This light sleeper usually wakes to find all but scant details of his dreams have sifted away to extinction, so bear with me here.
Very few people dream of Wheeling, West Virginia, especially not the chrome and polish version my brain designed and constructed early Monday morning.
As for Wheeling, don't ask why. Maybe I've absorbed too much Chris in the Morning from Northern Exposure and can't shake his recollections of the hometown he fled.
Maybe I just need some time on the road, and my memory drifted back to Ohio's best end point, where the driver immediately leaves behind the river for a tunnel under a West Virginia mountain.
Along the road leading to the river crossing sat the foundries and dry docks that I associate with ports and rivers commonly navigated by cargo ships.
With my father riding shotgun -if Wheeling was our destination, then gambling was probably Dad's goal - the bridge I've crossed so many times was as similar as the multi-tiered promenades lining the east bank were not.
Tiered levels of hotels, restaurants, tea rooms and other facilities filled the space between the mountain peak and the river bank, stretching out from the bridge's moorings.
A little loitering in hotel and casino atriums later, we ended on a ferry traveling north toward Pittsburgh, on a section of river too rough to form part of the usually placid Ohio I know. And really, the whitecaps slamming against rocks marked this river as more Niagara than Ohio. Tourist cruises would be at your own risk, and captains would be scared off by the hulking wrecks that preceded them.
So was I really in this composite West Virginia and does a single thread of plot dangle from pieces of this dream?
I know better than to shut my eyes waiting for a sequel.
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