My road-loving colleague Denny Gibson tells the story best, but when the National Road was laid out across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Federal Government mandated that the highway be laid out as straight as possible between the three states’ capitals. That meant that the road would not pass through the Ohio towns of Eaton and Dayton, which irked officials there. So they took matters into their own hands, building a road from Springfield, through Dayton and Eaton, to the eastern edge of Richmond just inside Indiana. They put up blatantly false signs at either end proclaiming it to be the National Road and even duplicated the National Road’s milestones along the route. Over time, this road was improved while the competing section of the National Road was not. It worked; more traffic followed what became known as the Dayton Cutoff than followed the National Road. This lasted until the 1920s, when the current numbered route system was instituted, the National Road was signed as US 40, and Ohio state highway funds finally improved the National Road west of Springfield. US 40 became the favored road, even though the Dayton Cutoff was signed as US 35 between Richmond and Dayton.

Here’s where the Dayton Cutoff and the National Road coverge on Richmond’s east end. The Cutoff is highlighted in blue. The Eaton and Dayton subterfuge was so successful that, in Indiana, the Dayton Cutoff is signed as Old National Road even today!

You can still drive most of the Dayton Cutoff. Unfortunately, a railroad crossing was removed just inside Indiana, orphaning its last half mile. Here’s what that orphaned section looks like now, heading east.

This is the where the Cutoff ends in Richmond. The road originally followed the driveway on the left. I assume that, at one time, US 40 was level with that driveway.

Denny Gibson traveled the whole route a few years ago, taking photos along the way. Check out his trip report.

If you like the National Road, you might like reading everything else I’ve written about it.

Our separation was meant to last but a month, but then she didn’t want me back. I had been living in an awful extended-stay hotel, digging a big financial hole by paying the rent with a credit card. I still held out some hope we’d reconcile but the road back looked long. So I looked for an apartment I could afford while still supporting my family in our home. Thank God my paychecks covered my family’s needs with some left over.

But the leftovers afforded me very little. My choices were few, mostly in bad neighborhoods. The apartments were always small and usually broken down. I ended up choosing the place that was closest to my children. It was especially tiny – just three hundred square feet.

Three photographs capture almost all of it. One wall contained built-in storage and a Murphy bed. A friend gave me the TV.

Around the corner was a tiny kitchen and a tinier bathroom.

Looking out from the kitchen and across the Murphy bed, the outer wall was five steps away. The folding chairs and my exercise ball were my only furniture. The eight-dollar Wal-Mart floor lamp was my main light source.

The carpet was stained, the bathroom door had a deep gouge in it, the electric heater was very loud, and I could feel the springs in the thin mattress (heaven knows how many had slept on it before me), but the place became home, whether I liked it or not.

We couldn’t pull our marriage back together, and my wife filed for divorce. Our case ended up going to trial, and because the court was badly backlogged I ended up living in this apartment for 18 months.

And so I came to terms with my marriage’s end here, with many nights spent lying awake in anguish and anger over losing my family. I wished I had the luxury to focus on healing, but I still had to work a demanding job to pay for everything, be a father to my children, do considerable preparation for the trial, and manage difficult interactions with my soon-to-be ex-wife.

The maxim about how to boil a frog says that if you plop him in boiling water he’ll jump out, but if you cover him in cold water and heat him gradually he’ll cook to death. Similarly, I did not realize how much our destructive marriage consumed us until my wife did me the favor of ejecting me from the hot water. The stress had been intense, to the point of compromising my health. But the separation traded stress for stress, the likes of which I had never known. I suffered from chronic insomnia; I lost 20 pounds. Were it not for a web of friends and family who prayed for me and took my phone calls at all hours of the day, I do not think I would have made it through.

Because of them, I was able to begin regaining the inner strength I had lost. I had compromised my integrity so often in the marriage, sometimes from my shortcomings and sometimes in desperation to keep my family together, that I had utterly lost myself. Through that my relationships with my sons had stalled and were decaying. I began the hard work of rebuilding.

My little apartment was the safe place I needed to do the work. That’s ironic, because the apartment complex wasn’t really a safe place. A steady stream of people, eyes darting about nervously, visited two apartments across the way looking for a fix. And it was whispered that a prostitution ring was being run out of a few apartments at the back of the complex. Yet the two likely drug dealers were respectful and occasionally congenial when we encountered each other in the parking lot (where they both parked immaculate white Caddies loaded with gold trim). And one of the alleged prostitutes kept knocking on my door at all hours asking for money until I said, “Are you hungry? If so, I’ll take you to the store and buy you whatever you need,” which chased her away for good. But otherwise none of the funny business touched me. Except for jump-starting a few cars when word got around that I had cables, and being awakened late one night to call an ambulance for a neighbor who had taken badly ill but could not afford a phone, I was left alone. The place was as quiet as a tomb, the silence broken only occasionally when a washing machine went off balance in the laundry room next door. Not sleeping gave me time to do the work, and having few amenities at home and so little money made it hard for me to distract myself or run away. So I buckled down, took a hard look at how far out of true I had gone, and made slow but steady progress back to myself.

Slowly, things started to get better. I learned to accept the pain and let go of my marriage. I found ways to snatch a little serenity here and there. I started to manage the stress more effectively. I began to look forward to my future. And best of all, I started to get tight with my sons again. We used to fold up the Murphy bed and play a rough game on the floor where I’d get on my knees, the boys would try to run past me, and I’d reach out and tackle them on their way by. The boys called the game “Attack Dad,” but I never figured out whether they thought they were attacking Dad or I was the Attack Dad. I can’t explain it, but that game was a tonic for us, almost singlehandedly restoring trust and good feelings.

I drive by this apartment complex a lot today; it’s on the way to church and the grocery store. Sometimes as we pass the boys remark on a memory of our days there. They sometimes say how they hated sleeping on bedrolls on the floor, but more often they bring up Attack Dad or some other good memory from those days. I thought I had left the apartment with more good memories than bad, feeling predominantly grateful for it and how much I grew during that time. Yet not long ago when I stumbled upon the photos I’ve shared here, my mind and body flooded with echoes of the pain I felt then. It took several days for the shock to subside and for me to regain my center. This has forcefully reminded me just how far I’ve come from the crushing stress I faced for so long and its effects on me. I am amazed now that I was able to function in those early months in the apartment. I have no explanation other than I had to be in God’s hand.

I’ve shared very little here about my five-year journey since the separation. My blog has mostly been about who I’ve become since those awful days – it’s an expression of the joy I feel in having found myself again. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to share this story with you now. But here it is, and I hope it provides some context for the rest of what I write here.

The few other posts in which I’ve touched on the journey are here, here, here, and here.

The road-trip season is winding down. I have one more road trip planned for this year, a trek down the National Road in eastern Indiana this coming weekend. The rain we’ve had in the past week has removed much of the excellent fall color we’ve had this season – I hope the remaining color hangs on a few more days for our trip.

As autumn wraps up, however, the wildflower season seems to as well. I paid almost no attention to wildflowers until I started making road trips a few years ago. Their color and variety make them hard to ignore when I’m exploring an old bridge or walking the edge of an old alignment! So I slow down and take them in – and photograph them – when I see them.

Yet I know so little about them. I try to look them up online to identify them, but often my search comes up empty. I’d love it if somebody would perfect reverse image search. I’d like to upload my flower photo and have the Internet tell me what it is!

And so I did not find out what these pretty yellow flowers are. Theywere plentiful along a forgotten alignment of US 40 and the National Road in Indianapolis near the Hendricks County line, growing among some Queen Anne’s lace and chicory.

I also couldn’t identify these white flowers, which I found growing in vines last May near an abandoned bridge on old US 50 near Clay City, Illinois.

I’ve known the weed below all my life; they grow all over Indiana. I remember they were especially prolific at my grandparents’ palatial retirement estate in rural southwestern Michigan. I think it’s an ox-eye daisy. I found this resourceful one actually growing out of the deck of that abandoned bridge. Its root system can’t be very deep – the deck is only a few inches thick. I gather that the ox-eye daisy is considered a noxious weed in several states – it tends to take over wherever it grows.

Clumps of these purple flowers, which I think are phlox, grew along a 1919 bridge on the National Road just east of the Illinois border. The sun was very bright that afternoon.

I have no idea what this is, but bunches of it were growing along the Marshall County road on which the Chief Menominee monument stands.

The prolific black-eyed Susan really pops along the roadside all summer. I shot these along a gravel alignment of the National Road near Reelsville. While I shot all the other flowers in this post with my Kodak Z730, I shot this on film with my Minolta X-700. It reminds me of four pupils attentive to the teacher, with one in the back row daydreaming.

If you can identify any of the flowers I can’t, please enlighten me in the comments!

This is my second annual post about roadside flowers. Check out last year’s flowers!

Even though I’ve collected cameras for 30 years, I’ve only had a decent everyday camera for the past few years. By “decent,” I mean a point-and-shoot camera with autofocus and zoom, by no means anything fancy. I am a cheapskate, you see. I used garage-sale fixed-focus cameras until my budding road hobby made me wish for slightly more respectable equipment. I dangled my toes in the water in 2006 when I bought an Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80, but even then I picked it up for $20 on eBay. The little Stylus came with me every time I hit the road, and the results were so good that I wanted to share my photos online. I put up my personal site and posted photos from my first three road trips (see them here, here, and here).

I found myself shooting lots of film, and my wallet was feeling the pinch from having it all developed. I figured that if I bought an entry-level digital camera it would pay for itself within three or four road trips. So I went shopping. Based on Philip Greenspun’s recommendations (at the time) on photo.net I settled on the Kodak EasyShare Z730. Not only did Mr. Greenspun have nothing but good things to say about it, but Kodak was selling refurbished units for far, far less than list price. I love a bargain, so I bit.

I figured I was going to be like the guy who’d owned a succession of beater cars but had just bought his first new car – basic transportation, a Hyundai, maybe. The Hyundai isn’t anything special, to be sure, but it would seem wonderful compared to the discarded ‘82 Buick that didn’t always start. After a while, the Hyundai would show its true colors as an entry-level car.

I was wrong. More than two years on, I enjoy this camera as much as when it first arrived. That’s not to say it’s a great camera – true to Kodak’s mission, it’s a point-and-shoot for the masses. It’s just highly competent.

The Z730’s five-megapixel resolution was on the small side even when I bought the camera, but who really makes huge enlargements? What it lacks in resolution, it makes up for in lens; its f/2.8 Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon is very sharp. It’s also a bit wide, at 33mm, which is good for roadscapes. If I’ve ever talked to you about this camera, I’ve probably said it sports a 28mm lens, which is just wishful thinking. I’d love to have a 28mm lens. It does have a 4x zoom, though. It lacks image stabilization, but shake seems to be a problem only at maximum zoom. I have found that if I back off a hair from max, my photos are crisp.

The Z730 is ready to shoot within a couple seconds of turning it on, and its autofocus quickly sizes up a shot. I seldom have to wait for it. I’ve missed shots only while trying to turn the camera on – the mode-selector dial, which doubles as the on/off switch, is fiddly and hard to work. While I’m complaining, I might as well mention that the sun washes out the little 2.2-inch LCD, but at least the Z730 has an optical viewfinder. Also, the battery that came with the camera was good for only about 300 shots, which isn’t enough when I’m on the road. I bought a stouter battery and have shot 700 in a day with it. Finally, its aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and manual modes are limited. The Z730 is aggressively about pointing and shooting, not about giving control to the photographer.

But I haven’t needed much control to get good results with the family snapshots and roadside landscapes that make up the bulk of my photographs. The Z730’s autofocus, coupled with its strong lens, does a great job nearly all the time.

This photo is of the original alignment of US 36 in Putnam County, Indiana. (Yes, the original route was a dirt road.) I love the vibrant greens in this shot.

The Z730 excels in diffused and indirect light. This covered bridge is also in Putnam County, not far from the road above.

I took this photograph of the Michigan Road (US 421) in Decatur County on a hot and hazy day.

This shot, north of Rochester on the Michigan Road (old US 31), is the abutment from a one-lane truss bridge that used to cross the Tippecanoe River.

I’ve had a lot of fun shooting wildflowers by the roadside with the Z730’s macro mode. I am so pleased with the detail the lens brings out.

It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to control depth of field on the Z730. I just press the macro button and hope for the best. Sometimes you get a little bokeh, as above; sometimes you don’t, as below.

At the other extreme, this camera was born to take photos of big brick buildings against the blue sky. This is the Johnson County Courthouse in Franklin.

This is Eminence High School, along State Road 42 in Morgan County.

I’ve also been happy with how well the Z730 handles available light. I left the flash off during my entire visit to the 2009 Mecum Original Spring Classic auction at the Indiana State Fairgrounds last May. To be fair, the joint was bathed in fluorescent light.

This shot, of the State Theater on State Road 25 in Logansport, does a better job of showing how well the Z730 handles available light.

The good results I get from my Z730 have encouraged me to learn a little about photography. I always wanted to take better photographs, and because a digital camera shows results instantly, I’ve found it easy to practice. I’ve read a little bit about composition and light, and have had fun experimenting. This photo, of South Bend’s State Theater, was one of the first times I moved in close. I still like the result. (I saw my first movie, Bambi, here when I was little.)

Wandering around Downtown Indianapolis with my camera one afternoon, I was looking for good interplay among the planes of buildings and signs. I especially like how this shot turned out.

I also spent some time at Crown Hill Cemetery shooting the James Whitcomb Riley gravesite. I like the monument’s strength in this shot. (This is the highest point in Indianapolis. On a clear day, you can see Downtown four miles to the south.)

At the muscle car auction, I shot a lot of car details. I learned a lot and got some satisfying results, such as this photo of the hood scoop on a 1970 Dodge Super Bee.

I’ve also practiced getting in closer when photographing people. My favorite subjects have been my sons, and I have some great shots of them, but in deference to their mother I don’t publish their photos online. You’ll have to settle for a photo I took of my dog! Gracie is a frequent road-trip companion. I fold down the back seats of my wagon, spread out her blanket, and off we go. She comes along on the leash when I stop to explore, and by the end of the day she’s usually so whipped that she snoozes soundly all the way home. I took this photo as we were heading home after a long day exploring US 50 in Illinois. (Check it out at its full size – you can almost count her hairs.)

I’ve enjoyed taking photos with my Z730 more than with any camera I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned a lot of cameras. But there are times now that I’d like to have more control that a better camera would bring. And I really want a wider lens! I’m currently drooling over the Canon S90 and I’ve flirted a bit with the Nikon D40. But both of them represent investments I’m not willing to make right now (see above, re: cheapskate). And if there’s anything my Kodak Z730 has taught me, it’s that even a meager camera can do a great job.

If you like old cameras, check out my entire collection.

It occurred to me today that I’ve been using e-mail for almost a quarter century. That’s more than half my life.

The lowly VT100

I first e-mailed at Rose-Hulman in 1985 on a VAX, using a VT100 terminal. My first e-mail was probably a request to an operator (what we now call a system administrator), but soon my friends and I all figured out that we could efficiently contact each other this way, seeing as all of us passed through the Computing Center several times a day. Yes, we had to go to a central location to read and write our e-mails. And there was no e-mail to computers other than the VAX; it wasn’t networked with anything. The very idea!

In 1989, a friend introduced me to Terre Haute’s computer bulletin board scene. A BBS was a computer that had software on it that served up e-mail, message forums, file shares, games, and chat rooms. You dialed into it with your modem; if somebody else was online, you got a busy signal and had to wait. There were many different BBS software platforms available, but most of the BBSes in Terre Haute used WWIV, which ran on DOS.

WWIV's main menu

Terre Haute’s BBS community was large and active, and we had a lot of fun together online. We even started meeting in person. At first our gatherings were tentative and informal, but as we gelled we started having parties, summertime cookouts, and even a couple late-fall hog roasts. Those of us old enough to imbibe began meeting at a different local bar each week for a few brews. We called ourselves the Tuesday Night Drinking Society, and we had one rule: We never met on Tuesday.

At about the same time, the software company I worked for got connected to the Internet backbone (via a token-ring local network; remember those?). I’ve had more e-mail addresses than I can remember, but I’ll never forget my first one: jwg@acd4.acd.com. (I worked for Applied Computing Devices, Inc., hence acd.com. acd4 was our mail server’s name.) The first Internet e-mail I sent was to a friend who worked out in Silicon Valley, 2,000 miles away. I was amazed that I could write him a note and he could respond in seconds! We got no work done that afternoon as we e-mailed back and forth. It seems so commonplace today, but outside elite academic and scientific circles (which had had the Internet since the 1970s) this was as groundbreaking at the time as it was for a 1920s farmer to receive his first long-distance telephone call.

Emacs logo

But the Internet was still all text-based. I had figured out how to make my beloved Emacs text editor handle e-mail and USENET feeds; I’m pretty sure I used gnus. USENET is a worldwide forum on any topic you can imagine. Oh my goodness, the time I sunk into discussions on USENET. You can still find many of those discussions thanks to Google Groups’ archive. Here’s the oldest one of my posts that I can find, from 1992, plus a 1994 post from a brief trip along US 40 in Ohio (from before my inner roadgeek was awakened). Anyway, Emacs and gnus are still around, but I haven’t used UNIX in 15 years; I have long since come to the dark side of Windows.

NCSA Mosaic logo

That happened in 1994 when I moved to Indianapolis and became an editor for the company that used to publish the …For Dummies books. That’s where I became aware of the World Wide Web, which had been born in about 1990 but didn’t really get anywhere until about 1993 when the NCSA Mosaic browser was born. I downloaded version 0.9 to my computers at work and at home and spent happy hours surfing the nascent Web. It’s hard to imagine now how small the Web was then – it was possible in 1994 to visit every page added to the Web each day. It’s also hard to imagine now a Web that was primarily static text with an occasional GIF or JPEG image thrown in.

This was the Web in 1994, kiddies

In the Web’s early days, you wrote your HTML by hand in a text editor. One of my fellow editors fought for about a year, but finally convinced the higher-ups that we needed to publish a how-to guide that demystified writing Web pages. When it came off the press in 1995, I got a copy and started building my first personal Web page. My dialup Internet account came with modest Web hosting, so I published it there.

That page evolved into my current Web presence at www.jimgrey.net. I no longer code my HTML by hand; I use Microsoft FrontPage. As the Internet has become a fixture in modern life, the amount of geekery I’ve been willing to employ in using it has dropped to almost zero, limited entirely to occasional HTML tweaking of my blog or personal site. I’ve grown lazy! I can’t imagine firing up Emacs to check my messages, using its arcane keyboard commands to get around, reading everything in monospaced text. I was willing to do that when the Internet was interesting as a technical toy. But today, what the Internet delivers is interesting and valuable, and I want the easiest and fastest way to access it. I hardly watch TV anymore, but I spend lots of time on YouTube and Hulu. At Christmastime, I set up Pandora to play endless holiday songs for my family. I keep up with my sons’ progress in school via an ANGEL Learning implementation (which, by the way, several of my colleagues helped build). When I need to know pretty much anything, I ask Google. And, of course, I still have discussions in forums and compulsively check my e-mail. The oldest applications of all this technology remain, I think, the best.

Read about how taking a speech class in high school launched me on my geek-ridden career.

I usually dread autumn. It’s not that autumn itself is a problem, but it means winter is coming, and I hate winter. Give me the freedom of shorts and T-shirts year round! But even I have to admit that we are having an unusually gorgeous autumn, and I’m actually enjoying it.

A typical central-Indiana autumn sees haphazard color for a couple weeks, and just when it starts getting good the leaves turn brown en masse and fall. Humbug. But this year, the color is taking its time. The tops of many trees started to change first. Sunrise touching those treetops made them glow; it’s been hard to pay attention to the road when I drive to work. The color then crept along the branch tips, creating a yellow, orange, or red outer layer with a still-green core, as if the trees had been frosted. Most of those trees have changed color entirely now, but many of their neighbors are beginning to change color around the edges. How long can this show last?

Over the weekend I toured the neighborhood with my camera, trying to be artsy again but mostly failing. At least I captured some excellent color.

My neighbor has two maples at the edge of his front yard. One’s gone yellow and the other’s just starting.

This is his yellow tree. It was late afternoon, and I liked how the sun was highlighting some leaves and hiding others in the shadows.

A huge evergreen is at the center of another neighbor’s front yard; beyond it, the afternoon sun really made its neighboring trees pop.

Here’s a good example of how the color makes its way down a tree’s edges. I want to keep checking every day to see how it’s progressed!

This tree, out on the main road, was green on the inside a week ago. I watched it change from the outside in every day as I pulled out of my neighborhood on my way to work. Now it really commands attention.

I saved my favorite tree in the neighborhood for last. Trite superlatives such as “fieriest glory” are all I can come up with to describe it, but it is late as I write this and I need to get to bed, so that’s what you get!

I wrote more last year about how childhood memories shape how I feel about fall. Check it out.

I was heading home to Indianapolis on the Michigan Road not long ago and reached Logansport as the sun was setting. The Char-Bett drive-in’s lit sign made me think of chocolate malts, so I stopped for one. I’m glad I did, because they were in their final days for the season.

I’ve driven through Logansport countless times, but had never before managed to do it in the evening when I had my camera with me. I was in no hurry, so I stopped to shoot every lighted sign I could find along the Michigan Road. This tavern is on 6th St.

I saw plenty of Old Style Beer commercials on cable from Chicago as a kid, especially during Cubs games, but I always figured it was just a local brand. This sign has too many elements of the Old Style logo to be a coincidence, so apparently the brand had more reach than I thought. Logansport is at least 100 miles from Chicago.

The State Theater is around the corner on Market Street, still showing first-run movies. This sign doesn’t look like much in the light of day, but it sure is strong at night.

Read about the time I led a parade in Logansport. Well, sort of.

When I was in college in the 1980s, I knew someone who owned a 1962 Chevy Impala. He took a bunch of us to a drive-in movie in it once. We sat on the car to watch the movie, with several guys on the hood and a couple of us on the roof. The sheet metal easliy supported our collective weight. We talked about how “they used to make cars out of real steel, not this paper-thin stuff they use today.” If we had tried to sit all over my 1983 Renault Alliance or a friend’s 1985 Honda Civic, the cars would have had to visit a body shop afterward. How, we all wondered, could our modern cars possibly be safer than this rock-solid old Chevy?

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in honor of its 50th year, has forever answered that question by deliberately crashing a 1959 Chevy Bel Air into a 2009 Chevy Malibu. If you’ve ever doubted the safety of today’s cars over yesterday’s, watch this video.

(Note: The IIHS appears to be ordering copyright-violation takedowns of this video when it finds them. Sure seems like they would welcome the free publicity that sharing this video brings. Anyway, if the video above doesn’t work, go to this page at the IIHS Web site to watch it.)

If you’re a classic car lover as I am, first you will need to get over the shock of watching this vintage automobile being destroyed. Breathe, just breathe.

Then compare what happens in the cabins of these two cars. In the old Bel Air, the dash buckles in and the steering column becomes a battering ram to the crash-test dummy’s face. The seat even pops loose, sending the dummy flying up toward the roof. In the new Malibu, there was no intruding dashboard, no projectile steering column, no dislodged seats. The cockpit remained intact, as it was designed to do, while the rest of the car absorbed much of the blow. The airbag shielded the dummy from smacking into the steering wheel.

The IIHS says that if a real person had been driving the Bel Air, he would have died instantly. A real person driving the Malibu would have suffered a knee injury.

You may recall that my car was totaled in an accident in April. As the other car struck us I watched my right front fender peel off and twist like so much aluminum foil. When we got out of the car, we found the rear passenger door and the frame around it crumpled if it were a discarded Coke can. My youngest son sat inches from the worst impact, yet he had not a scratch on him; he didn’t even understand that we’d been in an accident until we got out of the car and saw the damage. We all walked away, thanks to the safety engineering designed into the car.

Classic cars may be death traps, but they sure can be a delight to behold, as I found at a muscle car auction.

Original alignment, Shelby County

I’ve been working with blogger Hoosier Reborn on having the Michigan Road named a state historic byway. We’re building a grassroots organization from communities along the route that will provide the support necessary to win the designation from the Indiana Department of Transportation. We have built support in the counties north of Indianapolis except for Clinton County (if you’re from there and would like to see the road so honored, please contact me!). We’re ready to expand our organization into the route’s counties south of Indianapolis. We have offers from Shelbyville, Greensburg, and Madison to host meetings, and we plan to follow through in November. We plan to submit the historic byway application to INDOT in the summer of 2010.

I’ve created a Web site to serve as an information hub for our efforts. It sketches the road’s history, gives turn-by-turn driving directions, and links to my personal site’s extensive photographic survey of the road. So for all things Michigan Road, please go to

www.historicmichiganroad.org

I am just thrilled by how much enthusiasm there has been for this project. If you’re enthusiastic for it, too, and live on or near the road, contact me and we’ll add you to our e-mail list.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to read more about the Michigan Road, click the link above. Or check out what I’ve written on this blog about the road:

• A brief history of the road
• The 1872 Fairmount House in Madison
• An 1885 stone bridge in Ripley County
• Photos from under that bridge on a day the creek was dry
• Scenes from the road in Decatur and Shelby Counties
• The town of Pleasant View on an almost-forgotten original alignment
• Some historic homes in Indianapolis and a tree-lined original alignment
• An 1832 hand-built house in the former town of Augusta
• How the road in northwest Indianapolis became a major artery
• Stories from my trip through Fulton and Marshall Counties
• A longtime grocery on the road in South Bend burns to the ground
• Historic photos from Burlington, a town on the road in Carroll County
• The time I spun my car most of the way through Fulton
• The home of Plymouth’s first mayor, Horace Corbin
• The end of the road in Michigan City
• Announcing the Michigan Road Historic Byway effort

I have enough photographs and stories from my 2008 trips to write as many more posts! Maybe I’ll do that during the slow winter months.

Our effort has also gotten some press. The best coverage has come from the Pharos-Tribune in Logansport:

• Grassroots effort forming in support of historic byway
• Michigan Road (editorial in suppport of the project)
• Historic byway gaining support
• Byway effort moves ahead

I’m grateful for and excited about all the positive attention our project has received!

I’ve been talking to my sons about college lately in hopes that planting the seed early will help them see college as just the next logical step after public school. They’ve known for some time that I went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a very tough engineering school in Terre Haute. I’ve never worked as hard in my life as I did those four years, but I still managed to squeeze in some of the best fun I’ve ever had. Homecoming fell on a weekend the boys were with me this year, so I decided we’d drive out to campus and share some of the good times.

The best part of Rose’s homecoming is the annual bonfire, a tradition since the 1920s. This is no weenie-and-marshmallow roast. Every year, the freshman class builds a giant structure of railroad ties. Pollution-control ordinances limit the structure’s size, but those budding young engineers make the most of the space they get. Typically, the structure is 25 feet tall, not including the crowning outhouse that has been part of the tradition since the 1940s.

After a late pep rally, everybody made their way to a field on the campus’s eastern edge where the structure awaited. The area reeked of gasoline. Fortunately, we didn’t have to suffer the fumes too long before a flaming object arced in from nowhere – I learned later that it had been launched by trebuchet – and set the mass ablaze. My youngest son was so impressed that he pumped his fist, let out a whoop, and did a little victory dance. In almost no time, the structure was fully involved.

I haven’t been to a homecoming bonfire in a dozen or more years, but this one played out much the same as all the others I’ve seen. Everybody let out cheers and whoops and hollers when the timbers burst into flames. The fire spread quickly, warming the crowd. Soon everything was cast in yellow-orange light, and you could make out every face around you. And then, suddenly, it got very, very hot. The crowd backed away quickly, except for a few “brave” souls trying to tough it out. I would have liked to join them as I did in the old days, but my sons weren’t so hardy. We found a cooler spot near the back of the crowd, where I took this photo that shows how tall the flames were and how well they lit the scene.

The one difference since my last bonfire is the proliferation of digital cameras and the ease and speed with which photos and videos can be posted on the Internet. During my time at Rose, a handful of people always photographed the fire – but this night I swear every arm around me was stretched up with some sort of camera at the end of it. I wish I had photographed the sea of LCDs! And by the next morning, the first bonfire videos had already appeared on YouTube.

My sons talked excitedly about the fire about a third of the long drive home before they calmed down and dozed off. I decided that telling them about all the hard work could wait for another day.

The most fun I had in college was at the campus radio station. Read a bit about it here, and hear what I sounded like on the air here.