On a political discussion list:

He: “Where is your sense of humor. Eloped with your sense of decency?
Me: “How am I supposed to keep track of things like that? I have enough trouble keeping track of where I am, much less anyone else.”
He: “Prove that you are having enough trouble keeping track of where you are.”

So I got back to the map I was working on last weekend. If I had had it when I was bicycling in Fulton County earlier this month, I would have kept better track of where I was. As it is, I need to go back for more riding someday, to visit some of the spots I missed.

Today I started to add some of the history sites to the map. (Click on the snippet above to go to a page that contains the whole thing.) The brown areas are Indian reserves that were left for the Potawatomi people after they ceded most of the rest of their Indiana land in the 1832 treaties. The purplish areas are Michigan Road lands. In an 1826 treaty the Potawatomi people agreed to allow a road to be built through their remaining land, and to give up one square mile of land for each section of road. This land (minus the right-of-way) was sold to pay for the expenses of clearing the road. That much the Potawatomi people knew they had agreed to in 1826. What they didn’t know was that they were going to be forced to give up additional square miles of land for the portions of the road that lay outside their territory. (Highway 31 is the successor to the original Michigan Road north of Rochester.)

Most of those additional square miles were the rich prairie lands of LaPorte County. But there were three such pieces here in Fulton County, too. One is the square mile around the outlet of Lake Manitou in present-day Rochester. I need to learn more about that. One of the provisions of the 1826 treaty was for the government to build a mill for the Potawatomi people here. This place was called Potawatomi Mills before it was called Rochester. So how it was that the road commissioner thought he could take that land to sell to investors to pay for road construction, I don’t know. It would have depended somewhat on just when it was sold, I suppose.

Another was a 80-acre section north of Rochester. I wanted to go there to see if I could tell just what made that particular parcel of land so valuable that the road commissioner would have picked it. When I got there, I could see nothing from the public road that made sense. There was a drainage ditch along the edge of it, suggesting that it was probably too swampy for farming back in the 1830s.

There it is, across the road from this fence post. Doesn’t look like anything special to me, either.

Well, after I was all done with my rides I learned I had been looking in the wrong place. I should have been a mile north. But it was too late now. I had got photos of the wrong place. I remember what the northwest corner of the correct property was like. In fact, it’s very near the site of the treaty meetings in 1832, if not right on it. But the rest of it? I don’t remember very well. I wasn’t scrutinizing it that carefully when I was there. So I need to go back again and take another look.

But for real proof that I have trouble keeping track of where I am, consider what happened the night after we had returned. In Rochester we had stayed in a motel for 3 nights. The first night back I woke up in the middle of the night needing to use the bathroom. It’s not something I normally need to do, even though I have only half the usual number of bladder sphincters. But I had been deprived of good coffee while in Fulton County, so had tried making up for lost time when we got back home.

I didn’t want to wake Myra, so I tried to find my way in the dark. But I got lost. Our motel room was not that big a place. How could this be? Over here was the window, and the first light of dawn was showing under the window. But how did I get turned around so the window was on my left instead of on the right. And on the right was a door. But where was the bathroom door? It should have been right next to it? I kept going back and forth in the small space, trying to make sense of it. And what were these piles of clothes? I kept going this way and that along two sides of the bed. At least I didn’t lose track of where the bed was, but aside from the fact that there was a window opposite a door, nothing made sense. Finally, out of frustration, I turned the light on. And to my surprise, I saw I was not in the motel room, but in my own bedroom at home.

Many times when traveling I’ve been confused about where I was when I first woke up. But never before have I gotten out of bed and spent so much time trying to find my way before realizing where I really was.