I Have Seen Hell, And It Is Michigan In Winter

I work with fame every day. Well, okay… the child of fame. That is, my co-worker, to whom I refer as "Producer."

Those among my readers who are older (willfully avoiding the stern gaze of kenju) may recall a musical duo who hailed from the south, whose heyday was in the 1950s and '60s. They mostly did parodies of popular songs — usually Country & Western, but they parodied some pop hits as well. They won a Grammy award in 1959 for their song "The Battle of Kookamunga," their spoof of Johnny Horton's "The Battle of New Orleans."

They were Homer & Jethro.

Producer is the son of Henry "Homer" Haynes. He's fairly humble about it, but he is intensely proud of his father and loves to talk about him. Wouldn't you?

Son of Homer (sometimes Son of Something Else, but I never knew his mother and I shouldn't talk about her like that) has been working for over ten years on a documentary about his father and the duo, and with no budget, he has relied on others' willingness and their belief in the project in order to get things done toward its completion. For the past four years I have been his cameraman for the interviews of famous people whose stars are waning or have faded outright, and who have something to say about Homer & Jethro. In this endeavor I have met and videotaped Les Paul, Tommy Smothers, Roy Clark and Jimmy Dean, who were deeply influenced by Homer & Jethro (Smothers), or who knew them personally (the others).

This past weekend we interviewed another celebrity, someone who wasn't necessarily influenced by them, and didn't know them at all, though he met them once. He is Ernie Harwell, the Voice of the Detroit Tigers and, for a period of his life, an aspiring songwriter. Through a chance meeting, Homer & Jethro were bestowed with the honor of seeing a Tigers game from the broadcast booth where Atlanta-born Harwell, a country music fan, was eager to meet these celebrities. He told them he was a songwriter and, skeptical, Homer & Jethro took a look at his stuff. They took a couple songs and about a year later Harwell received an album in the mail with a note attached to the cover that expressed congratulations for one of his songs making it onto their recording. It was Harwell's first break into the music business.

Now retired from broadcasting, Ernie Harwell still lives in the Detroit area. And since Son of Homer has zero budget, that meant that we had to drive to Detroit to get this interview. SOH asked me if we could take my car because his is decrepit and might not make it. I was agreeable after he said he would pay for the gas and food. And because I didn't want to sit through 10 hours of his driving.

Though it had been crisp and clear all day, Friday night I took a look at The Weather Channel's website just to see what kind of weather we would be looking at on Saturday. It showed some light snow in the Chicago area with up to an inch of accumulation. I let out an uneasy groan at the news.

As anybody from the Chicago area knows, as anyone from the Great Lakes region knows, there's this little phenomenon in this area of the continent known as "The Lake Effect." In butchered scientific terms, "The Lake Effect" means that any ol' winter storm system rolling eastward over the cold hard northern Illinois ground and sprinkling its moisture onto the earth in little dusty ice crystals will eventually roll over Lake Michigan. There, the relatively warmer water evaporates and that moisture is sucked up into the li'l ol' winter storm system and that li'l ol' storm becomes a raging bastard. The effect is that a storm that dusts Chicago with two inches of snow can intensify over Lake Michigan and can then dump 12 inches on western and central Michigan!

So I looked upon the anticipated light accumulation in the Chicago area as a bad omen. When I woke up Saturday morning at 4:30, there was already new blanket of snow two inches deep on everything.

I went to the office and loaded up my Xterra, and SOH met me at the agreed upon time: 5:50am. In the interest of fuel economy, I did not engage the 4-wheel drive system. Traffic was heavier, dammit, than it should have been at 6:00 on a Saturday morning, so it was slower going than I had hoped. About an hour into the trip we were in northwest Indiana and saw a harbinger of the mood of our trip: on both sides of a short stretch of Interstate 80 traffic slowed to a crawl and several cars were strewn about in the emergency lanes, with emergency vehicles in attendance. Just as I surmised that the road surfaces must have been slick in this area I saw in my rear-view mirror, about four or five car lengths behind me, a light blue sedan sliding sideways into the left-hand emergency lane! I don't know if it hit anything. The further we went toward our destination, the worse the weather got.

All along the way there were stretches of Interstate highway speckled with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles signaling the presence of ice…and stranded vehicles which had spun out and slid off the road into the side ditches and the median. Throughout the entire round trip we saw no fewer than five tractor-trailer rigs jackknifed and helplessly immobile in the soft grass underneath the snow beside the pavement. One of the trucks was on its side.

On more than one occasion I felt the rear end of my SUV starting to kick out on a patch of "black ice," a condition where the road appears normal and dry, but there's a thin, transparent coating of ice that will rob your tires of their traction before you can even react. The first time was when everything appeared dry, but for the blowing snow across the roadway. I had the cruise-control on. We were on a slight curve to the right, and I felt the rear of the vehicle sliding. As a reflex, I tapped the brake pedal quickly to disengage the cruise-control, and the Xterra settled down. Another time was right after we passed an area where there had been more spin-outs and cars in the ditch. I was accelerating gingerly, but that was still too much. The rear end got squirrelly, but I let off the accelerator and we stayed on the road.

Once we got past Kalamazoo-what-a-gal! the weather started to lighten up, as I hoped it would when we escaped what I thought would be the extent of the lake effect area. Due to the weather, and to the fact that both SOH and I forgot to factor in the time change to Eastern Standard Time from Illinois to Michigan, we were two hours behind our estimated arrival time. But, since I am The World's Best Driver (oh, yes I am!), I got us there in one piece.

Ernie Harwell's lawyer/manger, who had been skeptical of SOH's true identity and intentions, spoke with him over the phone during the ride up, and, finally satisfied we didn't intend Harwell any ill will, became really cool and flexible with us and our tardiness.

We rolled into town, a suburb of Detroit, and grabbed a quick lunch. Around 2:00 we were setting up our lights. We rolled tape about 3:00. At 91, Harwell is fit, spry and sharp as a tack! And by 3:15 the interview was finished. We drove six hours THROUGH HELL, and we had six more ahead of us, for a fucking 15-minute interview!

Well, what's life without a little adventure, right? The drive back wasn't as bad, but we did drive through some thick squalls in near white-out conditions, we saw more sprawled and stranded cars and trucks in treacherous areas we had to crawl through, and we stopped for dinner on the way, so the return trip took every bit as long.

Having left at 5:15am and driving to the other side of Michigan and back, I stepped back into my apartment again at 11:30pm.

And Sunday? Crisp and clear. Another act in this divine comedy.