Wisconsin to Vermont
Day 1
As fall fades towards winter Wisconsin exists beneath a low diffused shadowless light in which time is imperceptible. The yellows and blues and greens of a week ago have vanished; the days pass short and monotonous, held in a muted color palate of grays and browns and malaise.
I left the calm open expanse of my friend’s farmhouse late in the morning and moved east into the city. The old broken Milwaukee highways blended without a map into the snarled mass of Chicago where the sky generously opened blue for an instant before continuing east into the diabolical gray desperation of Gary Indiana.
Traffic spread and eased into an impossible black headlight evening as I closed in on the tail end of a slowly eastward moving ice storm. I pulled over and spent the night curled down in heavy sleeping bag blankets, sleeping in the van, as howling gusts of freezing wind pressed angrily across the wide-open sheeted ice truck stop parking lot.
Day 2
The next day began in the freezing cold morning breath air and stretched endlessly into a 14 hour death march directly through a near zero visibility ice storm. The roads were strewn with invisible black ice and creeping semis and cumbersome snowplows. I peered tirelessly through hazy salt-crusted windows white knuckle navigating at a dangerous 45mph until it became too dark to continue. And a hotel, and a bed, and a pizza delivered to my room were excessive but welcome luxuries.
Day 3
The storm dissipated into a flat white sky the next day as I moved through New York revealing endless waves of beautiful, rolling hill, ice tipped pines. Farmhouses with silos nestled low into the snowy valleys and each gentle rise in the road presented another unique horizon.
Late in the evening I moved into the distant shadow peaks of Vermont and stopped to watch the sun set over a long open field, relieved to have finally arrived.