshing—all these wide vistas, this great expanse of sky. How I hated the plainness of it all (pun intended) when I went to college up here. Something in me is hungry for boundlessness. Today I’m heading back to my alma mater, Lake Forest College, for a visit with some old friends.

As I drove through McHenry County, farms were absolutely everywhere; the one other place I saw that wasn’t a farm was a tiny house that sold hay and straw.

But then things started changing. First I passed an ancient-looking stone silo right next to the road that was being used as a gatehouse for a large and rather grand home; a beautiful and intricately carved wooden door replaced whatever had been there originally. So strange to see this in the middle of farmland.

There were other oddities as well. A gigantic sign in front of an otherwise normal-looking farm proclaimed, “Mink Barn, Furs by Talledis, Fur Barn, 1/2 Mile.” (The sign depicted a woman wearing a fur coat. Not your normal farmer’s togs.) Then there was the sign for Illusion Farm, though the farm itself certainly seemed real enough.

In the middle of nowhere was a very small shopping plaza, with only three shops: Gifts from the Old Country European Imports; Dave’s Bait, Tackle, and Taxidermy (“Open 7 Days a Week”); and Lewis Chiropractic Center.

A little further on, I passed through Mary Town. Yes, that’s its real name. Not Mary, Illinois, but Mary Town. Appropriately, the sign in front of the Catholic church on Main Street (which was, I believe, the only church in town) read, “Come and Adore Our Eucharistic Lord.”

At Libertyville I passed Lamb’s Farm. My first college roommate, who was from Libertyville, volunteered there from time to time. They provide residential, vocational, and recreational services for about 250 developmentally disabled people on their 72 acres; it’s a working farm, too. Cool place.

I finally arrive in Lake Forest. Oh-so-tasteful Lake Forest. Astoundingly wealthy Lake Forest. When I attended the College, Lake Forest was the fifth richest town in the country. It’s where Ordinary People was set and filmed, where Tom Buchanan’s polo ponies in The Great Gatsby were bred. It’s where most of my classmates drove Beemers and wore the entire L.L. Bean catalog even though they hated anything more outdoorsy than skiing in Aspen, while I was on scholarship and financial aid and was working my way through college.

In my senior year, we put on a Madrigal Banquet.

I was Henry VIII, and I had all six of my wives anachronistically sitting at table with me, alongside various other courtiers. We sang (very well indeed), the costumes were fun, the food was sumptuous (and eaten without benefit of silverware), and the whole thing was a huge hit, especially since we had done it from start to finish without faculty support. The dean of faculty, George Speros (a personal friend of

Juan Carlos and Sofia, the king and queen of Spain), still calls me King Henry.

So I arrive back in Lake Forest, and it was as if Henry himself had come home, for all the hullabaloo they made over me. They put me up at a mansion next to campus, my old mentor Ron Miller took me to lunch, and the alumni association folks made me Class Agent, which meant that they’d pay my way back to LFC once a year for a conference in exchange for writing two fundraising letters a year for them. (That sweet arrangement ended a couple of years later when the new college president took over, dammit.)

Lake Forest represents a wonderful and terrible time in my life. I still haven’t been able to fully articulate all the ways I was changed by that place. I left there somewhat in disgrace—at my graduation ceremony, I received a blank diploma folder, since I had taken an Incomplete in my final course, a torturous but important independent study that they made me take the summer to complete, lest I never graduate at all. My professor wrote on the final paper, “In many ways, this is a brilliant and subtle piece of work. Shame it had to be extracted from you by such violent means.”

I had carried that feeling of failure with me for nearly fifteen years; now I was back, and being treated like royalty. It just didn’t compute. In my junior year I’d suffered a mental breakdown and a near-catatonic depression, the first volley in a very long battle with that darkness. But it’s also where I first grappled with issues of God and sexuality and spiritual meaning, and had found something real and substantive. This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which became my mantra for a number of months during that bleak time, says it best:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Tomorrow’s episode: Mirror Lake.

The Big Trip: Illi-noise

I left the idylls of Ohio for the ills of the interstate. At least it went by quickly. The moment I got off the interstate, I saw twenty-five vultures (yes, I counted them: twenty-five turkey vultures) gliding in a vague circle above a stand of trees. Of course my mind immediately goes to the macabre—has the highway killer struck again?—

but it was more likely a dead or dying animal in that little grove. Twenty-five of them, just soaring and circling. Waiting.

Then the wind starts whipping up. I had forgotten what the prairie winds are like. Even the big rigs seemed to be having trouble staying where they should be. I was being seriously buffeted.

When I drove through Gary, Indiana, I was shocked to see no smokestacks billowing forth. Fifteen years earlier, the sky was a sickly gray-green from all the pollution, and now—nothing. Clear skies. Clean city. Amazing how things had changed so dramatically. It gave me hope.

Coming back into Chicago gave me a definite thrill. For four years I took the train from Lake Forest into Chicago frequently, once or twice a month at the very least. I saw a stunning production of Equus there the first week I was in town, and I dearly loved the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony and shopping at Water Tower Place. But I admit I went there most often for more prurient pursuits, and I felt a stranger there from first to last. The city always smelled of desperation to me.

As I attempted to navigate the insanity of the Chicago expressway, with its drivers nasty and aggressive and unthinking, I heard a guy on the radio say that he goes to Montana once a year because it’s largely unpopulated. It occurs to me that this is one of the things I’m hoping for in going out West. I’m hoping to find that kind of solitude, and I’m thinking that maybe if there are fewer people there, then the people who are there might treat one another as a precious commodity.

The road into Rockford is typically nasty suburban sprawl, all strip malls and fast food restaurants. Rockford proper, on the other hand, is charming and old-fashioned. The Burpee Museum of Natural History is smack in the center of town, and I pass by the Sinnissippi Park Sunken Gardens on my way to my hosts’ home, which is on the rather lovely Rock River.

Brit and Lyle Handlon Lathrop were in their late 70s, both psychologists, and friends of Wayne and Sue.

They were fascinating people, iconoclastic, unpretentious in the extreme, and both quite brilliant. They were also rather intimidating, and I never really connected with either of them. Lyle was devoted to C-Span (he was retired now, so he spent most of the day watching his senators and representatives at work, and they seemed to infuriate him, so he yelled at the little kitchen television a lot), and Brit was devoted to both her clinical practice (she had an office in the basement with an outside entrance for her patients) and to

Deepak Chopra. She handed me a large stack of his tapes and sat me down and made me listen to them for several hours.

I found his ideas astounding at the time. His work on mind-body medicine, quantum physics, and their spiritual underpinnings really galvanized me. His ideas still hold a lot of power for me, though I can certainly understand it when a friend calls him “Deep Pockets” Chopra: I sometimes wonder if he’s more interested in being a big name and a bestselling author these days than he is in the ideas themselves.

I went to bed eager get out into the wilds to begin camping. I set aside my questions about the quantum fabric of reality, and dreamed of circling vultures.

Tomorrow’s episode: The Return of Henry VIII.

The Big Trip: Day 1

Silver Spring, Maryland, where I lived at the time, is terminally suburban. It creeps up to the border of Washington, D.C., and sprawls for miles into Montgomery County, becoming the second largest city in Maryland after Baltimore.

I grew up one town over, in Takoma Park, but after college, Silver Spring became our home. Not Home in the big sense—that will always be Vermont, despite the fact that I only lived there for two years—but it’s where my parents lived, where my first apartment was, where my father died, where I shared a house with my mother. Leaving Silver Spring on a great adventure was a symbol for leaving an inherited mindset behind and trying to see with new eyes.

It is September 17, a Tuesday. Somehow it’s important that I mark the time of my departure precisely: 11:26 a.m. My trip takes me up route 270, where I visit my great grandmother’s homestead in the tiny town of Boyds, Maryland. My great uncle’s general store there still bears his name. Such a flood of memories: summer nights chasing lightning bugs and drinking black cows, screen doors banging as children ran in and out of the house happily, sitting on back lawns with friendly neighbors, the sound of cicadas buzzing furiously, the feel of the graveyard beneath my feet at the little country church. There was something quietly mystical about that town back then. There still is.

I headed up 70 past the town of Frederick, where my father lived for many years before marrying my mother, then into Washington County.

The smell of manure and alfalfa was overpowering, and quite wonderful in its way. The fields gave way to rolling hills, and cooler pockets of air. At Sugarloaf I passed Little Conocheague Creek, and the town of Clear Spring, where the hills rose up dramatically and quite prettily. Rush Limbaugh was on the radio vilifying liberals in a shockingly hate-filled tirade.

A sign for The Nice Motel read, simply, “2 people, $28.”

At the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a man sitting by the side of the road with a pack or bedroll next to him. He sat with his back up against a railing, knees up, arms resting on his knees, with a thumb extended casually: he was hitchkiking, apparently. His expression was glum, even grim, as if he dared someone to pick him up. I didn’t take the dare.

Pennsylvania, though it has much to recommend it, was fairly dreary, since I saw nothing but the turnpike while I was there. At the rest stop just across the Ohio border, I even bought a postcard of the turnpike.

At the same rest stop, a toilet paper dispenser had, on one side, a graffito of a large phallus, crudely drawn and very ugly, and on the other side, JESUS written in big, bold letters. I’m assuming they were not drawn by the same person.

Once I got off the turnpike in Ohio, everything changed: the fields were cool, lovely, verdant, the trees tall. I found my way to the Stanford Hostel in the Cuyahoga Valley. The hostel, which is owned by the National Park Service, was built in 1843 by one of the original settlers of the Valley.

There I learned one of the primary rules of hostel life: everyone does chores! I dusted the living room, then went to sleep in a cramped room chockablock with bunkbeds, though I was the only one there this night. I’d come to find, wherever I traveled on this trip, that I had arrived just after the late summer vacationers had departed—which of course suited me just fine.

The next morning, I sat in my car having some breakfast

while I wrote out the postcard, the first of twenty-two that were sent to my mother. The card is full of newsy bits and excited anticipation. I affixed the stamp—it depicted a spotted whitetail deer—then started addressing the card.

You know that creepy feeling when you think someone is looking at you? I suddenly got that feeling. I looked up to find two of those same whitetail deer, so young that they still had their spots, standing about fifteen feet away eating breakfast, and one of them was staring fixedly at me. Then he nudged his partner, who stopped eating long enough to eye me thoroughly. Then they sauntered off into a grove of trees.

Hmm. You don’t think they could have been harbingers, do you?

Tomorrow’s episode: Chicagoland, the Handlon-Lathrops, and my introduction to Deepak Chopra.