Day 18 Sunday October 23

Day 18, Sunday October 23, South Bend, Indiana

Beginning miles from Kennewick: 2,479. Temp. at 7 a.m. 45. Mild, no wind.

I have to make up for taking this excursion to South Bend and drive to Nashville, Tennessee today. So will have to bak fill the log to write my impressions of Game Day at Notre Dame University. It is probably a hopeless task to try and describe the festival atmosphere I experienced here yesterday. It was a kind of combination of Oktoberfest, Mardi Gras, and giant excuse for one and all to eat as much as they could and get drunk. A kind of autumn party. And the people came from all over the United States and abroad. I counted numerous cars in the parking lots with New York state license plates.

I took what I hope are some interesting photographs of people and parts of the university. I felt rather strange to be swimming in rivers of people and the only one without a football ticket.

Since Notre Dame is probably the most famous university in America one could feel among the throngs of people a kind of affluence and wealth and privilege. In the parking lot of the hotel the first person I met was a Superior Court Judge from New York. As I was standing in the lobby of the hotel a man came in wanting a room and he had a thick accent. I asked where he was from and he said Dublin, Ireland. They had no room for him. A room cost $379 for one night! But you have to buy for two nights. (Naturally I didn't rent a room. But used their excellent parking lot.)

At any rate I was tired after walking 4 or 5 miles through the campus; it's much bigger that I thought it was, and decided it made more sense to sleep over night in South Bend and get an early start for Nashville in the morning.

I left South Bend in the dark of morning. Back down Highway #31 that I came in on. When it got light I could see the sky was hidden behind sheets of dark clouds and soon there was a trace of a falling rain on my windshield.

It stayed that way all the way to Indianapolis the capital city of Indiana. I felt regret the night before when I drove eastward from Peoria, Illinois I was missing some of the new landscape. In fact, I have felt the same regret since I crossed into Wyoming from Montana that I haven't had the time to write down the vast changes in the landscape as one drives across the American Plaines. It is so vast and sweeping. All one sees in Wyoming, for example, are oil wells and cattle grazing over the unending prairie. Then gradually as one travels across South Dakota there begin to be a series of farms plotted by a cluster of trees and sometimes an old frame of a windmill for a water well. But one doesn't see the corn fields until one drives into Iowa. In Iowa the farmers drive their giant harvesting machines on the highway and you have to line up behind them until a flat straight of highway for safe passage around them.

The corn fields look to me like it's the kind of corn grown for cattle feeding. And the giant harvesting machines that mow down the row of corn stalks must use the ground up stalks for some kind of animal feed. There are hundred and hundred of miles of corn fields that continue on into Illinois and then Indiana. This is called the American Heartland, some say the feed basket of America. In Indiana the farm plots become much smaller than the big ones further out west probably because it was settled first and the farm homestead had to be divided over time from father to sons with each getting a smaller plot.

I could write a whole story about the man who extended his hospitality to me for almost a week and never come close to explaining to a reader or myself who or what he is. He is about the strangest man I've ever met on any journey. He seems to me a man drifting toward nowhere and as they say a kind of hard landing. But he has some generous instincts. His photo will be attached tomorrow. And also the ones I took in Peoria, Illinois and South Bend, Indiana. Actually I can attach his photo today. It's #281 and #283; Darren McCabe.

I have in my head a general outline of a short story to use him as a character because in a short story I am allowed to change details to reveal a truth, while if I wrote his story exactly as he told it to me, it would sound so unbelievable no one would believe it. Even now when I think back on his life as he told it to me, it seems unbelievable. Yet I know that is what one encounters when one sets out on a giant journey and simply accept the world and the people in it as they present themselves: unbelievable stories. Such as that old philosopher in Bozeman, Montana.

I am writing this in a place called Bowling Green, Kentucky about 56 miles from Nashville, Tennessee. It is 8 o'clock and dark of course. But I will push on. I have some business plans for Nashville. Oh, my plan to sell some book at Notre Dame University did not work out. Yet I have no regret in going there for a visit that cost me at least an extra day of travel and expenses.

For one night South Bend, Indiana felt like it was the most exciting place to be in America. Above the football stadium one of those giant blimps circled the stadium. And inside the stadium were the TV cameras beaming the game, the band music, the masses of students singing and shouting all over America through TV sets in homes and bars. I am not part of the American royalty!

Georgia Baker even called me up to ask if I was inside the stadium so she could keep an eye out for me on her television. I laughed, No, I said, I have no ticket. I'm watching the game in South Bend, Indiana on television inside a bar with a bunch of other ordinary people. But from the bar we could actually hear the crowd roar 2 ½ miles away when Notre Dame did something good.

Roger