Indian Mounds Drive, Part 1

He drove. A few weeks ago. There was no snow on the ground, but there had been not too long ago; a false January thaw had made the world slovenly, the trees dead sticks, the grass a statewide smear of mud. He turned left from strip-mall hell, went under an overpass, and bam came the options. Immediately forward was a bridge over the Grand River, the only one for six miles either way, and a busy highway connecting two big hunks of suburb. To the left was the on-ramp, where all the other traffic was going. He went right, onto a little-noticed turnoff squeezed between the river and the freeway. There was a gate a few dozen feet up, just past a drive down to a tourist riverboat, but it was open today. He nosed his car forward, around a bend, and abruptly the land of urban sprawl fell away beneath the sullen old-growth trees. With the land no good for farming or building, these trees had survived only because no one wanted them.

Indian Mounds Drive twisted and turned along the river, no intersections for five miles, cut off from the world by the freeway and a network of swamps and bogs, dotted with nesting stands for migratory birds and super-low-yield oil wells, sucking on a teat long since depleted. Officially this road was part of the city's grandiloquent Millennium Park project now, though no signage was around to prove it. The old westbound lane was off limits to cars, reserved for bikes, but you could still sometimes overtake some Lycra-ed moron riding in the vehicular lane. He'd take them out if he thought society would let him. He wasn't sure when this road had been built, or why; there were no structures, no homes or businesses, anywhere along its route. It began and ended at freeway exits, and just the other side of the freeway was the old trunkline, so it was really kinda useless.

Unless you were poor and unscrupulous. For many years, the road had been used as an unsanctioned city dump. Cletus and Mildred would load the pickup with broken appliances, dirty diapers, and cubic tons of McDonald's wrappers, pick a spot along the soft mucky shoulder, and shove it all out the back end. Voila, no pesky trash fees. Once in a while the city would crack down, patrol the road better, get the orange jumpsuit crew out, and things would be better for a while, but then budgets would be cut and things would devolve again to a modern anthropology course splattered across the spongy soil. There were turnoffs here and there for Granddad to get out his fishing pole, but don't let him eat what he catches; the wastewater treatment plant just upstream had a little trouble containing stormwater, and it discharged with exasperating frequency, like an unfortunate bean-eating great-uncle.