Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [7]
I wanted this to be a personal journey of discovery. I wanted to experience every mile as it came upon me. When I woke each morning, I didn’t want to know what I would be doing that afternoon, let alone the next day. What would happen would happen. The serendipitous nature of the trip was everything to me. Planning ahead would kill the adventure and the excitement. If that happened, there would be no point leaving home.
A few days later, I was standing on a fishing boat on Lake Michigan in front of a spectacular view of Chicago. Spread out across the horizon were the Willis Tower (still known by most people as the Sears Tower), the Hancock Center, with its two pointy spires, and dozens of other skyscrapers. You might wonder what I was doing on that boat. Well, I was there to have a good look at Chicago before setting off – like getting the target in my sights. It wasn’t my idea and, to be honest, I found it a wee bit pointless. But these things have to be tried. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Personally, I am not a boaty man. The rising and falling on the swell, the false horizon and the diesel fumes combine to do me no good at all. They make me bitchy. And on that windy, overcast afternoon in late April, I was even bitchier than usual because, for some reason, I was pissing like a racehorse. I’d gone about twelve times by the time I had to shoot the first segment for the programme, introducing Chicago. But in the midst of all this, I heard something that made me forget my foul mood. The skipper told me he’d recently caught twenty-nine salmon in a single day. In Lake Michigan, of all places! I’d always thought that the lake was so polluted that nothing could possibly live in it.
To an ageing hippy like me, the skipper’s news was a bolt of joy. Then he told me that commercial fishing has been banned on the lake. Another wonderful thing. Sometimes old idealistic eco-heads like me can get kind of depressed when we switch on the television and are confronted by programmes about people killing crabs or hauling in swordfish or hoovering the bottom of the sea in Alaska. Those fishermen tend to be portrayed as macho heroes who do a very brave and wonderful job, but to my mind they are vandals. So when I heard that they are no longer allowed on such a vast expanse of water as Lake Michigan, my heart sang a wee song. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Lake Erie, another of the Great Lakes, was officially declared dead; and the Cuyahoga River, which flowed into it, was declared a fire hazard. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a river being a fire hazard? But it happened because they poured tons of shit – logs, oil, old tyres, paint, flammable chemicals and, literally, shit – into it. The muck decomposed and created methane and other flammable gases. Then, in June 1969, the inevitable happened and the Cuyahoga did indeed catch fire, devouring two bridges in Cleveland – a city that people started to call the ‘Mistake by the Lake’. What in the name of God were we doing to ourselves?
Fortunately, the fire sparked so much public indignation that a legal framework for protecting watercourses and lakes – the Clean Water Act – was passed three years later. And now salmon were back in Lake Michigan, which would never have happened without that piece of legislation. We have our arses kicked on a daily basis by people who don’t know what they are talking about, so it’s lovely to hear something that makes me feel a wee bit proud to be a member of the human race.
By the time we were heading back towards shore, I’d totally shaken off my grouchy mood. It was still choppy on the lake, but now I was feeling good about the world and excited about the journey ahead. I was going to have lots of fun. Meet lots of people. See lots of things. And tell you all about it. So come with me. Join me on Route 66. We’ll get our kicks together on the Mother Road. Come