Granite City, Illinois

Here I am in what they call the American Bottom. I has something to do with being down here in the flood plain of the Mississippi, a flat low area and a great miserable metaphor for the hell on earth that is East St. Louis a place where apparently, at least at one time, there were no manhole covers because the wretchedly indigent population had taken them to sell for scrap metal and the town government had not the time and or the inclination to replace them. They apparently created a bit of a driving hazard.
The beautiful capricious nature of freight left me with this load, a great truck full of Fruit2O, one of a collection of water/juice drinks popular these days (Sobe’s Life Water, Vitamin Water, etc…) probably because they are, presumably, low(er) in calories and higher in vitamins and shit and loved by producers because they are mostly of their cheapest ingredient, water. Well maybe their 2nd cheapest ingredient (after corn syrup). The load is from Kraft in Ayer, Massachusetts which I picked up on the 21st and wasn’t due here in “the bottoms” until tomorrow (the 25th) morning. So I got to spend the thanksgiving holiday with my friends in Boston (Somerville to be precise). I parked the truck at a medium size (enormous size in New England terms) truckstop and biked in the very misty foggy morning to the commuter rail station at Grafton.
The ride in was uneventful through a thick and persistent fog which outlined the skeletons of birch and maple and aspen in a breathy silence and out of which I thoroughly expected Squanto and the Pilgrims to emerge with turkeys and fish (to bury with the corn of course). Suddenly spindly treed wood dotted with pleasant houses and Volvos give way to something that looks like a suburb, but not in a way that anyone who wasn’t familiar with the east coat would understand.
Dinner was lovely as were drinks at the bar afterwards with another friend and a bartendress who invited us to enjoy pies and (what must have been room temperature) shrimp laid out on one table the thought of which, on such a full stomach, was gross. She also chided us because “ya like haaff myage and ya fahkin sittin theyah, get up and have some fun.” Or something like that but definitely with the accent which is almost as hard to phoneticize as it is to replicate.
I woke up early and then went back to bed and then woke up again, still early but not as much as before and biked in what had become a bitingly brisk morning up beacon to the Porter Square stop in the red line and shuttled into South Station hearing Eliot Smith and pretending to be Matt Damon as the train arced over the Charles. The ride out on the Framingham/ Worcester line was quicker since it skipped all the stops from Yawkey (the Boston equivalent of “nasty”) to the 30 or so stops that have Wellesley in their name.
Then another brisk ride up to the truck and I was off. Thick traffic on I-84, everybody was going to the mall. Through the Poconos (not mountains I recently found out, but a deeply dissected (by rivers) plateau, which, when you look at it makes sense and also explains why the place is so creepy.) Across Pennsylvania, a bit of snow glittering in the headlights and finally into Ohio and coming to a rest near Seville. Nearby there is a town called “Barberton” and I wonder if there is the same sort of ridiculousness going on here as there is southwest of Chicago in Joliet and Romeoville.
This morning it was cold. Winter is here (along with Christmas carols and unbridled spending). Through the rest of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. Nothing new here. Settling into a groove, appreciating the Saturday line up on NPR.