Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

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This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

Prospecting

About zero degrees Fahrenheit today. I stayed inside; I was on holiday, thanks to Martin Luther King. Karin & I did go out for supper, and I felt the cold then. I barely made it to the car.

A lovely philosophic job is advertised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in Marquette – a Lake Superior port town, four hours east of Duluth, eight hours from South Bend if one travels through Illinois and Wisconsin. Its hills and lake are beautiful, and its wooden sports dome is the world’s largest. But the cold! The snow! The darkness! If I barely can endure them here, how could I there?

This job was advertised a year ago as well; I wonder if that school has trouble attracting (or retaining) employees.

Another possible job – in Texas, not far from Ana & David – is in a nicer clime but would expire after a year or two.

Without the Ph.D., no job offer is likely to materialize; but I talked last week with my adviser, and we both realized that I am very close to finishing (though the degree probably wouldn’t be conferred until the end of May).

The cold

Today’s was a record low temperature in South Bend (−15°F). When it’s like this, what else is there to write about?

I left the apartment for three minutes to take the trash out to the dumpster. My mustaches froze.

On the map, it looks as if Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are the coldest of the contiguous states. Minnesota and North Dakota are ten degrees warmer than South Bend. So is Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. What’s the point of not applying for teaching jobs in the beautiful Upper Peninsula, if this is how South Bend’s weather is going to be?

This morning, before I got out of bed, I made two important philosophic breakthroughs.

Anniversary, pt. 2: Sheridan Road, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Google Maps

We chose Wisconsin because we thought the travel would be easy. It wasn’t. According to Google Maps, the House on the Rock – our final and most remote tour stop – lay less than five hours from South Bend. And yet our return took us nearly eight hours. Our rests were brief; our detours were minor; traffic in Chicago was relatively painless. Google just got it wrong.

Around 12:00 last night, we reached home and joyfully were reunited with Ziva and Jasper.

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The trip to Wisconsin was lengthy by design. In Illinois we kept to the Sheridan Road, hugging the lake. I wanted to see the mansions in Evanston, Kenilworth, and other obscenely rich towns. Then we drove through some merely well-off towns; through the grimy naval town of North Chicago; through Waukegan, where I’d lived as a three-and-four-year-old; and through Zion, where I’d spent the third grade. I showed Karin my old haunts (the fast food restaurants). We stopped at my old church, which now seemed very small, and I pointed out all my acquaintances in the photos on the missions bulletin board. We then went downstairs and interrupted a baby shower. I said hello to the pastor’s wife, who made me greet her husband on the phone.

Then it was north through dismal Kenosha and west to Milwaukee, where our goal was to eat some famous bratwurst. The bratwurst was so delicious and the pretzel so enormous, we’ll probably never eat at that place again (the food was felt well into the night).

The music inside the bratwurst pub was very loud. This distressed Karin, who’d never been inside any kind of pub. (She also was distressed when one drunk young man swung around and serenaded me with “Call Me Maybe.”) Traffic downtown in Milwaukee was bad. Parking was expensive. We called it a night and settled into our Waukesha Super 8. The TV was showing a marathon of Law and Order (the version with Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy).

Next entry: Madison, etc.

The return leg

On Sunday, we returned to Indiana. For lunch we stopped in hilly Hannibal, MO, at a Subway.

The after-church queue was too long. We pressed onward to a Wendy’s.

The Wendy’s was being remodelled. We retraced our steps to a KFC.

Edoarda ate mashed potatoes without any gravy. (She’s a vegetarian.) Suddenly, a crowd came in for the lunch buffet. Edoarda was a little startled. She’d never seen so many Missourians.

Martin also felt out of place. He noted that the people of Hannibal would likely go home to watch the Rams, not the Bears. (And not the Colts, either, remarked Edoarda.)

Mary was troubled by the country music. …

Stephen … I think he was mostly concerned about Edoarda.

Edoarda was doing just fine. She ate plenty of potatoes, and on the way out she picked up a brochure for tourism in Hannibal.

Leaving town, we took a wrong turn and drove around some of the hilly neighborhoods. Finally we made it onto the highway. We crossed the river into Illinois, and all at once everything was desolate and flat.

Around Joliet, my knee started hurting badly. My leg needed to be stretched out. Edoarda was sitting next to me, and so I asked her if I could stretch out my leg upon her lap. It was an indelicate request. Edoarda refused, and not just a little vehemently. Martin permitted me to rest my leg upon the center console.

And now we’re back in Mishawaka. The next order of business is to choose presents for our gift exchange.

The quadrennial car ride

“Story of the Week” from Library of America.

Martin showed me that website. It combines two of my greatest interests: literature and PDFs.

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Thanksgiving upon us, we brace ourselves for a round trip to Kansas City. It involves two long car rides through featureless downstate Illinois. At least it should be a comfortable trip. We’re borrowing Martin’s parents’ SUV.

There is a Wendy’s that we like to stop at, outside of Hannibal. Or else we might go through St. Louis and Columbia, and gaze upon I-70’s “fine establishments.”

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What worries me is how to choose the music. Some years ago I rode with David, and we took turns selecting playlists. It came out well. This year the other passengers are Martin, Mary, Edoarda, and Stephen: too many different wills. No matter what’s chosen, someone is bound to be dissatisfied. (Worse, I doubt we’ll agree upon an equitable procedure for choosing.)

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I hope for cloudy weather, so as not to have to squint for hours.

In South Bend, today is the first day of noticeable snow.