American Sabbatical 013: 9/13/96

9/13...To Shawnee.

We flatfooted out of Lincolntown into the road squint. Dry air, dancing cumulus, and relieving breezes made the little towns pleasant stops, but the glittering asphalt, shining whites and silvers of the roadside world, and the relentless ultraviolet was starting to wear the eye bones. I complained of a headache, and Peggy insisted we EAT. So was asked around the next town, Pana, for a good place, and everyone said “Bob’s Steakhouse.”

By the time the entrees came we were all alone in the place. Bob, the cook and owner, and the waitress came out and sat at the counter across from us, and we chatted through the meal. Pana (Paynah) was a dying town, Bob said. The coal mine had closed, the local industries had moved, and the rose nurseries had lost out in the competition with South American flower growers. Pana had once been the rose capital of America, honored in the Rose Bowl, and sniffed over all over. The wealthy growers had kept new industries from the area, because they didn’t want competition to drive up their low wage rates, and now look. Upstate there are new Mitsubishi plants and the like, but Pana is withering away.

It was getting down in the sun, so we wheeled out of Pana in search of a flat spot to pitch our tent. We found an Illinois state park in Ramsey (Peggy’s middle name) which had to be nice, and it was. Arching white oaks, chestnuts, and hickories alongside a manmade lake (the valley used to be good foxhunting, the ranger told me). South of Springfield we are into the Great American Hardwood Kingdom. The soil changes from the rich black alluvium of the archaic sea into the peripheral outwash clays, and sandstone and limestone upheavals. That’s to say, from bigbucks real estate to turf that can afford to be woods. And the accent changes from broad, flat Midwestern to hillcountry twang. Folks started calling us Yankees, and there was a bit of hostility in the calling. Well, us Mainiacs know about holding the flatlanders at arms length for fear they’ll squeeze you to death, but it’s still hard to be distrusted on your face. Pretty soon we were face down and it didn’t matter.

9/13.. Friday the Thirteenth..

9/14...Shawnee Forest.

Peggy's Anvil Rock

We lolled under the sun-dappled pines, drew the fanciful sandstone outcrops, and went for a short stroll. Only it turned into a long hike. Somewhere we missed the turn and ended up walking in a big circle around the bluffs. The woods were dry as toast, yellow dust rising ankle-deep, and the white oaks turning from lack of moisture. The maples, chestnuts, and hickories seemed to be faring better, and the tall conical red cedars added their dramatic punctuation to the scene. Eventually we huffed and puffed back to our refuge, and fell out for the night... except there was a Christian youth group from Tennessee enveloping our camp site (absolutely no sense of personal space), so we got to listen in to their discussions of the nature of God, how long one of God’s days was (talking about fundamentalist geological time), and hear their choral hymns. Well, it IS an uplifting place.

We arose with the birds, put on our Festiva, and...no go. We had puted the DC right flat (which I hope I’m not doing again right now). I enticed a trio of bikers camped across the way into showing their muscles. They pushed us to the brink, and.. YAHOO.. we were off downhill in search of the American Bottom. We pointed her south for the Ohio river, hoping to see some of the beauty its name is supposed to mean, and then follow it to the Mississippi.

There are a lot of dead and dying towns in southern Illinois, but one industry is thriving. Lawn Ornaments. Who says ornamentation is only a Maine thing? It’s a hick thing. We have yet to pass through a boonie that doesn’t have brake-stomping yard art. When shadowman first appeared in Maine a few years back, we naturally assumed it was a local invention. Hah. The volume and variety of shadow figures increases from eastern New York to the Big Muddy. Shadow conestogas with cowboys and campfires, shadow children playing, shadow sweethearts, shadow animal families, shadow you-named-it, are down every back road. And there are local varieties of painted signboard figures, too. The mushroom ladies in So. Ill. look more like polyp ladies, you might like to know. And Joe D was right, one of the decorative motifs of the Southern uplands is the stuffed sofa on the front porch, but he was wrong about the distribution. We found soggy sofas on the porches of mud-chinked log cabins right there in Rosie Claire.

But we found the confluence, what we figured was the low down on the Bottom. We’d expected two vast waters roiling together, but the prospect was less grand, just ordinary-river-sized sheets of gray joining under grayness. I went down to the junction and spat in the stream. Peggy recorded the ritual. In the park at the confluence we saw our first bald cypress trees, very exotic for us Northrons.

There is a thing about comicbook towns in Illinois. We’d already seen the giant statue of SUPERMAN that rules in Metropolis. When we got to Chester it was Popeye and Oliveoil who are the patron saints. And Chester is a real live town. Two VFW posts. In fact Illinois comes back to life as you head north along the river. Back into the rich farmland, but with the smell of river in the air. A dank and dusky presence lying between the bluffs. It’s remarkable how few vibrant burgs we’ve encountered in the Midwest, beyond the exurb, so the birthplace of Popeye seemed jumping by comparison.

Started looking for an inn, but the airfreshened joints advertising beds by the hour didn’t really turn us on, despite the innuendo. We were trying to come to harbor near the Kahokia Mounds, and suddenly the Interstate sped right through them. Holymoly, it was like flying a spaceship though an alien civilization. We hit the exit ramp and kept circling round like a bird with a clipped wing until we lit at a chain motel, where we stumbled in bugeyed. And that moreorless covers what the laptop ate.