Category: Travel

Wired News is starting a two-week series of reports on a trip down the Mississippi River by one of its writers. Having just driven a relatively short section of the river with my dad, and having had a blast doing it and writing a little about it, I’m envious.

Back in Chicago tonight. I’ll catch up with the details of the past couple of days downstate later, but the short take is this: We began the day in St. Peters, Missouri, had coffee at our motel and headed straight up state Highway 79 to a place called Winfield. Drove several miles through farmland to the Mississippi, then crossed over to another ferry slip in the middle of nowhere. Then crossed a ridge and drove north along the west side of the Illinois River valley in Calhoun County, and crossed the Illinois at an actual town, Kampsville. Drove south down the east side of the valley to Grafton, the site of the only Mississippi ferry in the area we hadn’t taken; we rode across to St. Charles County, Missouri, then turned around and came straight back. So that made eight ferry crossings Sunday and Monday.

Why all the ferries, you might ask? Well, the ferry idea had intrigued me ever since my son Eamon and I happened upon one of them, more or less by accident, in June. But the bigger reason is that it’s just a way to be closer to the river, to the water, and get a chance to really see it in a way you just don’t if you’re just crossing a bridge or driving by (I haven’t gotten so fascinated that I’ve actually gotten a boat and gone out on the water by myself, though).

From Grafton we made a quick drive north and east to Mount Olive. Mother Jones, the labor heroine, is buried in a union miner’s cemetery just outside of town (another chance find on my trip with Eamon in June). It’s a beautiful spot, a sort of modestly impressive memorial, and appears to get a steady trickle of visitors (judging by keepsakes left at the grave; have to wait to get my pictures developed, as my digital camera ran out of battery before we got to the cemetery). Dad and I both had the same thought when we were out there: The one person we would have loved to have with us was my Uncle Bill, who would have been in heaven out there at a place dedicated to a cause he loved. One local note: The town of Mount Olive has put up banners along the main street celebrating Mother Jones and the memorial. I wondered how her legacy played in a place that an outsider (me, the Californian/ex-Chicago-area-type) might assume to be strongly conservative; if nothing else, maybe someone in Mount Olive has enough of a Chamber of Commerce sense to see an attraction out in the cemetery. Another possibility: The banners might be connected to the annual Mother Jones observance, held each October, which includes a dinner event in Springfield on a Saturday night and a caravan out to the grave on Sunday.

After Mount Olive, we headed up Interstate 55 toward Chicago. Stopped and ate just south of Springfield, then on a whim, drove into the capital, which I’d never visited before. Two things I wanted to see: the state Capitol and Lincoln’s tomb. We pulled up to park on a street just south of the Capitol about 5:15 p.m., and the employee parking lots were already deserted. We were getting out of a car at the meter when a woman wearing an employee badge from the Illinois State Library told us we’d get ticketed — the area was a no-parking zone after 4. She told us it would be just fine to park in the employee lot despite the tow-away warning there. Score one for Springfield people; Nice to strangers. We strolled around the Capitol — gorgeous late afternoon, with a stiff breeze from the south and piles of cumulus moving to the north. Then we found our way across town to Lincoln’s burial place. I won’t — can’t really, have to think on it more — sum up right now what I felt about the site. I’m not sure I understand Lincoln or his importance at all, but I will say I think his presidency and the tragedy of his death have been woven into the lives of liberal ’60s kids like myself, and his presence is real down there in that cemetery even 139 years after his death.

Then we got back to I-55 and headed north, passing Bloomington-Normal and other places that raised lots of memories of past adventures. More about them later, perhaps.

I haven’t been traveling much the past few years. Then, largely as a consequence of getting laid off with enough severance that I didn’t immediately have to renew my taxi driver’s license to make ends meet, I’ve traveled a lot in the past three and a half months. My two trips back to the Midwest in that time, with their major on-the-road components, have made me aware of two otherwise invisible retail powerhouses growing up in (mostly) rural America.

Everyone thinks of Wal-Mart as the Great Destroyer of the old small-town business district. But what I’ve been seeing the last few months is a chain that seems to be sprouting up in those small downtowns — from Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, to Cairo, Illinois, and beyond. It’s the Dollar General store. I’ve only been in one. Eamon and I went into the one in Cottonwood Falls — seat of Chase County, made famous by William Least-Heat Moon’s “Prairyerth” — to buy something trivial; can’t remember what now. But the impression I got was it was the cheapest stuff off the cheapest freight container from the cheapest mass-produced-goods factory in the most horribly industrially anonymous part of China. Probably I have that all wrong — I should go back with notebook and camera and take another look. But it is attention-getting that they are everywhere. Everywhere.

Along with another chain: Buck’s General Store. Sounds homey, doesn’t it. Like maybe you read about Buck in “The Yearling” and he’s out whittling in his rocker on the front porch of the store. That was the old 19th century Buck. Now we’re talking about the 21st century Buck, who sells gasoline and cold drinks and sundries and every form and flavor of snack cake yet invented. In fact, Buck’s General Store is just 7-Eleven with a different layout and color scheme. But like 7-Eleven and Dollar General, it’s everywhere, too. (So is Dairy Queen, by the way; except when you really want a chocolate malt, when you can easily drive 1,000 miles without seeing one). I’m just wondering where they all came from. I know 15 minutes or so on the web will give me some sort of clue; and if the answer is interesting, I might even write more about it.

(But before we leave the subject of by-the-highway retail altogether, another chain that has come to my attention, and actually gotten my money on two occasions, including today, is Cracker Barrel. It’s a store. It’s a restaurant. It’s a pile of knicknacks so weighty it would sink an aircraft carrier. On our June trip, Eamon had his eye out for one, since he remembered them fondly from his 1997 cross-country drive with him mom, Noela. We saw one in Columbia, Missouri, as we headed west on I-70. It was above-average for road food. I found passable postcards to send to Dad. Nothing happened that would stop me from visiting again.

(Today, we stopped at one just south of Springfield, Illinois. The way the store/restaurant is set up, you enter through tchotchke central after walking a gauntlet of oversized wooden rockers lined up unbucolically on a faux country-store porch outside. In fact, we saw one person in one of the 25 or so rockers, staring into the glare of the declining afternoon sun and the roar of interstate traffic, when we entered the place; and a different patron on solitary rocker duty in the very same chair on the way out. So we walked into the souvenir zone and, just like in Columbia, we were immediately greeted by an older woman shop employee inquiring into our welfare. When I told her I was fine and asked how she was doing, she answered with some sort of over-the-top superlative — I’m just doing fantastic, or something like that — that half made me expect I’d hear a Unification Church pitch next. Dad put his finger on it. “That was a little too much like Wal-Mart — just a little too friendly.”)