One last phone call from Burt Natarus

Burt Natarus (Photo by Richard Chapman/Used with permission)

     I was about to begin this sentence, "Most aldermen..." when I stopped, realizing that I have no idea what most aldermen are like. I rarely hear their names, never mind learn them, and seem to get by fine. Only the oddballs stand out, whether former power broker Ed Burke, or hat-wearing Dorothy Tillman, or serial nepotist Dick Mell. Occasionally I'd encounter one merely in the performance of his duties—Joe Moore, Matt O'Shea. I think I liked them best, regular guys getting stuff done. 

     Then there was Burt Natarus, the oddest of the oddballs. I have to admit, when I saw the Sun-Times obit Fridy, my reaction was, "Oh no, not Burt Natarus ... was he still alive?" Then again, indignity followed Natarus wherever he went, quacking like a pull-toy duck.

     "Neil? Burt Natarus . . . All you have to do is call that guy in charge of bridges and paint 'Irv Kupcinet' on the side of the Wabash Bridge. The other thing I want to ask you if you think I could get my ode to Maggie printed. I think it would be a nice gesture and a kind thing to do."
     There is no official post of ex-alderman. Yet attention, to quote Arthur Miller, must be paid. So I was happy to get a phone call from Natarus, for 36 years the vivacious representative of the 42nd Ward, whose bold vision helped build Chicago into the global city that it is today (OK, OK, a cantankerous machine loyalist known for suggesting we put diapers on horses, but I thought, at least let the poor guy have a moment).
     "I have a copy of the ordinance. Dec. 23, 1985. I was one of the floor leaders. We got Harold Washington to sponsor an ordinance naming the Wabash Avenue Bridge the 'Irv Kupcinet Bridge.' I don't think that designation has been taken away. All they have to do is paint the side of the bridge. All you have to do is get a hold of the new transportation director. Get him on the phone: Kemp, his name is, or Kremp."
     Gabe Klein. Easier said than done. I've been calling for a week now. Nada.
     "I think, with your influence, you could make it happen—by the way you are a good writer, but you have a mean streak."
     Thank you, though "mean" is a matter of perspective. Maybe it's a mean world and I just reflect it. Besides, it can be difficult to decide: whither meanness, wither kindness.
     "You gotta do me a favor. I wrote a poem about Maggie. I sent it in under a letter to the editor. I want them to publish the poem. I'll tell you why it isn't being published: I don't think your editor likes me."
     No! How could that be? Let's look at "Ode to Maggie," shall we—and I think this perfectly illustrates the mean/kind conundrum. His poem begins:

"Oh, sweet, beautiful, brilliant ladyIn sadness and in grief, you have leftyour beloved, Richard, our Gaelic leaderfor the heavens and your maker."

     Now is it kindness or cruelty to print that? Is it mercy to stop? Or to continue:

"In gratitude we thank you for being youand giving us so much of yourself andfor us: Noble love! mutual respect."

     Frankly, I have to stop here, out of concern someone will think I'm making fun of Maggie Daley, when to be honest I'm just amazed at the virtuosity of Natarus' tribute—aldermen of today certainly jostle each other to stand up and sing the mayor's praises, but they can't touch a candle to the elaborate, fulsome paean to the Daley divinity that an old master can perform. That itself is worth a bridge, or at least a plaque. I couldn't have been more surprised if I heard one of those shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits knocks on my door, looked up and saw Hinky Dink Kenna in a paisley vest and bowler hat.
     "I drafted the ordinance covering the railroad tracks, to what became Millennium Park. I passed it, got my friends on board. I'm the one who first put in the ordinance. Maggie liked that. Maggie never forgot that when she got sick I wrote her a couple letters. She wrote me some beautiful letters back. I told myself I would write her a poem. I call it 'Ode to Maggie,' you know 'ode,' O-D-E, you know these ancient odes, John Keats, who can understand it?"
     He kept going; I think he expected me to interrupt, but I was having fun just listening.
     "I talk too much. How are you? How's your . . . mentality?"
     I said I'm fine; I could tell my answer frustrated him, but he let it go. I asked his age.
     "I'm 79. I walk. I sold my car. I walk wherever I go. I live by Ontario Street. Everybody that attacks TIFs don't realize this was once a warehouse district when I was a big shot."
     Why bring the Kup bridge up now?
     "I bring it up now because I walk around and see the other bridge, the Lyric bridge, has a sign on it, but this doesn't have 'Irv Kupcinet' on it. Kup was a great guy. Kup was really something else. He was really great. The bridge . . . just put it in gold, 'Irv Kupcinet Bridge.' That's all. They should put up that sign. That's all I want. I don't want it to be referred to anymore as the Wabash Avenue Bridge. I want it to be the Irv Kupcinet Bridge and that's it."
     He didn't ask my opinion, but I think that, while Kup indeed was a great guy, Mr. Chicago, that a bronze statue on Wacker Drive is also honor aplenty. Still, I told Burt Natarus that I would do what I can, and I have.

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, December 18, 2011 

Happy birthday, Kier.

     "Well-we-jus-got-back-an-I-wish-I'd-never-leave-now...."
      —"Where'd you go?"
     "Who'd-a-thought-somearattl-rebulent-fought-year...."

       Again. And again. Standing, side by side, over the turntable in room 210 of the sprawling Northwestern Apartments on Orrington Avenue. Setting the needle down. Listening to the opening chords of The Clash's "Safe European Home." That machine gun guitar and drums, then a firehose of South London verbiage. Lifting the needle. Silence. Returning to the start of the song. Over and over, and over, trying to parse the slushy words, like snatching bubbles out of a torrent.
     That first line was easy.
     "Well, we just got back and I wish I'd never leave now...."
     The second, simple.
     But that third line—what was it?
     It had to be done. Because if Kier couldn't figure out the words, then how could Phil sing them? And if Phil couldn't sing the words, how could the Front Lines play the song? The needle lifted, and we started again.
     Music was important. Words were important. Songs were important. The band was important. No band ever formed that wasn't, if only to the people in the band.  Plus various hangers-on, like me. I wasn't, technically, in the band. But I was helping because I was there, his roommate freshman year, 1978, Northwestern University.
     We had been assigned to the same room by a computer through our mutual hunger for coolness, even over personal comfort. On our housing forms, both Kier and I checked that smoking was A-OK with us, even though neither of us smoked. We didn't smoke, but we didn't want to be the kind of stick-in-the-mud losers who cared about that kind of thing—this was back before continually signaling your virtue with semaphore flags became a national obsession.
     So we were stuck in a four-man quad with two smokers, Tim and Fitch.  Fitch was a rich kid from Christmas Hill, Connecticut, who brought skis and golf clubs to college.
     "Well the reason people are poor..." I would imitate him saying, in a plummy, Thurston Howell III voice, "is because they don't go out and get the money. I mean, the money's there."
     Tim was a manic-depressive on lithium who had been institutionalized over the summer and was let out, if memory serves, so he could go to Northwestern and live with us, along with, briefly, the homeless man he met at Burger King and brought back to our room. This was not the college experience I had expected. I remember realizing, with a frisson of horror, that Tim was not going bald, organically. It was only on the side of his hair that he clonically ran his fingers through.
     Fitch was gone by Christmas. He wasn't about to stick around, not when he had roommates like Kier, who once pushed him into a closet after a political discussion. And me, who braced the door closed with the old headboard of Fitch's bed—why was it deconstructed? Maybe because we had moved his furniture into the fire escape. We left him in there a long time. Tim took off too, by spring, leaving us two living in a four man quad.
     That kind of thing tends to push people together, and I learned a lot about Kier, who was an exotic on several fronts: he had long hair that girls on our delightfully-coed floor loved to brush until it shone. He was from Washington, D.C.—who is from Washington, D.C.? He had been a Boy Scout. His parents were divorced.
      He was a political science major, and what we would call today "woke." I remember him explaining what a terrible governor of California Ronald Reagan had been, years before he was elected president. He cared about world events, which vastly different from me, who cared almost exclusively about myself. We had nothing in common.
    Especially when it came to music. I was pop: David Bowie, Peter Frampton, and especially Elton John, because my girlfriend back home adored him, and I caught that like a rash. The closest thing I had to discernment was love of Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," and that was more because it spoke to my personal brand of heartbreak. Otherwise, sentiment was fine. I had gone to see Harry Chapin twice in a month, first back at Blossom Music Center in Cleveland, then at Pick-Steiger Hall on campus.
    Kier brought albums by the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the B-52s—edgy stuff. But he didn't just listen to music, he made it.  He was a musician. He brought with him a beautifully battered Fender Telecaster and an amp the size of a small refrigerator. And a Pignose—a small portable amp. I felt myself half a musician through osmosis, and loved even knowing the words, knowing what this stuff was called, the small electronic boxes his guitar plugged into—a phase shifter, a fuzzbox, a wah-wah pedal.
      Kier was a crackerjack guitarist in the Jimmy Hendrix mode, who killed the frat talent show by playing behind his head. (Was it Robin Trower's "Sinner's Song"? It's only been 41 years, but I seem to remember that was the song). He played it with a bow and, at another gig, at the pathetic little shack of a nightclub the school ran, finished a riff, and pointed the bow at me, in the audience. I was thrilled. Not in the band. But close.
     If that seems needy and fanboyish, remember I was in the Medill School of Journalism, with no interest in reporting or newspapers or news. My general goal was to be a novelist, a humorist of some sort, cut from the Robert Benchley cloth, to wear a fez and lead conga lines out of "21" in between polishing timeless gems of humor to display in the gold setting of The New Yorker.
    Except I couldn't write, and didn't know anybody at The New Yorker or anywhere else, and didn't have much ambition, not the real solid kind that pushes you to try and do and achieve, as opposed to the vaporous kind that flickers just outside your range of vision and keeps you constantly startled and stumbling, twisting around trying to catch a glimpse of something that isn't there.
     Kier, on the other hand, was close to a star on campus. I have a memory of frat boys lining the stage while he played, on their knees, salaaming, fluttering their hands to heaven. It was close to worship.
     Helping the band put me into Belmont Avenue clubs years before I would have found them on my own. Lugging equipment upstairs into Tut's then, being the first one there, dancing by myself in the center of the floor. I became very good at dancing alone, and particularly like to do it after someone I asked to dance had turned me down, my way of saying, "Fuck you, honey, I just wanted to dance." Not that the person I had asked noticed or cared. But it felt like a small victory.
     We painted the walls of the room black, with all sorts of bars and lines running everywhere. That summer I visited him in Washington. I can still see his mother, in half glasses, primly typing her church newsletter. Other people, living other lives. It was an epiphany.
     I can't go into it all. You'd be reading for hours. By junior year, he floated off toward the band, and I was exiled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for a very unhappy internship toting up ambulance runs for the Green Bay Press Gazette. This was hard work, and not what I wanted at all. This wasn't it at all.
     Meanwhile, Kier and the Front Lines put out 45s. They played gigs, and lived in a big house on Forest Avenue. We weren't that friendly then, but kept up and, I believe around then, drove to New York City. We went to the Thai Hut on Devon Avenue—the first time I had tasted Thai food— left at 6 p.m., and at dawn pulled into Manhattan with Little Feat on the tape deck.
    "Oh the sunlight looks so pretty.
     God it's such a sight.
     Like rolling into New York City.
     With the skyline in the morning light.
     Roll on through the night."
    My first job took me to Los Angeles. Another dead end. I tried to last six months and lasted three. Back in Chicago, Kier would tear Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" cartoons out of the Reader and mail them to me, in that half support, half mockery that friends do. When that job blew up, I drifted eastward, pausing to live with my folks in Colorado. When I returned to campus, one year after graduation, a certified failure to launch, I moved in with Kier—in the third floor of his house on Forest. "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Two weeks on a cot set up in an empty attic under an inverted V of shiny insulation, watching the bare bulb, hands folded behind my head, thinking, "How did I fuck this up so badly? And so fast." The starting gun went off. And there I am, face planted a yard from the blocks, trying to get to my feet while my classmates lap me, one year already gone.
      Kier's band, meanwhile, was hot, with a young thumb-slapping bassist, recording sessions and influential people interested.  But success of the kind that allows a person to live on it was elusive, over the next decade Kier faced a choice, and chose wisely.
     "Music was his life," sang Harry Chapin, who knew how to write a lyric, "it was not his livelihood." I thought it a testament to Kier's character that eventually he set aside his guitar and joined the working world, as did I. The novel went into a drawer and I began rolling the stone of professional journalism up the hill. We both, not stars, but practitioners of the possible.
    We knew another student, Nathan, a gaunt, pop-eyed, jittery guy who also wanted to be a musician. A year younger. I remember sitting in his dorm room while he explained to me that he was going to be a rock star, and I just looked at him like he was crazy.
     But he wasn't crazy. He was driven.
     Speaking of driving. Kier and I were driving in the broken down blue van the band used. And there was Nathan, walking along the road. So we pulled over and gave him a lift. He asked Kier what he was doing, and what Kier was doing was working at Student's Publishing.
     "Well," sneered Nathan, radiating contempt—his superpower, "somebody's gotta frame the artwork."
      I don't know whether singing in Urge Overkill amounts to a life well-lived. But I've never, in the past 40 years, cared enough to find out. While Kier and I have been in constant communication as we pushed our lives forward. I can't remember Kier ever being in a bad patch—he's far too stable for that. Though I remember helping him move into a crappy little apartment on Broadway, and worrying for him. You're living HERE? I thought, but didn't say. There was a pipe running across the ceiling, maybe seven feet up, and I remember staring at it, grimly, wondering, Is this the pipe Kier'll hang himself from? Of course I was projecting my own insecurities more than anything else. He was fine. Kier is always fine. I have many good friends, but if I had to pick one to be holding the rope that I was clutching while I dangled off a cliff, I'd pick Kier.
    Which reminds me: back on campus, I was trying stand-up comedy. I had to try something. We had some kind of group, comic performers. I can't even remember their names. But I wore hard contact lenses, trying to make myself more palatable, and one night, waiting to go on in some forgotten club, I left them in too long and my eyes swelled shut. I ended up at St. Francis Hospital, where they treated by abraded corneas, covered my eyes with bandages, and told me I could go home.
    "How?" I asked.
     Who brought you?
     Nobody brought me. I came in an ambulance. A nurse handed me a phone. What number to dial? It was 3 o'clock in the morning.
    I called Kier. Which is as good a definition of a friend as you're going to find: your friend is the guy you call to come get you at the hospital at 3 a.m. He rode his bike over and walked me back to my apartment.
     Life clicked by, day by day, year by year. I can see my first real apartment in Oak Park, on Washington Street, with the aluminum deco sconces. Kier called from New Orleans: he had asked Cathleen to marry him.  A nurse, as grounded as he is, and one of the prettiest women I have ever seen. I remember my advice when he had said he was thinking about asking her to marry him: "Well, if you're not certain you ever want to get married, then give it thought. But if you might want to marry somebody, someday, then by all means ask her right now. Because you'll never find a better woman willing to give you the time of day." Or words to that effect.
     So he got married—I was the best man. Sorry Kier, about forgetting the boutonnieres back in the refrigerator of my apartment on Logan Boulevard, and the mad dash that Edie had to go to retrieve them so they could be pinned on as the music swelled for you to walk down the aisle. A little bit of unnecessary drama and tension, I know. But it all worked out okay. 
     For a number of years we'd grab a movie in the three days between my birthday and his. But family and work, time and routine, plus there not being a convenient way to get from Naperville to Northbrook, all got in the way. Which was okay. We didn't need frequent check-ins. We had a past. We knew. It all worked out okay.
     That's how I felt last week, turning 60. An astounding, perhaps Kier-like calm. It had all worked out okay. Better than okay. Great. Not great in the usual sense of the term. Not famous. There was no "Steinberg at Sixty" retrospective at the Chicago History Museum, which I could imagine if not achieve. But greatness is overrated. Hemingway was great at 60 and shot himself in the head at 61. Frankly, I feel I've found myself a better gig. I am lucky in love, blessed by work I like to do, and so rich in friends, the oldest and best being Kier, who didn't become a star, like Nathan, later Nash. But he didn't have to be. Never being a star also meant never becoming a has-been either. He didn't die at 28, like Jim Morrison. He didn't have some hit in 1993 that everybody has forgotten by now. He isn't some Oh-yeah-I-remember-that-guy in a non-age appropriate haircut, a dangly pirate earring and mascara, playing to four people at the Heartland Cafe. He cut his hair, raised two great sons, became a Christian and a grandfather and a good, thoughtful friend, the kind who sends CDs of music you might like for your birthday.
     Songs on Apple iTunes, by the way, now scroll the lyrics to songs. No laborious guesswork necessary.
     That tricky line to "Safe European Home" is, "Who that Martian arrival at the airport, yeah?"
     No wonder we couldn't figure it out. Something of a let-down, to finally learn the elusive truth. But hey, that's life. You wait 40 years to learn something that wasn't worth knowing in the first place. Maybe what was worthwhile was in the figuring out part, not the mystery we were figuring. Which comes as no surprise. Maybe that's wisdom.
     On Wednesday I saw the photo montage Kier put on YouTube—our college life, photos I had never seen, jumping to marriages, to kids, to his kids' marriages. Putting this together took planning, consideration, work I called Edie up to my office to see it.
      "What am I going to do?!?!" I wailed. "His birthday is three days away." I always get blindsided by his acts of consideration. All those mixtapes, then CDs of music, arriving promptly on my birthday. Thoughtful. Did I ever return the favor? I hope so, in some other, smaller way.
     Edie, of course, as she always does, assessed the situation immediately and offered the perfect solution.
     "Write something," she said.



      Editor's note: Caren Jeskey's post will appear next week.




     

 

O’Hare couple have a home—until June 23

     Life is looking up for Linda and Manny Benavides.
     They are no longer sleeping on chairs at O’Hare International Airport, late in the evening, or on a Blue Line train early in the morning, after police make their sweeps and throw them out.
     Now they are in a clean if bare one bedroom ground floor apartment in Norwood Park, temporarily.
     “It’s beautiful in here,” said Linda. “We love it.”
     “Thank you,” added her husband.
     After the Sun-Times featured the couple on its front page May 22, there was an outpouring of support. The couple was put up for a few days in a motel in Des Plaines, where people kept arriving with clothes, gift cards, money.
     “A beautiful Chinese lady, she knocked at the door, gave us an envelope,” said Linda. “She said, ‘This is for you,’ and she brought two masks. I said, ‘What is your name?’ and she said, ‘God’s blessing you.’ She left right away. I gave my husband the envelope. He started counting. It was a thousand dollars. So we opened a bank account right away. We didn’t want to keep it on us.”
     Linda estimates they’ve received $2,600 total.
     Plus the apartment, offered by a stranger.
     “She’s been so good,” said Linda. “I’m afraid for her, because she’s a cop.” 

     That seems noteworthy, especially now. I don’t get many emails from cops, but this one stood out.
     “I am a Chicago police officer,” she began. “I saw the article about the homeless couple that have been sleeping at O’Hare since April 16th. I would like to offer them a place to stay and try to help them to get into a place where they can stay together. I think it’s heartbreaking not to have a place to stay during these difficult times.”

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The lesson of the ginkgo

    May, if you recall, was the coldest ever in Chicago, with a polar vortex that dropped down from Canada and scorched the area's budding plant life, including the ginkgo biloba tree in our front yard just as it was blooming. So instead of sprouting its distinctive fan-shaped leaves when it was supposed to, it grew stunted little brown nubbins.
     I took this personally.
     "I killed it," I wailed, disconsolate. "The tree survives 270 million years and I killed it."
     The ginkgo, in case you don't know, is a living fossil. When the Tyrannosaurus Rex showed up on Earth, the ginkgo was already almost 200 million years old. 
     Taxonomically, there is nothing remotely like it.  The ginkgo exists in its own division — Ginkgophyta — its own class, order and family and genus. To find a close living relative, another ginkgo-like tree, you have to go back to the Pliocene epoch, three million years ago.
    The perfect tree for a loner or eccentric. Frank Lloyd Wright loved them. Mine was planted about 10 years ago on the parkway through a program with the village that splits the costs of trees. So not just a wonder, but a bargain. Now dying before my eyes.
     To make matters worse, this was the tree brushed when that 50 foot evergreen fell over in an ice storm the day after Thanksgiving, 2018. The toppling tower missed me by 10 feet, snapped off one branch of the ginkgo. But the main tree was miraculously spared, still symmetrical and lovely. It escaped that fate, only to be slain by a few missing degrees of temperature in May, like a runner collapsing a few feet short of the finish line, dead.
     What to do?
     Northbrook, the leafy suburban paradise, has a forester of course, Terry Cichocki, and we know each other, my having phoned her enough times over the past two decades to consult, either for stories, or for some other tree that was giving me trouble.
    I phoned her again, not seeking help — what can be done for a scorched tree? — so much as to commiserate, to talk to someone who I knew would care, and to confirm that nothing could be done, that the frozen finger of fate had done its cruel business.
    What she said surprised me.
    A second sprouting, she explained, will occur and the tree will be fine. Do nothing. Maybe we'll toss some extra fertilizer on it to give that second set of leaves the extra oomph they need to push into their 270 millionth spring.
     Second set of leaves? Who knew? I was overjoyed.
     The village came by, the fertilizer was spread. This week the leaves appeared. Just before my 60th birthday, the perfect present.  Maybe that helped in my uncharacteristic reaction to the milestone. I was not introspective or sullen or irked. Not sad or depressed or melancholy. No conjuring up the life of celebrity and success, the pale blue Teslas, that might have been mine had I only been a different person doing everything differently. None of that bullshit. When my wife asked how it felt to be 60, I held up my hand and started ticking off the men I knew who died in their 50s—"Steve Neal, Jeff Zaslow, Andrew Patner" and others. Turning 60 was a gift I would gladly accept. It sure beat the alternative.
     Maybe it wasn't the tree, but the triple crisis going on in America — plague then recession then civic upheaval. The least a person who finds himself secure in all that is not to complain about the spinning clock. You'd have to be an idiot. Which is certainly within my repertoire. But not this time.
     I was also relieved. I had written a headline for my column Wednesday on race in America that rather than intrigue potential readers instead drove them away, in droves. Seven hundred comments in the first hour on Twitter, and, from the handful I looked at, most were of the "Fuck you, I'm not reading this," variety. Maybe the headline would have been fine last month, or next month, but now what I intended as a fish hook was acting as a spike. "Read the room," someone commented, sharply. Even as I was calling the paper to confer, the powers that be were pushing out a second headline that worked far better. Now instead of offending black Americans I was offending white bigots, like I'm supposed to.
     Timing and luck are important. It's best if the nearby evergreen never falls. And best to bloom when the weather is going to stay warm.
    But if it does fall, at least it should miss you. If you push out your verdant display at the wrong moment and get scorched, then you have to be  adaptive. You need a second set of leaves — or another headline — in reserve. A tree doesn't survive 270 million years without being resilient and having a few tricks up its ... ah, branches. I've written a column for the Sun-Times with my picture on it since 1996, and lived through this mini-vortex to bloom another day. That's the lesson of the ginkgo.

Can white America overcome its slaveholder mentality?

     It can be difficult to forgive those who wrong you. But it’s much harder to forgive those you’ve wronged.
     That, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing America today regarding race. That explains why, having lost the Civil War, the slaveholder mentality is still not only popular but, recent protests notwithstanding, ascendant: many white people still can’t find it in their hearts to forgive black Americans.
     The notion that white people are superior and besieged by the presence of lesser, darker races is on the upswing, having stupefied the United States sufficiently in 2016 that it elected an unfit fraud as president. Now...
     “Excuse me?” you might be thinking about now. Did you say “forgive?” Whites need to forgive blacks?
     Certainly. Flip open the dictionary:

     for·give /fərˈɡiv/ verb. stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw, or mistake.

     The “stop feeling angry or resentful” part doesn’t need explanation. Anger and resentment are the defining elements of white supremacy. The slavers professed to be burdened by their charges, saddled with their care and discipline.
     Trumpism is only that attitude’s latest manifestation. Setting down their whips to clutch at themselves and complain about being the true victims.
     OK ... you may be thinking ... point taken. But what about that second half? “...for an offense, flaw, or mistake.” What have black people done?

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The serendipity of maps

The Badlands

     Yesterday's column on the Rand McNally Road Atlas got a surprising amount of reader response. People really love maps, and I suppose also crave a break from the news of the day. Google Maps is a very useful tool. But it does fail at the whimsey, the serendipity, that physical maps excel at, in their ability to serve up unexpected destinations. 
     Or near serendipity, as in the case of the snippet below, from my unpublished travel memoir, "Quest for Pie." It is 2009; the boys are I are leaving Badlands National Park, pressing westward.

     Edie had suggested that I buy a Garmin — an electronic pad about two by three inches, a $200 piece of equipment that perches on the dashboard and gives directions using satellites. And God knows I sometimes need directions. We had stood in the big Best Buy electronics store while I turned the thing over dubiously in my hands. But it would be a new technological device to master, and I worried I’d drive off a cliff while consulting it. My gut told me: save the two hundred bucks.
     So I used maps—the paper kind that fold. A few weeks before we left, I picked up a stack at the American Automobile Association office at a strip mall in Northbrook, provided by a perky, helpful AAA gal who grew so enthusiastic about our trip as we talked about it, I fancied, for a moment, she wanted to come with us.
     The morning we left the Badlands, before the boys woke up in our cabin, I consulted the South Dakota map, figuring out our route. We had an easy, two-hour drive to Custer, where we’d see Mount Rushmore and, the next morning, tour Jewel Cave National Monument—another Edie call. She learned from guidebooks that they had a lantern-lit tour of the cave. Normally, I’d resist a cave, as a dark, damp place not worth the effort of descending into. Really, if you’ve seen one cave—and we had, a cave in Put-in-Bay, Ohio—you’ve seen them all. They’re dark. They’re subterranean. They’re caves.
     But lanterns? Flickering flame? That made it an adventure. Tom Sawyer, exploring a cave with a candle, courting death with Becky Thatcher. The route I worked out at home had us swing north along 90 through Rapid City, or…
     Badlands National Park is in the southwest corner of South Dakota, a thumb of green sitting atop a field of pink—the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Long ago the Sioux Nation. And there on the map, right by the border with Nebraska, I noticed the “Wounded Knee Massacre National Historic Site.”
     All I knew about Wounded Knee was a) a book was written about it with the evocative title, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and b) that’s it. I’d heard of the book, but not read it.
     Nevertheless the name resonated, vibrating with historical significance. Two inches below where we were now. I checked the map’s key. About 40 miles away. When I asked the clerk in the lodge—a round-faced, black-haired Native-American woman—what the drive to Wounded Knee is like, her eyes widened a tiny bit, as if impressed, and I felt perhaps a notch above the standard braying white bread tourist. I liked that, liked the idea of going there without having planned to go beforehand. Of the boys and I standing solemnly before whatever plaque or megalith or memorial is at Wounded Knee. The impulse surprised me—uncharacteristic—but I immediately realized where it came from.
     As you head into the West, the inventory of roadside gift shops attached to gas stations suddenly shifts toward rubber tomahawks and feathered dream catchers and plastic statuettes of Indian chiefs. I had never been particularly sympathetic to the Native-American plight—indigenous people always get the shaft by better-armed newcomers, it’s the same story the world over, no need to feel guilt-ridden that it was also true in the United States. Making a show of feeling bad, scraping together a little ball of faux remorse and rolling it around between your fingers doesn’t change the hard facts of the past. No suffering is alleviated. It’s just an unconsciously insincere, easy way of letting yourself off the hook for something that isn’t your fault to begin with.
     But this transformation of their vanished culture into souvenir garbage struck me as slightly obscene, romanticizing the people who had been ruthlessly slaughtered and displaced while yet again making a buck off them. A distinctly American phenomenon. I have never been to Poland, but I’ll bet there aren’t tubs of plastic rabbis and bad paintings of Jewish women lighting Sabbath candles in all the gas stations heading to Auschwitz. Visiting Wounded Knee struck me as an atonement, a kind of penance, a humble gesture to inject some good karma into our journey at its beginning. Plus it would be educational. I ran the plan by the boys—drop down 44 to 2, pass through Potato Creek and Porcupine, visit the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. We could even dip into Nebraska, to notch another state on our belts. It might add an hour to the drive. They were all for it.
     In the van, map spread out across the steering wheel, reviewing the route, I congratulated myself: the Garmin device would never have pointed me toward Wounded Knee. The Honda was loaded up, running, outside the cabin at Cedar Pass Lodge. We were checked out. The coffee was in the coffee holder, the boys in the back. Wallet, sunglasses, wedding ring. Everything set.
     Although … one qualm. As I put the car in gear, I thought I had better mention it to them, just in case. If we loop south to Wounded Knee, we’ll then proceed northwest to Custer, via a different route. That means we’ll miss Wall Drug.
     “Could we do both?” Ross asked. No, not really. If we did, we’d be backtracking and it would add 100 miles to the trip. The boys were adamantly in favor of Wall Drug. Mom had talked about it. We had to see Wall Drug.
     “Wall Drug is a must, right Ross?” said Kent, rallying support. Right.
     Edie had indeed been rhapsodizing the place as a highlight of her youth. They give free ice water. I considered overriding the boys, but then I’d be hijacking the itinerary and forcing us off onto a grim tangent. What if Wounded Knee turned out to be a bust; a windy, dreary nothing? It would be my fault.
     Okay, okay, I thought, No Wounded Knee. Wall Drug it is.
     “Goodbye Badlands,” Kent called, sweetly as we headed toward the park exit. “Hope to see you.…”
     “Eventually?” I said.
     “Yes.”

At the end of the tunnel, a light clicks on

     Look at a map of Illinois. Notice how Peoria, Bloomington and Champaign all line up, one, two, three, like the stars in Orion’s belt, hanging in a row southwest of Chicago. Beyond them ...
     What? You don’t have a map of Illinois? Well, go online and ... oh, I see the problem. On your phone, a map of Illinois is about 3 inches tall.
     Pity. The Illinois map I’m looking at is a mighty 19 inches tall, splayed across two big pages of the 2021 Rand McNally Road Atlas, a catalogue of delight, a joyful anachronism persisting in our Google Map age.
     “Huh?” you’re wondering about now. “Is this not about crisis? I’m confused.”
     Rest assured, this is also about crisis but indirectly. As the novel coronavirus shifted from terrifying new pandemic to wearying endless ordeal, I began to wonder what might be written about that wasn’t overburdened nurses frantically trying to save gasping patients in chaotic ERs. The machinery of former life must be grinding away somewhere. If only I knew how to find it ...
     “A new Road Atlas in the midst,” read the subject line of an April 21 email.
     “Good morning,” Kendra Ensor, marketing VP at Rand McNally, began. “I know it’s a strange time, and with the state COVID-19 guidelines in place, recreational travel is pretty much at a standstill.”
     Smart. A lot of companies wouldn’t even nod at the elephant in the room. “As is customary this time of year, and has been since 1924, the new edition Road Atlas has just released.”
     Admire the way that sentence is structured —“has just released.” There is no company releasing the Road Atlas. The Road Atlas magically appears, at its customary time, of its own accord.

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