The night in Lock Haven wasn’t quite what I expected. There were kids hanging around the parking lot shooting off fireworks and doing burnouts in their souped-up pickups until about 2 am. It was boiling hot when I tried to go to sleep and I was sweating buckets while jolting wide-awake to the smell of burning rubber after every burnout. Eventually the caravan of pickups rolled out and left me with only a gentle symphony of crickets and the soft murmur of the river. The temperature dropped over night and I found myself awake in the gray hours of the morning shivering cold but still clammy with the sweat of a few hours earlier. I bundled myself up in my sleeping bag and fell back to sleep.
I left behind Lock Haven as the city was just beginning to stir. Back on I-80, I followed a steady current of tractor-trailers downstream. As Pennsylvania dissolved into eastern Ohio, the gentle hills gradually flattened out. There were very few landmarks, natural or otherwise, that were visible from the road. Red barns sat among vast fields of corn, almost too stereotypical to seem real. After Akron, I left the interstate in favor of US-30. Central Ohio felt impossibly flat, but roadside trees blocked out any grand views of the horizon that you might expect. The only visible elevation changes were small mounds piled up and connected by an overpass carrying a local road up and over the highway. Occasionally, US-30 rose to a mild crest as it passed over some county road that dead-ended a quarter mile later in a cornfield.
US-30 continued this way all the way to the Indiana border and in towards Fort Wayne. An ominous storm system was unloading to the southwest and suddenly the sunny skies darkened. To the north, there line where the storm clouds met blue skies was clearly delineated. As rain began to tap the windshield, US-30 began to bend northwest. The clear skies to the north beckoned and for a few minutes, I held out hope that I might skirt around the worst of the rain. Suddenly, the raindrops crescendo and accelerated to a rhythm my windshield wipers could barely match. The car thermometer showed the outside temperature plummeting 10 degrees in a matter of seconds. I turned off the AC, cracked the window enough to stick out a few fingers but not enough to let in the rain, and enjoyed a break from the heat.
The rest of Indiana was a long montage of oversized truckloads being hauled from anywhere to anywhere else. Crane parts, industrial pipes, a massive 20-ton, $500,000 combine harvester. I ventured away from the highway for gas in Valparaiso and drove down the main drag right around dinnertime. Downtown Valpo, as billboards and storefronts lovingly called it, was lined with boutiques, upscale cafes, family-owned restaurants, and quaint ice cream parlors. It was absolutely bustling with all the energy you might expect from small town America on a steamy Tuesday in July.
Perhaps surprisingly for a slice of semi-rural Indiana, the vast majority of residents having dinner on sidewalk tables were wearing facemasks, even while waiting for their food to arrive. A few back roads took me out of Valpo past luxury subdivisions full of massive stone and glass mansions surrounded by acres of manicured lawn. On the housing spectrum, they leaned closer to castles than single-family dwellings.
I pulled into my sleeping spot for the night around 7 pm, although the change from Eastern to Central time made it feel later than it was. The spot was a small parking lot with room for maybe five vehicles that served a local park containing soccer fields, playground equipment, and other athletic facilities. It grew dark as a sat in my car eating a can of black beans. Two deer, a doe and her fawn, appeared on the edge of the soccer field, flicked their tails, and scampered off into the woods that lined the far end of the park. It drizzled on and off and a few fireflies dared to twinkle whenever the rain stopped. Two teenagers were shooting hoops on the other side of the park. Or maybe they were in the driveway of one of the houses next to the park. It was too dark to see and the muffled, rhythmic bouncing of the basketball made my eyes grown heavy.
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