Lafayette, The Descent

Most people that write travel blogs or travel books talk about the places that everyone wants to go to. But some people talk about the places that everyone especially doesn't want to go to. Bill Bryson, in his book, "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America," admitted that he was from Des Moines, Iowa, and I believe he wrote that in Des Moines, everybody works at the Firestone factory, marries a girl named Bobby Sue, and has children that grow up only to work at the Firestone factory and marry a girl named Bobby Sue.  I've never liked that book more than I do now, not only because its subject matter is small town America, where no one wants to be, but also because it recognizes that although America is known for New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities that Hollywood travels to or makes sets of, America is actually made up of small towns. Small towns are, for better or for worse, the heartland of America. And driving through small towns in Indiana, one recognizes these towns as the small motors that run this country's cities, growing their food, making their corn syrup. But this is all to say that driving from Indianapolis to Lafayette, you see a lot of small trucks and factories, and you can't help but wonder if the woman driving the small truck past you towards the Firestone factory is one of those Bobby Sues.

So here's the story. After landing in a cornfield, I drove a car north from the airport through I-465 towards the first of the college towns I would visit, West Lafayette. Lafayette and West Lafayette are adjacent towns separated by the most polluted section of the Wabash River. A few bridges connect the two townships which presumably aren't unified because West Lafayette and Purdue University want to keep the money and school district from the clutches of the blue collar factory workers kept at bay by the river. But in order to get to West Lafayette, you have to plow through Lafayette first, birthplace of Axl Rose, who referred to it as a shithole.

 I-465 is a highway that loops around Indianapolis, but most of the time you can't tell the difference between it and a parking lot. Regardless, it's the highway you take to leave the airport, and you might say that although the Indianapolis airport is nice and new, the roads out of the airport are the second most depressingly overrun roads in Indiana, the first place title being reserved for the roads leading from Gary, birthplace of Michael Jackson and a town deserving of its own blog, to Chicago. In any case, leaving the airport one gets the peculiar feeling that people have died on the northbound voyage, trying to get to Chicago or Canada.

The hour long drive on I-465 from Indianapolis Airport through I-65 leading to Lafayette offers enough possible small town travels to keep you occupied for a week or a month, depending on how quickly you get sick of Cracker Barrel. The first town you might turn into directly from the highway is called Zionsville, and I was tempted to don a Yarmulke and stop in that town first. Still, I persisted in my deliberation to visit the town that housed Purdue University first, the school that Neil Armstrong and Emelia Earhart attended.

Almost immediately after reluctantly passing Zionsville, however, I was relieved to find even more diversity in Indiana, as the next highway sign advertised two more melting-pot towns, Brownsburg and Whitestown. If you turned left off the highway, you would end up in Brownsburg, and if you turned right, Whitestown. It warmed the cockles of my heart to know that in Indiana brown, white, and Jewish people could all live in towns so nearby each other. And since the very next town I passed was called Lebanon, I had to concede that Indiana was one of those rare places where brown and white and Jewish and Muslim peoples had effected a rapprochement along the east and west sides of I-65 North. There were other towns along the highway too, Crawfordsville, Thornton, Sheridan, Attica, Frankfurt, but I already knew that Zionsville, Whitestown, Brownsburg, and Lebanon demanded visits.

Finally, I saw a billboard advertising the entry to Tippecanoe County, home of Purdue University. I had the moonroof of the car open, and as I noticed the sign I also noticed that the air had changed from the air of highway industry and repair to something even worse, a smell of burnt chemicals and rotting vegetables. Only later would I realize that Tippecanoe Country is not only the home of Purdue University but it is also the home of two A.E. Staley factory plants which alone account for nearly 23 million pounds per year of air pollution emissions, in addition to being home to several other factories. The factories, now Tate & Lyle owned, have been and remain to be in the business of manufacturing high-fructose corn syrup, a process that mixes hydrochloric acid with a ton of corn and heats the mixture under pressure, giving off one of the most foul odors known to man or god. David Hume, looking for a constant in what seemed the most varied of human faculties, taste, said that men from different cultures might have various preferences regarding taste, but they could all be in agreement on what was completely disgusting, and he provided the example of sour milk, postulating that no man from any time or culture has ever liked the taste of sour milk. He might have added the smell of the emissions from a corn syrup manufacturing plant to sour milk for more emphasis. No one in human history has liked the smell of the emissions from a corn syrup manufacturing plant, and for good reason, it's one of the most vile, wicked, evil smells to which I've ever been exposed.

And that's what you smell descending into Lafayette. I wonder if the 56,000 Lafayettians know that they're home when they smell the vileness, like I recognize the city that I'm from when I hop off a plane and breath in the sultry air. I wish I could have been sincere when I said 'descend', like Dante descends into hell or Odysseus descends into the underworld or Socrates descends into the cave, but I can't strictly speaking say descend because the earth from Indianapolis to Lafayette is strictly flat; and so you can see the thickening particulate odor stagnating in the sun over the brown shucked corn stalks for miles in any direction. Most probably because of the smell, there's not much to see northbound on I-65 once you arrive in Tippecanoe County, the chief monuments are a Subaru factory, two water reservoir towers, and a large hospital, curiously located on the outskirts of the town across the highway from an R.V. lot.

The exit to get to Lafayette is State Road 26, an exit well lit by Best Western, Baymont Inn, Harrison College (a motel), Comfort Inn, Cracker Barrel, Bob Evans, Dennys, Motel 6, and a McDonalds. SR 26 is the main thoroughfare of Lafayette, but instead of being flanked by neutral grounds it's flanked by fast food joints, franchises, and depots. You pass by a Walmart, a Target, a Hobby Lobby, a fireworks store next to a strip club named "Chances Are" that offers parking in the front of the club facing SR 26, which strikes you as a little indiscreet given the size of the town. After the strip club you see a Carpetland and a Steak 'n Shake crossing Highway 52, a boundary that marks off the residential part of the town from the commercial.

Sliding into the residential district of the town, you get the feeling that this town might be charming after all, in a small town Indiana kind of way. The road narrows into two lanes, westbound and eastbound, and it's flanked by faded World War II homes with bright new American flags proudly hanging over small meticulously trimmed plots of grass. After a few blocks of this, however, you pass Home Hospital on your left, consisting of a series of old large grey boxes with a billboard in front of them stating the hospital has been closed for all medical services. Across from the abandoned hospital is what appears to be an abandoned park. It looks as though at one point in time there were a few businesses near the hospital, because in front of the other empty buildings there are signs that say "For Sale," or "We've Moved." Eventually you punch through two firestations (one in service and one that's for show, with a statue of a dog in overalls, which appears to be a crossbred dalmatian/bulldog, given the maculation mixed with the enormous girth) and a liquor store into the Downtown Lafayette Historic District.

The chief sight to behold when arriving into downtown Lafayette is the center placed courthouse square. Courthouses are a hallmark of small towns in Indiana, and Lafayette has one of the most regal courthouses of Indiana. But just as you begin to think that the town's charm has been distilled into the historic downtown area, you notice that the old downtown buildings also seem abandoned, for the most part. There are a few people walking around, but you get the distinct feeling that if you walked into one of the nondescript edifices around you, all you would see is a man or a woman at a large reception desk with a ceiling fan slowly turning above them, some dust motes falling, a door creaking, and life passing.

First impressions are often wrong, and you can add this one to the tally. Lafayette is far from being an abandoned Kafkaesque bureaucratic ghost town, but it would take a local festival, Oktoberfest, which surprisingly takes place in October, to show me otherwise.