Since all things, good and bad, come to an end, the conference in Milwaukee ended and our excuse to escape Flint ended. So, while Thomas dozed Sunday morning, I packed up our things and got ready to go. Thomas had mentioned on Saturday that he felt a bit cheated as we "didn't do much." I pointed out that attending the conference, though that mostly involved sitting, listening, and eating fruit salad and buns, was, strictly speaking, "doing something." He admitted that he loved seeing the Taggart family Friday night--especially, for some reason, the "lounge areas" scattered around Sturge and Barb's house. And seeing Steve's salt tank/business was an experience not to be matched anytime soon but, over all, he was disappointed. Apparently every day should be a thrill, not just Friday. So, not hopeful, I promised to check the map for something interesting to visit on the way home.
To my amazement there is a national park (Dunes Coast National Park, or something like that) just outside of Gary, Indiana which is, in my opinion, easily one of the top five ugliest cities in the world. But, about 20 minutes outside the city limits, all we had to do was cut off the interstate and head straight north for about 8 miles and lo and behold, here we were:
Apparently (if the park literature is to be believed) it has one of the world's largest "moving dunes." (Aren't all dunes, strictly speaking,
moving?) At the left (just above the fences) you can see a bit of industrial wasteland but that isn't Gary. Gary is over to the right of that and Chicago is farther to the right, almost at the edge of the picture. (Click on the picture to enlarge it and you should be able to see the city skylines.) They look pretty here but they aren't.
This is an old Pavillion that is falling to bits. The faded signs claim that there are "treats" and "gifts" for sale, but the peeling paint implied otherwise. There were bathrooms open (
scary bathrooms) but all other rooms were boarded up.
I think this is Mountain Tom. [I say "I think" because the map of the park was very hard to interpret--perhaps because these dunes are always moving around?] It doesn't look so impressive in the picture but just try and climb up it. Every 3 feet you move forward, you slide 2 1/2 feet back. It is exhausting.
Climbing down is a lot more fun--sort of like skiing on sand in tennis shoes. Except that your shoes get filled with sand and cause serious pain. As always with beaches, the sand in the sun was baking hot and the sand in the shade was painfully cold.
Thomas learns how to "break the grip of the rip." I think the better lesson to learn is simply to not swim at all--it's just too dangerous.
I suppose I am glad I went to the conference. It was organized by AutCom (the largest Activist Organization for Autistics) and a lot of people from various walks of life were there. I got a much clearer sense of what music therapy is and isn't doing, for example. I also learned that the theory of "stunty dendrites" is old news (a research study that make big headlines because it alleged that there is an Austistic Brain) because the research has not been replicable and, it seems, the study itself is looking increasingly suspect. The best (verifiable) explanation now is that autistics "wire up" their neural pathways in patterns that are utterly unlike an NT's (neural typicals), even unlike other autists pathways. The effect is both delays (as the brain has to seemingly endlessly process information when retrieving something as simple as the answer to "Are you hungry?" but also opens possibilities for amazingly interesting and creative thinking. [One source of violent debate is in reaction to the Old School claim that autists cannot understand metaphor. The New School claim is that autists
invented metaphor. After all, if your brain didn't take a pit stop to colors while on its way to retrieve the name of a day of the week, how could you ever come up with "a blue Monday"? You can see how the issues become exhausting. If it didn't matter so much, I would stop trying to figure it all out.]
He's all done and now just has to wait for all his classmates to get finished changing in the bathrooms. (The costume is 100% polyester fleece and is, I imagine, HOT! He looks like he is being cooked alive.)
Some of his classmates are back quickly. Emily dressed up as a cat.
Here are the rest. (Frederick can't stop staring at Clare's wig with the giant Repunzal braid.)
Here he is at Emily's, chilling in his Kermit pants and playing with Play Doh.
Thomas insisted that he was too old to dress up for Halloween but Thursday morning fell apart and begged for a costume. I told him that I would make something SIMPLE. So while he was at Philharmonia rehearsal Thursday evening I sewed question marks onto a black sweatshirt top. I'm not sure what he was, but he said that that (not knowing what he was) WAS what he was.
