American Sabbatical 011: 9/11/96

9/11.. Going downstate.

We cut west out of Lake Bluffs trying to dodge the interstate and exurb, but it was 50 miles before we broke out into farm country, and even then the traffic was thick. The auto has clogged the arteries of small town middle America, too. Our goal was Lincoln Country, but there’s a lot of corn between here and there.

The great expansiveness, the simple rectilinearity of the road grid, the hard-edged storage bins and silos, the gleaming pickups, all taken at 55 mph, are quite soothing. You can understand how refugees from the turmoil of Europe in the 1840’s would find this rich and simple land a paradise. Of course they didn’t appreciate the pickups.

Our first day southing was so horizontal that our first hillock came as a shock. It was just outside Normal in a place called Flannigan, and the story was obvious. Flannigan, the poor bedeviled Irishman, fated to scratch the sod in this everlasting level, just couldn’t stand the blessed normality of it all. Every time he took solace in the sauce he’d fill his barrow with good black dirt, wheel it up to his little mound, and dump it. His wife and children thought him mad to wish for altitude in the comforting flatness, but figured it was some strangeness he’d brought from the old sod. After 50 years of laughing at the old man’s elevated stubbornness, folks began to notice that there were always birds soaring over the Flannigan place and a cooler air flowing around it. Flannigan’s Folly had become a landmark, the notch on the horizon a man could use to line up his furrows. When the old man died at 96, the neighbors put on a great display of fireworks from atop the hill, and renamed the town in his honor. Now mothers from all over the county bring their children to Flannigan’s hill to feel what climbing is like, and enlarge their horizon’s. “Like sledding on Flannigan’s Hill,” has become synonymous with fast living, and if you don’t believe me, the hill’s still there.

The sense of history rears up with the mossy stones in a local boneyard. When we couldn't find any of the characters from Spoon River in the cemetery, we thought that Masters had been clever to change the names, and invent the tales. Turns out that Spoon River was actually Lewiston, and Masters WAS truth-telling. We were in the wrong cemetery. Over to Lewiston, where the names are the same, the neighbors didn’t like it a bit.

At one I was let into the house. It has many cabinets with displays of Masters memorabilia; he lived there through his childhood and into his early teens, when he and his family moved to Lewiston, Illinois. All the books he wrote were on one bookshelf, posters from the many presentations based on Spoon River in another, some family artifacts including his obituary and funeral pictures. My hostess (a young woman who had lived in town most of her life) pointed out that three of the pallbearers for Masters still lived in town - one was the oldest practicing lawyer in Illinois!!!!

I began to ask questions. It turns out that MOST OF THE CHARACTERS IN SPOON RIVER ARE REAL. Some were barely disguised. “Everyone around here knew who they were!” my guide continued.” You can bet he wasn’t very popular.” For example, Lucinda Matlock was his grandmother! Some of his characters are buried in the graveyard at Lewiston. Each June the town has a reading IN the graveyard.

Shades