Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Cows appeared to like Indiana. But what was a "Hoosier"?

Shall we have supper in South Bend? A punt's distance from Notre Dame. Nonsense! Gas mileage 23.5! Push on!

Even the motels were appealing; swimming pools winked alongside them. Have a good night's sleep! Indiana seemed to sing.

"Not yet," the driver said. He had seen the signs for Chicago. To wake up in the morning with Chicago already passed by, successfully avoided, outmaneuvered -- what a headstart that would be!

At the Illinois line, he figured the time, the distance to Chicago, the coincidence of his arrival with the rush hour, etc. The Volvo's case of pre-ignition was gone; it shut off calmly; it appeared to have mastered the famous "kiss start." After the uplift of Indiana, how bad could Illinois be?

"We will be bypassing Chicago at six-thirty P.M.," the driver said. "The worst of the rush hour will be over. We'll drive an hour away from Chicago, down-state Illinois -- just to get out in the country again -- and we'll definitely stop by eight. A wash for you, a swim for me! Mississippi catfish poached in white wine, an Illinois banana boat, a pint of STP, a cognac in the Red Satin Bar, let some air escape from your tires, in bed by ten, cross the Mississippi at first light, breakfast in Iowa, sausage from homegrown hogs, Nebraska by noon, corn fritters for lunch

He talked the Volvo into it. They drove into what the license plates call the "Land of Lincoln."

"Good-bye, Indiana! Thank you, Indiana!" the driver sang from the old tune: "I Wish I Was a Hoosier," by M. Lampert. We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

Smog bleared the sky ahead, the sun was not down but it was screened. The highway changed from clear tar to cement slabs with little cracks every second saying, "Thunk ker-thunk, thunk ker-thunk..." Awful, endless, identical suburbs of outdoor barbecue pits were smoldering.

Nearing the first Chicago interchange, the driver stopped for fresh gas, a look at that falling oil, a pressure check on the tires -- just to be sure. The traffic was getting thicker. A transistor radio hung round the gas-station attendant's neck announced that the water temperature in Lake Michigan was 72 degrees.

"Ick!" the driver said. Then he saw that the clock on the gas pump did not agree with his watch. He had crossed a time zone, somewhere -- maybe in that fantasy called Indiana. He was coming into Chicago an hour earlier than he thought: dead-center, rush-hour traffic hurtled past him. Around him now were the kinds of motels where swimming pools were filled with soot. He imagined the cows who could have woken him with their gentle bells, back in good old Indiana. He had been 18 1/2 hours on the road -- with only a breakfast in Buffalo to remember.

"One bad mistake every eighteen and a half hours isn't so bad," he told the Volvo. For optimists, a necessary comeback. And a remarkable bit of repression to think of this mistake as the first.

"Hello, Illinois. Hello to you, half of Chicago."

The Volvo drank a quart of oil like that first cocktail the driver was dreaming of.

If the driver thought Sandusky was guilty of gross excess, it would be gross excess itself to represent the range of his feelings for Joliet.

Two hours of lane-changing inched him less than 30 miles southwest of Chicago and placed him at the crossroads for the travelers heading west -- even to Omaha -- and south to St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans. Not to mention errant fools laboring north to Chicago, Milwaukee and Green Bay -- and rarer travelers still, seeking Sandusky and the shimmering East.

Joliet, Illinois, was where Chicago parked its trucks at night. Joliet was where people who mistook the Wisconsin interchange for the Missouri interchange discovered their mistake and gave up.

The four four-lane highways that converged on Joliet like mating spiders had spawned two Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, three Holiday Inns and two Great Western Motels. All had indoor swimming pools, air conditioning and color TV. The color TV was an absurd attempt at idealism: to bring color to Joliet, Illinois, an area which was predominantly gray.

At 8:30 P.M. the driver resigned from the open road.

"I'm sorry," he said to the Volvo. There was no car wash at the Holiday Inn. What would have been the point? And it's doubtful that the Volvo heard him, or could have been consoled; the Volvo was suffering from a bout of pre-ignition that lurched and shook the madly clutching driver so badly that he lost all patience.

"Damn car," he muttered, at an awkward silence -- a reprieve in the Volvo's fit. Well, the damage was done. The Volvo just sat there, pinging with heat, tires hot and hard, carburetors in hopeless disagreement, plugs caked with carbon, oil filter no doubt choked as tightly closed as a sphincter muscle.

"I'm sorry," the driver said. "I didn't mean it. We'll get off to a fresh start in the morning."

In the ghastly green-lit lobby, arranged with turtle aquariums and potted palms, the driver encountered about 1100 registering travelers, all in a shell-shocked state resembling his own, all telling their children and wives and cars: "I'm sorry, we'll get off to a fresh start in the morning ..."

But disbelief was everywhere. When good faith has been violated, we have our work cut out for us.

*

The driver knew when good faith had been violated. He sat on the industrial double bed in Holiday Inn Room 879 and placed a collect phone call to his wife in Vermont.

"Hello, it's me," he said.

"Where have you been?" she cried. "God, everyone's been looking."

"I'm sorry," he told her.

"I looked all around that awful party for you," she said. "I was sure you had gone off somewhere with Helen Cranitz."