It’s midsummer here in the Berkshires, one of the most beautiful times of year, with warm days, cool nights, fields filled with fresh vegetables and theaters and museums attracting visitors from around the country. It’s idyllic, lovely, and also a clear sign that I need to hit the road.
Caretaker Farm, Williamstown MA
For whatever reason, when midsummer comes around, I develop an itch for a road trip. Sometimes I’m able to find a good excuse to spend a week or so driving around this weird and wonderful country – a friend’s car needs moving from Texas to Maine – but usually I’m forced to confront the fact that road trips are just meeting my peculiar psychological and intellectual needs.
In 2022, Amy and I took a vacation together to the eastern Great Lakes, visiting “legacy cities”, the metropolises that boomed before WWII and have shrunk afterwards as American industry moved south, west and eventually out of the country. I was amazed at how much I enjoyed visiting those cities, and wrote a long blog post: Legacy Cities and the Changing Nature of the Good Life, which turned into a talk at the DC-based PopTech conference.
(It was PopTech’s first year in a new venue, and there were quite a few technical problems, but the talk is fun to watch. )
Reflecting on the deindustrialization of the Great Lakes and Americans migration south and west, I wrote an essay in 2023 that’s basically an outline for a book project: From Phoenix to Cleveland. I am not brave enough to start writing this book, but I’m deep into the process of researching it, which involves equal parts processing large data sets and taking road trips.
Last year’s drive was dictated by a straightforward, but fascinating data set: the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard’s data on price/income ratios on residential properties. Basically, you can roughly characterize the affordability of a city by measuring how many years of local average income it takes to buy the local average house. This is a lot more informative than telling you that Boston is more expensive than Binghamton, NY – sure, but salaries are better in Boston. Still, it takes 6.6 years of Boston salary to buy the average house in the Massachusetts capitol, while 2.6 years of Binghamton salary will get you comfortably settled in the Southern Tier.
Last summer, I visited 15 of the 50 “highest value” cities in the US – cities with unusually low P/I ratios, like Decatur, IL, which leads the nation at a 2.2 ratio. I wrote a lot on that trip:
By the numbers: what statistics can and can’t tell you about “undervalued” cities
Buried, With Dignity, In Elmira
In Search of the Statistically Improbable Restaurant
Decatur: From Corn to Soy to Cricket City
A Tale of Two Cities (Toledo, OH and Gary, IN)
The Company Town and the Corn Fields (Columbus, IN and Terre Haute, IN)
It was a delightful, if exhausting, trip and I’m proud of the writing I did along the way. (The chapter from Elmira may be one of the best bits of storytelling I did during the trip, if you’re looking for one essay to start with.)
I’ll be looking for undervalued cities on this trip as well – there’s 11 more of the top 50 on the itinerary – and as I’ve been exploring in some of my other writing, I will be using big data sets to search for “statistically improbable” restaurants along my route.
But this year’s route is more about geography than driving to explore a single data set. I’m trying to understand the Great Lakes better than I currently do. My first stop is in Rome, NY, where the first segment of the Erie Canal connected Rome and Utica, before growing into the shallow, crowded, smooth highway that linked Lake Erie – and the upper four great lakes – to New York City and the Atlantic. I’ll check in on Lake Ontario in Oswego before cutting across the “Golden Horseshoe” in Southern Ontario to spend a few days in Michigan, staying in Hamtramck. I’m vising friends in Traverse City on Lake Michigan before crossing the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin and saying hi to Lake Superior in Duluth. After visiting friends in Minneapolis, I’m down the Wisconsin coast from Green Bay to Racine and back home through the corn and soy belt, with visits in Champaign, IL, Indianapolis, IN and Cleveland.
I’m still assembling my reading for the trip. I’ve been enjoying Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which I’m starting to think of as a nonfiction ecothriller. Next in my queue is Paul Collier’s “Left Behind”, which offers some language – “neglected cities” – that I suspect will complement the best book I read on last year’s trip, Alec MacGillis’s “Fulfillment”, which helps me understand “winner take all” cities and their opposites. I’m open to suggestions as I prepare, as well as for must see roadside attractions and unmissable Bengali, Balkan or BBQ restaurants.
I also have high hopes of forcing myself to write less and make more videos. Inspired by my friend Casey Fiesler’s admirable practice of sharing insights on data ethics via TikTok, I am hoping to record a set of road stories from the communities I visit. This is going to force me well outside my comfort zone in more ways than one, so I’m writing this here in hopes of forcing myself to follow through on the project.
More to come as the journey gets underway. You seasoned road trippers know that planning a trip is part of the fun, and so organizing my past writing from and about the road is part of psyching myself up for many, many hours behind the wheel of an underpowered Prius C…