Winding down Interstate 294 from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to join Route 66, my first impression is not of the City of Big Shoulders, as Carl Sandburg called Chicago, but of big trucks and industry, a place where the steamers meet the railroads, and railroads meet the trucks. I am in a grid of interstates crisscrossing left, right, north, south, east, west.

Ogden Avenue is the dirty vein of Cicero, Illinois, a town with a bad reputation since the days of Al Capone. It passes through Chinatown, by a graceful arch. The road continues out to what would have been outlying districts if Chicago had not grown out to meet it. A few miles further from the center, and we are in Latintown. Where the two meet on 66, I see a sign: Canton China Restaurant: Comida Para Llavar (take-away food). At the point where Chinatown and Latintown meet, so do their signs. The road is a patchwork quilt, now Spanish, now Asian--helping cultures intersect. Now this is what Route 66 does best.

On this December night, the temperature has fallen to 16 degrees and the wind is still blowing hard off the Lake. I remember this wind from college at Wisconsin, when I would escape here for the blues clubs Chicago practically invented. I remember "wind chill."

On Route 66 in Cicero, the best hotels rent for four hours. This is in contrast with less-distinguished places, where beds go by the hour. This is not Day’s Inn country--not even Econolodge.

The night is long and I must sleep. Before unconsciousness, I finally come back to think of all those miles ahead, all that tarmac. At this point, with an arctic freeze starting our trip on a chilly note, it seems flat-out impossible, like trying to eat one of those six-pound steaks at the Big Texan steak house in Amarillo. Goodnight and let the road gods accept our offerings of gas and tires and wind to give us safe passage through the coming storm.