From Ohiowa Impromptu
A billboard displaying
smiling cows and buxom pastures, and vice versa, and the words “Welcome to
Ohiowa, breadbasket of the
Midwest!” greets traffic entering that great state from Chicagoland on the
Governor Wendell J. "Sherlock" Holmes Memorial Parkway (I-202A), one
of the early interstate masterpieces of the Ike Administration, "unfurling
its unribbon unbright as umber," in the words of the poet Potter, all the
way across winsome Ohiowa from Fort Dean, famous for agricultural machinery,
blonde-braided cheerleaders, brats in batter, and crackling spuds in their
jackets, to Macropolis, the state capital, famous for three-piece suits,
one-night stands, and corn on the cob; and from Macropolis westward to New Ur
of the Chaldees, placid college town and second city of the state. Turning
westnorthwestward, the sinuous (some might even say sexy) interstate soon
sloughs off the fields of wheat and corn and winningly wends its way across
flat Plato Plateau, a plain of loamy soil threaded with streams and canals and
once alive with the soft booming of overfed geese and the whirring of guinea
hens but now half-hidden under software warehouses and shopping malls and
suburban condos in huddled developments bearing hopeful names such as Prairie
Lea and Sunkissed Uplands. Grain silos, church spires, water tanks, and mighty
oaks set off for the big, beckoning Midwestern sky but never complete the
journey, not even the majestic Gabriel Oak, estimated to be 5,000 years old if
it’s a day (and it is). At the foot of Gabriel 's soaring bluff, at the end
and/or beginning of the Holmes Highway’s cross-Ohiowa journey, sprawls (or “squats
like an uneasy toad”--yes, Potter again) the city of New Ur of the Chaldees
(pop. 123,456), county seat of Madurodam County, East Ohiowa R.C. archdiocesan
seat (4 closed and shuttered Polish ex-churches, 2 slated for demolition
sometime this week), ex-industrial center (tires, wheels, hubcaps, ceremonial
flatware, fireworks) recently depressed as hell but now feeling a little
better, thanks, partly because of the recent arrival of Maher Global
International Worldwide Intercontinental (or Intercontinental Worldwide), PLC,
the Irish real-estate conglomerate, and consequent spinoff businesses such as
Austro-Provençal fusion restaurants and Anglo-German car dealerships and
Italo-Chinese fashion boutiques and a new, well-endowed, and shapely Irish
Studies department at Downstairs State, the local university.
