Crossing the Plains with Bruno by Annick Smith

Author:Annick Smith [Smith, Annick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595346704
Publisher: Trinity University Press

HOUSE IN THE DUNES

DAYS FOUR AND FIVE, MAY 14–15

Outer Drive. I take the Outer Drive along the lakeshore’s pale green parkways, which this damp morning are flecked yellow, pink, and violet with daffodils and apple blossoms and beds of wide-eyed pansies. Sailboats and yachts are moored in Belmont Harbor, and a few white sails wing across the lake.

This ride is so familiar I could dream every turn and name every landmark. We pass the lagoon at the borders of the Lincoln Park Zoo, where my father took us for rowboat rides on warm Sunday afternoons. On the other side of the zoo is Francis Parker School, where I was lucky to spend fourth through eighth grades. The school was and still is a progressive institution, and it infused me with intellectual ardor and moral awareness, but the Victorian manor where we studied and played has long since been replaced by a modern structure, and with it my sense of belonging.

The Outer Drive’s southern stretch leads past an even more personal neighborhood. Here are the University of Chicago streets where I walked as a bride at nineteen and pushed Eric’s buggy as a twenty-year-old mother. It is tempting to let nostalgia take over, but I am getting bored with my self-obsessed vision. We turn inland at the Museum of Science and Industry, wind through Washington Park, and pass into the black ghetto at Stony Island Avenue, ascending over it on the Chicago Skyway.

Bruno sits in the back of the SUV, head up, looking out the partly open rear window and sniffing new territories. His two hundred million ethmoidal or olfactory cells read the world in precise degrees of scent, as opposed to my fifty million, which are not enough to divert me from reading the world through my eyes. According to German canine scientist Walter Neuhaus, a dog’s nose is from one million to one hundred million times more sensitive to smell than mine is. Bruno smells the environment more intensely than he sees it, but contrary to popular assumptions, he is not color-blind. Like all dogs, Bruno sees muted colors—indistinct greens, yellows, purples, shades of gray—which, I realize, is how I am seeing my past today.

I pull onto the Indiana Toll Road against Mom’s objections. Her reluctance is a hangover inherited from my father, whose Depression mind-set would not allow him to pay a toll if he could drive for free. He would detour miles out of the way to stop at his favorite gas station, which offered the cheapest gas and low-priced cartons of Kent cigarettes.

My detour veers toward comfort. I hate the truck traffic on Interstate 94. The $2.50 it costs to ride the toll road is worth every penny. We take the Lake Station exit, leaving the industrial ruins of Gary behind and joining I-94 East. The landscape morphs into fields of young grass on either side of the road. Low hills are feathered with new-leaved trees. Eighty miles separate Chicago from our cottage in the dunes. Worlds so close, and yet we have entered a different country.

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