Three Days of Corn
Lake Erie, OH
Time and distance is usually measured by minutes, hours, seconds, years, feet, miles, metres, kilometrs…even the Planck length…but perhaps the most obvious unit of measurement when crossing Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin is corn. Three days of it, with little interruption except the occasional city skyline on the shore of some distant lake, punctuated by Brian Urlacher’s benevolent face telling you how to combat hair loss.
Rolling into the Geneva State Park Campground in Ohio after the first day of corn, the sky was already beginning to fill up with rain and the wind was picking up. This was the true test of setting up the RooHab (the tent-Subaru structure that was to become home for the next three weeks on the road). All night Lake Erie roared in the distance, betraying its typically placid facade. Morning seeped through the mist suspended in the air, cold and breezy, only hastening the breakdown of camp and getting back on the road, suffering another day of corn and getting to the next camp. However, before we left and as the fog lifted, it was worth making one trip to the lake to see the waves.
The oft quoted mantra of the early days of the trip: “You know what I miss”? “What”? “Corn”. Turning our head to look out the window with a deep sigh of relief, “Oh, thank G-d”.
When we first saw it, the steaming tower loomed over the houses, confoundingly enormous, hissing like a snake, It was truly difficult to get a sense of just how large the cooling tower was. The second day of corn had ended at Indiana Dunes National Park, established as a national park in 2019 and previously called the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. We were more concerned with getting food into our faces and did not notice the tower looming in the distance until a few moments later. Previously on the trip, I related how, as a child, the cooling tower of the Davis-Bessie Nuclear Power station was something that used to send shivers down my spine; it’s leering hourglass shape belching steam into the sky, it’s radioactive heart ready to unleash death and sickness upon the world (keep in mind that Chernobyl had recently happened and Three Mile Island was still on peoples’ minds - the mid-eighties hysteria over the safety of nuclear power was still at it’s height). Then there is was - another steaming hour-glassed monster looming this time over houses. I was already discussing the possibilities of how to photograph the tower and the attached coal fired plant the following morning. The evening sun was fading fast and the wind was picking up. Last night’s soaking was not something that we wanted to repeat (and thankfully did not have to). We grabbed dinner under the shadow of the cooling tower at The Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City, IN. In the light of the next day, after breaking camp and loading Nori the dog/navigator back in the car, we took one last quick spin through the town to capture a few more images of the cooling tower on the Rollei 2.8 since I find that the square format lends itself really well to manmade structures and FP4+ captures light so beautifully, but it was difficult to frame up something that massive unless you are far away from it.
The RooHab’s inaugural setup
The corn ended when we crossed the Mississippi River in Minnesota and roosted in St.Cloud for the night, the last stop before heading to Fargo, North Dakota and the first public reading of Price Per Barrel: The Human Cost of Extraction at Zandbroz books. Like many things, the journey to get to the beginning is a journey in itself. This time it began with corn and corny jokes.