I-294/I-94 between the Chicago suburbs and Indiana

To anyone who grew up in the southwest Chicago suburbs and spent the occasional summer day on the Indiana or Michigan lake shore, it's familiar. You think nothing of getting on I-294, following as it turns into I-94 and passing through Gary. Then you exit at Michigan City or New Buffalo or South Haven — one of the border towns collectively known as "Michiana", especially on the Indiana side, where they're not above appropriating a bit of Michigan's white-hot "Great Lakes, Great Times" cachet.

It's only later that you realize that there's something wrong about this stretch of road.

Maybe it hits you when you're old enough not to look at every mileage sign to see if you're almost there yet (Cline Avenue means you're about halfway). You're driving by yourself, insulated in your little cocoon, listening to the latest hip band, but there's something about the place that still permeates the glass-and-steel membrane you've put around yourself: the realization that you're driving through one of the most sordid, lurid, squalid — whatever -id word you can think of — places in the country.

It might be the fireworks billboards that tip you off. Illinois law, which prohibits most kinds of fireworks, sends Chicagoans over the border to giant explosives warehouses. Each advertises that it's the biggest, the best, the closest to Illinois. But the one that's stood out for at least the last 10 years is Krazy Kaplan's, whose mascot is a droolingly unhinged-looking man with dynamite emerging from his ears. He's CRAZY! He's INSANE! He's FORGOTTEN TO TAKE HIS MEDS AND IS COWERING IN THE CORNER, SHAKING UNCONTROLLABLY AND STARVED FOR HUMAN INTERACTION! Doesn't that make you want to party?

Or maybe it's the strip club signs, perhaps best represented by the pensive young woman with Flashdance hair peering seductively from an ad for an establishment known as "The Industrial Strip." Signs for other strip clubs abound along I-94, but most of them are for chains like the Deja Vu. The Industrial Strip appears to be the real deal, the true northwest Indiana experience.

Other vices and socially stigmatized services are duly represented by the expressway's signage. Casinos, adult bookstores, cheap cigarettes — if you want it, it's in Indiana. Want plastic surgery or a vasectomy reversal? No problem. Oh, and don't forget to call the state's convenient toll-free number if you have a gambling problem.

But it's the ad offering suicide clean-up services that will make even the most jaded suburbanite sit up and take notice.

"There are messes that no one should have to clean," proclaims the sign. It advertises the services of an Aurora-based company called Aftermath, Inc., which Slate recently designated "a front-runner in the burgeoning bio-recovery industry." This is the only billboard of theirs I've ever come across, and Aurora isn't particularly close to the Indiana border. There must be something about this location.

A visit to the company's website (warning: totally inappropriate techno soundtrack) is instructive, by which I mean utterly soul-crunching. It starts off with an animated montage of disaster scenes delimited by an occasional biohazard symbol. It provides helpful information for anyone interested in franchising opportunities. And it proudly outlines its sponsorship of a raffle, for which the prize is:

A gun.

These signs can't be good for Indiana's tourism industry, which is trying to create a higher-toned image for the state. A recent four-hour, broken-windshield-wiper-inspired stop at the Michigan City visitors' center brought this home. They call the area "Harbor Country" and illustrate their brochures with tasteful, old-timey drawings of women in bathing costumes enjoying Indiana's beaches. (UPDATE: Indiana's use of the name "Harbor Country" has been challenged by the Michigan-based Harbor Country Chamber of Commerce; see here.) It's hard to imagine a place for The Industrial Strip in the visitors'-center-sanctioned idea of the Indiana shore. But by the time you get to Michigan City, you've already sat through a 50-mile litany of sleaze and desperation.

If you keep driving east along 94, you'll see a billboard for slick Lake Magazine, the source for everything you need to live the "resort lifestyle on Lake Michigan." But it's too late.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)