I went to the Midwest Junto for the History of Science1 last week, which this year was held at Purdue University, in West Lafayette Indiana. There was a lot of interesting work shared at the conference, including:

  • ⚗️ ⚔️ Patrick Gamez at Notre Dame connecting chemical weapons, the CIA’s Cold War obsession with chemistry, and the blossoming of a totalizing and terrifying approach to war he called “chemist’s way of war”
  • 🍁🛫 Blair Stein at Grand Valley State University, who has a new book coming out soon on the history of Trans Canada Airlines (TCA; now AirCanada), mentioning CTA’s access to government infrastructure allowed it to computerize its reservation system before the (private) US airlines.
  • 🖋️🌗 Elizabeth Carlton at UC Riverside combining art history and science history to uncover the exquisite methods, fascinating philosophy, and catty politics behind the first maps of the moon.2

Purdue’s got some really interesting stuff going on, including a new center for Social Genomics (which I visited in October) and a markedly successful approach to avoiding the Eye of Sauron in DC that targets higher ed apparently at random nowadays (Have former Republican Governor Mitch Daniels run your university for a decade and turn it into a STEM powerhouse that reflexively says and does “free speech” in a way that’s acceptable to Republicans, but unnatural for a lot of more liberal academics and administrators.)

But but but this post is about how I got there. I used Chicago O’Hare Bussport.

Haven’t heard of it? You probably know it as Chicago O’Hare “ORD” International Airport, the fourth busiest airport in the US. But it’s also something of a regional transport hub, connecting the fine people of five different states not only to O’Hare but to each other. It just hasn’t been designed that way—and using it that way seems to be, at least technically, illegal. Let me explain.

The accidental bus station

In a normal country, there would be a train from Madison to Chicago and Chicago to Lafayette. In fact, there would be a train route in the Actually Existing United States if not for Scott Walker’s grudge against the capital of his state – as it is, you can drive to the train station a half hour away in Columbus, WI, take a train to Chicago Union Station, and then catch one of the three Cardinal trains per week running from Chicago to the East Coast via Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia.

I did take the train to Lafayette (though not all the way from Wisconsin). But I anchored my trip around the busport.

You can take a bus from Madison to downtown Chicago, and then another to Lafayette. But. The annoying thing about busses is that if you take them into the city, you get stuck in traffic. This is why cars should not be in the way of busses, or busses should be linked together and put on rails and called trains.

But if you’re not going to do that, and you’re just passing through a city rather than stopping in it, and especially if your city has a big honkin’ lake to the east so everyone going around it will be going around its west side, a convenient place to transfer busses is a suburban hub on the western outskirts of the city.

O’Hare is just that. From O’Hare, you can take:

The last has the best website, in my humble opinion.

Act II Transportation's website, showing glamorous pictures of black vans and SUVs, city skylines, and some really artsy rust belt wall with a torn poster on it reading "About Act II Transportation" Call it “late aughts prom gothic”?

But trespassing??

Of course, the bus hub that the forces of regional transport planning built at ORD is not an accidentally perfect hub. Headways, layout, and interoperability (I had to buy separate tickets for separate services and manage the transfers myself) are one problem.

Layout of ORD, showing all the different paces that busses/trains arrive and depart

ORD is also not the nicest place to spend a layover. While I had a pretty direct trip on Lafayette Limo and Van Galder on my way back from Purdue, my insistence on a luxury travel experience (which is to say, eating something better than airport food and being able to write my talk) on the way down pushed me to take the train from Chicago Union Station to Lafayette. I dread the last hour of the bus ride from Madison to Union Station: the freeway from ORD is always clogged with nauseating stop-and-go traffic. So this time, I did what I should been doing every other time I bussed to Chicago: I got off at O’Hare and took the L into the loop.

This is one problem with the airport-as-bus station: downtown is just a better place to transfer.

The other problem is that the airport is (obviously) not set up for people using it as a ground-based layover. There isn’t just silliness like getting off the Lafayette shuttle at the arrivals bay and then having to take the Air Train to the airport’s bus terminal. ORD is so hostile to what I was doing that I was probably trespassing. As signs posted at the airport doors (which you need to pass through to transport to outbound busses or the L) tell you:

Chicago Department of Aviation sign reading "Notice: Not Flying Today? The Airport is Open Only to Those with a Ticket or with Airport Business..."

Since 2020 (at least) ORD has been closed to the general public, unless you are employed there or are actively flying. As a white 30-something in business casual with a roller bag, I probably didn’t raise any eyebrows. And maybe what I was doing was “airport business.” But c’mon.

So, on the way out:

  • Bus from Downtown Madison to ORD
  • Smooth L ride to the loop
  • Delicious Korean take-out from the French Market downtown
  • Train from CHI to Lafayette
  • Total time: 9.5 hours door to door, but with a bit of sight-seeing in downtown Chicago
  • Rating: ★★★★☆, the Korean food came in clutch

And on the way back:

  • Shuttle bus from Purdue campus to ORD
  • Get bumped from the first available bus from ORD to Madison because the bus out of Downtown Chicago broke down so they had to combine two busses
  • Take the next available bus back
  • Total time: 8 hours door to door (shoulda been 7)
  • Rating: ★★★☆☆, we need busses that don’t break down pls

Some recommendations

  • Reading: Last month, activists plucked more than 20 dogs out of a beagle breeder and research facility outside of Madison. Read Marina’s new Substack on that, and check back on Vox next week for her upcoming report on what the second attempt — in which activists attempting a second rescue met tear gas, truncheons, and moats full of manure — means about the status of the animal rights movement today.
  • Watching: We watched Ken Burns’s The American Revolution when it dropped last year, and since then have been plowing through his other wars—we hit The Civil War next and are now on to The Vietnam War. All are rich texts on wars that, in different ways, never really ended; I probably learned the most from The American Revolution and The Civil War was excellent TV even if as history it has, erm, aged poorly. But The Vietnam War really lays out how much folly, pride, and blinding masculinity led one US leader after another to keep feeding American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians into the meatgrinder.
  • Listening: WGBH’s new narrative podcast Catching the Codfather about fish crime in New Bedford leans a little too hard into journalism’s “both sides” reflex but is still an excellent history of the rise and fall of New England’s biggest fishing port, and the outro music, Jorge Feirrara’s Viva Viva New Bedford, absolutely slaps.

  1. It’s pronounced DJOON-toh, which apparently is a word Ben Franklin used as a synonym for Congress, nor HOON-tou, like someone misgendering a military regime. ↩

  2. Sorry Elizabeth I know these were copperplate and woodcut engravings but there’s no good emoji for copperplate. Get on it Unicode! ↩