When I last reported on our travels with Honey, our GPS navigator, we were attending a wedding in Cincinnati. It was a true adventure, because the place where the wedding was to be held was new turf to us. Honey did some strange things on that occasion, but she did manage to get us to the wedding and home again safe and sound. This time, we were headed to Chinatown in Chicago, a place we had been a dozen times before and, although it is a 300 mile, five-hour drive from our home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to which I could probably make the whole trip blindfolded. So, once again, this was more of a test for Honey than it was actual navigation. I am sorry to report that she failed miserably.
With the exception of a couple stops on our way out of town at the ATM and my office to pick up something I forgot, there were no wrenches tossed Honey’s way to cause her to inform us that she was “recalculating.” In fact, her route west on I-70 and around Indianapolis via I-465 and 865 was exactly as I would have done it. She was silent for the next hundred-plus miles north on I-65 through Indiana until we approached the dreaded I-80/94, I-90 split-off near Gary. As I expected, she pointed us toward I-90, not the way I usually go, but the route preferred by most drivers who want to avoid the truck laden I-80, which is perennially under construction. I acceded to her wisdom when I saw the line of cars and trucks backed up at the I-80 exit. I prefer I-80/94 West, because there are no tolls.
It was at this point, as we were headed in the direction of the signs for I-90 West, that the unexpected entered into the equation. She was telling me to proceed to Dunes Highway and then to I-90. As it turned out, traffic at the I-90 turn-off was also starting to backup. If I bore to the left as she was suggesting, I would avoid that.
“Smart girl!” I congratulated her.
“Pay attention to the road,” my wife said.
Soon we were in the streets of Gary, Indiana, hometown of the recently departed Michael Jackson. I looked for signs that he had passed this way. Nothing… Nothing but the telltale signs of urban poverty – dirty streets, decaying houses, a woman standing by the curb hailing cars, whom we would pass twice as we drove around lost.
“She must be waiting for someone,” Amy said the first time we passed.
I snickered.
“I think she’s hitchhiking,” she said when we discovered that she was still there as we passed again.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Oh…”
How is it that we passed this woman twice? This is the part where I recount how Honey went bananas and dumped us in the middle of an industrial zone the steel town of Gary, Indiana miles from our destination of Chicago, Illinois.
But, permit me to digress a bit first.
When I was a kid, I took piano lessons from a German woman who thought I had talent, but was dismayed by the fact that I never practiced. She would tell me that I was a good sight-reader, intimating that I really needed to practice more. The sarcasm was lost on the ten-year-old me. Finally, she asked me what she had to do to make me practice. I told her that I wanted to play Broadway show tunes, instead of the Czerny exercises she always assigned. She agreed to give it a try. Soon I was happily playing songs from the “Music Man.”
One of the pieces I especially liked was titled “Gary, Indiana.” I played it exceptionally well.
“You like this?” Mrs. Friedenberg asked.
“Yeah, I like it,” I said.
“Have you ever been to Gary, Indiana?”
“No.”
“Well I have. And I can’t imagine why anyone would write a song about such a dreadful place.”
I chalked that remark up to jealousy over the fact that I preferred Meredith Wilson over Czerny. 55 years later, I would come to understand that she wasn’t kidding.
As we approached Dunes Highway, we were instructed to turn left, and then in a few blocks, turn right on Broadway. Almost immediately, I discovered that we were going to have trouble. There were orange signs everywhere advising us that we were on a detour. Shortly after we turned right, Honey was telling us to take the ramp onto I-90 West. The problem was that the ramp was closed due to construction. In fact, I never should have turned right, but instead, I should have stayed on the detour.
“Recalculating,” Honey announced.
At this point, I should have turned my little computerized friend off, turned around, and followed the detour. Instead, I decided to give Honey her head. Big mistake. Soon we were behind a hulking, smoke-spewing flatbed truck going about five miles-per-hour on a narrow road in the middle of a wasteland of dusty truck yards and factory buildings belonging to U.S. Steel.
“Go 0.6 miles and turn left on Route 20,” Honey said.
“This will be okay,” I told Amy. “Route 20 is a major East-West route that we can take until we can find an open ramp to I-90.”
But when we got to the point where Route 20 was supposed to be, the place where Honey kept insisting we should turn left, there was nothing. Nothing! Not road, a lane, an alley or a foot path. Nothing! She had failed. She was having a nervous breakdown.
“Shut that thing off,” Amy said. “Turn around and go back.”
I let Honey continue to recalculate, which she did over-and-over, and turned back for the last detour sign that I had apparently missed. After a few one-way streets in the wrong direction and our second drive-by of the woman hailing strangers from the curb, I finally found the place where we had gone wrong because we were behind that big truck and couldn’t see the detour sign.
We made our way onto I-90.
“Recalculating,” Honey said.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Oh, shut up!” Amy said.
As we approached Chinatown at the south end of downtown Chicago, Honey was advising us to do something that didn’t fit with my sense of how to get where we wanted to go. But getting to Chinatown is always confusing to me. And I had always suspected that the way I had finally settled on, the safe way, was not the best way. I decided to let Honey have her head again. Miraculously, she had found a better way, a much better way.
“She has redeemed herself,” I told Amy.
“Yes, but has she repented?” Amy said.
“In this case, I will settle for redemption,” I said.
Don Bowling, owner of the building, and his son Josh are painting the roof on the former KFC at the south end of town.
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