On the Road, Days 2 & 3 -- Ann Arbor, Chicago, and ?
It snowed on the drive from Pittsburgh to Ann Arbor, a town that is exceptionally difficult to navigate. Take a look at Google Maps if you don’t believe me. The streets wind around, appear in different places, and change names without warning. Huron! Geddes! These names appear so often as to disorient even the confident driver, who feels as though he must be cruising around in circles, those he isn’t.
Our hosts were lovely people — a doctor and his wife, their kids all grown up and moved out of the house. He is a new Alan Jacobs fan thanks to being shown the Text Patterns post on readability. She is a reluctant Facebook member, a conversationalist, and a loyal Ann Arbor News reader. She laments the paper’s impending demise, especially the loss of a letters page that serves as a community forum. I’ll have more to say on that subject — and on interviews that I conducted with Ann Arbor News staffers and the owner of a start-up news venture in that town — in an upcoming piece for a lucky publication that doesn’t yet know they’re going to buy it from me.
Our host also noted in passing that the local synagogue is beset by anti-Israel protestors every Saturday. Is this a common phenomenon in America or peculiar to Ann Arbor? Either way, I sure hope it ends.
Another question: is any state as zealous about patrolling its highways as Michigan? I counted 9 unmarked patrol cars, 11 tickets, and a few other marked cars besides on the drive from Ann Arbor to ABCDEFGHI-stopped-keeping-track-at Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo.
Onward to Chicago, untouched by the law. My friend J. is an attorney for a big firm there. She is the rare member of her profession who appreciates how absurd it is that newly minted law school graduates are paid upwards of $150,000 per year. It’s astonishing how many proceed to spend lavishly, postpone taking care of their student debt, and earnestly lament the utter impossibility of doing the kind of law they’d do — that they really yearn to do — if only one could survive on a mere $70,000 or $80,000 per year. The happiest lawyer I know, a New Yorker who represents low income clients in housing court, makes even less. I suspect when J. shifts into her chosen field, a plan already in the works, she’ll become the second fulfilled young lawyer I know.
Of course, I may be biased since J. also happens to be the fantastical dream of every old media editor: a young professional who prefers her content on paper, who subscribes to a newspaper and several exceptional magazines, and who regularly patronizes the Web advertisers of her favorite publications as an intentional gambit to prop up Internet ad rates! And her fiance is an actual magazine subscriber too!! We ate Indian food, stuck around talking later than we should have, drove out of town sometime after midnight, and pulled off the Interstate a couple hours later at a Comfort Inn located in a town whose name I cannot remember. They offered free Wi-Fi, like every budget motel these days, and unlike every luxury hotel. When higher-end accommodations cease their $12.95 per-night access fees I’ll know that corporate America is really changing.
Chicago is the best place. You should turn around and settle there. Have you been to Hot Dougs? It is my fault for not telling you.
Did you ever see 25th Hour? Remember the end? Are you worried you are cross the country to get to one of those under-the-radar town in the California Desert and willfully disappear? until sending for the TAS crew in your elderly years?
— Rortybomb · Apr 13, 07:44 AM · #
The road to Yosemite is blocked with snow.
— Freddie · Apr 13, 01:28 PM · #
Conor – two driving related things. First, you’re right, though I’ve never thought about it before in any comprehensive way, that Ann Arbor streets are bizarre. It’s like Germany, where the street names change when they cross other streets. (So many composers to commemorate with streets.) But the patrolling thing on I94 must be something entirely new, a response to the fact that until recently that was the most insanely fast stretch of crowded interstate anywhere…where if you were going 85 or under, you were just watching people fly past you.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 13, 02:59 PM · #
“She is the rare member of her profession who appreciates how absurd it is that newly minted law school graduates are paid upwards of $150,000 per year.”
You are mistaken here. All of us (except for many newly minted law grads) recognize the absurdity. We also recognize the absurdity of the billable hour, but for reasons I don’t fully understand, it is extremely difficult to get clients to agree to alternative billing practices that make any sense.
— Steven Donegal · Apr 13, 03:53 PM · #
…is any state as zealous about patrolling its highways as Michigan?
Based on one drive across it’s state, it seemed the Kansas Highway Patrol was extremely well funded.
— Tom Meyer · Apr 13, 09:15 PM · #
Re: The streets wind around, appear in different places, and change names without warning.
That’s the result of roads that were connected together by extensions as Ann Arbor grew; originally they didn’t connect at all. Or did so at odd angles which were smoothed out to make a single road. Geddes used to cross the Huron River where Gallup Park is now and proceed on down to campus. Now it merges direct with and becomes Fuller Road while on the south side of the river the old Geddes still continues downturn, but you have to turn left and cross the bridge on Huron Parkway to get there.
Another Ann Arbor combo: Washtenaw-Huron-Jackson to, through, and out of downtown. If you can find an old map from say the 40s you’ll see that these three too used to be separate from each other, then were connected.
Re: Another question: is any state as zealous about patrolling its highways as Michigan?
That must be something new, motivated maybe by the horrible economy and the need for enhanced revenue. For many, many years Michigan was speeders’ paradise; except during the occasional well-announced crackdown (usually on a holiday weekend when you couldn’t go over 50 on congested freeways anyway), you had to be doing 90 before the cops would consider you worth their while. And even then they’d usually just write you up for 80.
— JonF · Apr 15, 12:46 AM · #