The Grad School Diaries: The Road to Mordor

As we came over the rise, the odor from the contaminated marshes jumped from a minor nuisance to a stench that would have killed minor gods unfortunate enough not to have HEPA filters in their ventilation system. I set the cabin air to recirculate and tried not to gag. “Is it always this rank out here?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” our future son-in-law replied from the starboard wing gunner’s station. “Sometimes it gets really unpleasant along through here.”

“It looks like something out of War Hammer 40,000; like Space Orcs would have built it,” my wife commented from the Navigator’s position.

“Or from Lord of the Rings,” I agreed, adjusting the throttles. The surface had been getting steadily worse since we’d entered the Badlands an hour or so earlier, and I was having to use care just to keep on course. “Add the smokestacks and all of the crap in the air to the landscape, and this could be Mordor on a bad day.”

“Mordor has good days?” our daughter asked from the port wing gunner’s station.

“Mordor could, but Gary, Indiana definitely doesn’t,” her future husband retorted.

My wife laughed and started singing the song “Gary, Indiana” from the musical The Music Man. Members of my crew capable of doing so joined in until it stopped being funny. “I think they wrote the song before the Industrial Revolution hit this part of the world,” I remarked, rolling my eyes. Actually, the musical was written in 1957, but it’s set in 1912, allegedly just six years after the city of Gary was founded, and certainly well before it ever came to look like this…

Of course, we’re not actually driving an armored fighting vehicle through a post-apocalyptic wasteland; we’re driving a Pontiac Torrent along Interstate 90 on the way from East Lansing to Chicago. But as we drive past towering metal structures, blackened with smoke and covered with spikes and sharp extrusions, the distinction is not as clear as you’d probably expect. If you told me these things were made by Orcs in the service of an evil Dark Lord bent on World Domination, I’d probably believe you. In fact, there’s a definite chance that even non-gamers might agree that it looks like something out of WH40K…

By contrast, the City of Chicago, rising slowly out of the distance in front of us, looks grand, modern, hustling – even clean – and the suburbs to the north of the city, where our son-in-law’s parents live (near the Wisconsin border) are pure Norman Rockwell. One could almost believe that the people who live there are paying the folks in Gary to continue looking as horrible as possible, just so that they look better in comparison. Although I know that’s an absurd thought, just as I know that parts of my beloved South Bay look almost as bad, with oil refineries belching fire and smoke into the sky, and stinking of heaven only knows what toxic chemicals. But for sheer baroque ugliness, almost Gothic in theme, the run through Gary is likely to remain the winner for some time to come…

It’s my first day off since Year One officially got started, more than two months ago. Literally my first day off; the first day I have not devoted any of my waking hours to my schoolwork. We’re off to Chicago to meet our opposite numbers; the people who will become our daughter’s in-laws in another couple of years. It’s a new experience for both of us; I’ve only been a step-parent officially for four years now, but even my wife, with an additional eighteen years of experience, has never sat across the table from the parents of someone her offspring is planning to marry. We’ve heard a lot about these folks, of course; our daughter has already been here a number of times, and her intended has also told us what to expect, but meeting people in person is always different from what other people have described. And in this particular case, the people we are to meet are somewhat older than we are, and have lived very different lives from ours…

It’s an odd feeling; sort of a parallax view; meeting a friend’s parents while at the same time being somebody’s parent. I'm still not used to the idea of being a grown-up (which I know is absurd for a man of nearly 44, but is nevertheless true), let alone meeting other grown-ups and pretending I know what I'm doing. But this meeting is important, both for run-up to the wedding and for all of the years that come after it. Until such time as our daughter's birth father makes it up here from Alabama, I'm the closest thing to a male parent who is going to be available for this duty. It should be an interesting afternoon. And while I don’t actually expect that anything will go wrong, we can honestly say that we’ve been through Hell to get to this gathering. Or at least some place that rather looks like it…