PAgent’s Progress

Strange Trip continued…

My last day of travel remains a blur in my memory. I remember sitting in a car seat that seemed to have become welded to my frame. I was always soaked with sweat. There was a persistent itch between my shoulder blades that never seemed to go away. In fact, I seemed to have that itch for the better part of the next several years. I suspect some kind of interstate-travel-spawned fungus took up residence in my skin as it pressed up against the soggy upholstery for so many days.

I think I started cackling when I crossed into Wisconsin. I may or may not have started yelling “MOOOOOO!!!” out the window, while making unfair comparisons between Wisconsin dairy products and those from Tillamook, Oregon.

While planning my route through Illinois, I noticed several highways marked “Tollway”. What was this? A highway you had to PAY to use? I’d never seen such a thing. Toll bridges, sure, and the occasional state ferry, but a road that actually charged a toll for access? I was highly suspicious, and resolved to steer clear of these playgrounds of the devil.

Fortunately, I could turn south from Madison and run straight down to Bloomington, then skip east on I-74 to get to Champaign. This provided my first view of Illinois farmland, the giant rectangles of corn and soybeans that extended for mile after mile after mile. The highway occasionally zipped through some tiny little community, but mostly the population density was uniformly even and uniformly thin. The terrain was dead flat, the road was dead straight, and you could have drawn the horizon with a straight-edge. This was the precise opposite of a mountain range. No, the opposite of peaks and hills wasn’t some kind of deep chasm; it was this tabletop topography, this ironing board evenness, that was the antithesis of mountains. I looked at the flat miles speeding by and my soul died a little bit.

Finally, I pulled into Champaign, and kept going. I knew almost nothing about Champaign, except that it was the larger and more commercial of the two sister cities. So, I drove east to Urbana, and checked into a motel off the freeway for the night.

The next morning, local paper in hand, I started looking for a place to live. Time was of the essence, as I couldn’t keep paying for motel rooms, and also because I half-expected to see the rear window of my car smashed in every single morning, with all my earthly belongings missing. Looking at the apartments for rent, I considered my basic criteria for housing:

1. Affordable
2. Quiet
3. Near a grocery store
4. Convenient to campus

If you have spent any time at all on college campuses, you will immediately recognize that nos. 1, 2, and 3 are largely incompatible with no. 4. Knowing myself, especially after my last year of college, I knew that no. 2 would be the most critical for my mental health.

I quickly eliminated every apartment in Champaign. I liked smaller towns, and although the two cities had merged together like lumps of warm Play-Doh, Urbana clearly remained the country cousin of Champaign. I then drew a large circle around the University, and eliminated any apartments within that circle. This definitely limited my options, but that was the point, wasn’t it? I selected the most attractive-sounding apartment out of the remaining ads, and drove out to see it.

The apartment building was located in a residential area of established homes and tall trees. It was one block away from a supermarket, and just down the street from a shopping area with a K-Mart and a video store. The vacant one-bedroom unit was on the third and top floor of the building, on a corner (eliminating the noise from one entire neighbor). The layout was very spare and very cute, and it was furnished with some of the most astonishingly cheap press-board furniture I had ever seen.

And it was quiet. I was on the outskirts of southeast Urbana. It would have been hard to get any further from the University and still remain within the city limits. I’d have to commute to school, sure, but it would be well worth it if I could avoid the kind of noise-induced stress I had experienced while living in the dorms.

I went down to my little Mazda GLC, and pulled the wad of cash out from under the driver’s seat. Sitting down with the building manager, I filled out the paperwork, counted out first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, and got a key.

It wasn’t a lot of fun carrying everything I owned up two flights of stairs, but my euphoria at being done travelling, my joy at having a place made it quick work. No more motels! No more long days on the highway! I sat on the ugly brown couch, surrounded by boxes of stuff, and sighed.

In nearly every possible way, my journey from Washington state had been a profound transition. I’d left my comfort zone, left every place I’d ever lived, and traveled 2,500 miles to an alien environment. I had a place to live, by myself. Soon, I’d be starting graduate school, in what I had been assured was one of the toughest graduate schools for chemistry in the country.

My long strange trip was just beginning.

To be continued….