exit 670

Originally posted March 16, 2005 – With gas prices high, high, high, trips like this won’t be too common, eh?

There’s this bumper that WGN Radio plays during Cubs’ games. Bumpers are those little snippets of music that you hear between commercials and the play-by-play; a transition between the signal and the noise, if you will. WGN selects a diverse catalog to usher us back into the game, but my favorite has to be the beginning of Coldplay’s “In My Place.” It’s so serene and laid-back, much like the baseball broadcast, and it glides you smoothly from Andy Mazer’s dry Jiffy Lube spot into the welcome arms of Wrigley Field crowd noise and Pat Hughes’ powerful descriptions, sucking you from your car into the Temple of the National Passtime that sits at the bottom of the funnel that is Central Illinois. No worries, no pressure, just a warm summer afternoon watching baseball; you can’t see the field, but you can feel the wind blowing in off of the Lake.

The wind must be coming from the corn, because that’s all you can see. Anything else out there would be blocked from view, dwarfed by the fields. It’s a Midwest cliche to be certain: flat fields of maize surround you on every side like a kid stuck in a bad horror film, running panicked from an unseen enemy, screaming out for Champaign or Peoria to save you from the horror of it all. But the fields just won’t stop. Route 66 ducks in and out of small villages, a road practiced at barely missing the silos and grain stores that welcome you to the municipality. Traveling the Mother Road,

One of eight million grain silos in Central Illinois. This one’s in Odell, in case you plan to visit.

Gremlins ipod you lose count of the silos far before you forget the number of slashes dotting the center of the road. If ever there’s a lapse in U.S. history education, then two hundred years from now kids will glance at the state motto and believe “Lincoln” to be slang for “cornfields.”

Not that this is exclusive to the Prairie State, nor is this area the king of the endless horizon. It’s a song sung throughout most states that house Big 10 and Big 12 land grant schools, and if Illinois were to go to war with Iowa, Nebraska or Kansas over which state is the most droll and unexciting to traverse, I dare not bet one penny on my home to score a single victory. Still, the lack of significant landmarks is expected of the other areas of the Midwest, while in Illinois it all seems to be leading somewhere — or, on the opposite occasion, away from something (which is far more depressing, I assure you.) It’s as if this is not right, these never-ending fields, but that there’s something larger looming overhead, and all this around you is a stranger in someone else’s home. We’ve got something the other states of the Midwest could never imagine, a twelve-ton orange and blue elephant in the room (with his eye just barely obscured by the corn) that no one dares take his or her eyes off of.

We have Chicago.

It’s around Joliet that the dichotomy of Illinois begins to be revealed. Traveling north out of St. Louis, the metropolitan area stops rather suddenly, ending just twenty miles northeast of the Arch, around Troy. Until you reach the split of Interstates 55 and 70, it’s billboard after billboard, Hustler Club here, Laura Buick there, and eighty Cracker Barrels and Stake ‘n Shakes (bean crock) on the side of the road to reassure you that civilization is still all around. Then, I-70 heads east towards Effingham, and WHAM – it’s back to the damned fields. A half-hour prior, you ask yourself, weren’t you cruising past the headquarters of Anheuser-Busch, past not one but TWO Busch Stadiums, and past a giant, six hundred and thirty foot arch? Now, it’s back to corn? That fast?

This does not speak well of the St. Louis area, at least on the Illinois side of the Mighty Miss.

I-55 curves northeast, joining with Route 66 as they angle towards The Destination. From here on in Illinois there is only One Destination, with only minor distractions. Roads are funny things like that, particularly interstates, as they act like travel agents and annoying Orbitz pop-up ads, reminding you that, perhaps, your desired place of arrival isn’t the bee’s knees as much as you want everyone to think. A day in Springfield at the Old Capital, rubbing noses at Lincoln’s Tomb, and general Walking Where He Walked is fab if you’re into that kind of stuff, but there’s that damned big green sign hanging over the highway reminding you that if you keep going you’ll end up in CHICAGO. It’s just three more hours! Who wants to see Adlai Stevenson’s grave in Bloomington? That fool lost two straight elections to a silly little soldier, and besides, it’s not CHICAGO. It’s just two more hours!

Those smaller, minor distractions — your run of the mill state capitals, Universities of Urbana-Champaigns and Peoria, where everything is test-played — they betray themselves as the second-rate, bush league, wanna-be attractions they are by making no effort to mask their location. Travel ten minutes – nay, five – outside the city limits of any of these grand municipalities and you find yourself once again consumed by the cornfields of giant magnitude. You thought you escaped. No. These cities are but an oasis in the corn, with the draw of something greater hanging over them, reminding them that they are but cute, if rather pointless, diversions from The Destination. Assembly Hall is a sight to behold but it’s not CHICAGO. It’s just one more hour!

I pause here, reader, to plead my case. You may think I exaggerate. I exaggerate not. Large over Central Illinois looms the shadow of The Destination, because why would anyone not want to partake in it? It is one thing to sit in Mound City, five hours south and in a completely different state – one obsessed with showing – and realize that to head north would take the better part of an afternoon, and leave little time for play, much more the return trip. As you move closer, though, the draw is irresistible, and you find yourself consumed with the idea. First it dances innocently across your mind. What of an afternoon trip to Michigan Avenue? It seems hardly doable until that big green sign reminds you that you’re just ninety minutes from CHICAGO, and all of a sudden you find yourself on the second floor of the Apple Store wondering how in Illinois you ended up here.

But I digress far, far — back to Joliet. It’s one of the final stop on the Illinois 1917 State Bond Issue Route 4 Tour (also making appearances in Edwardsville, Litchfield, Springfield, Lincoln, Bloomington and Pontiac) and it STINKS. Or at least the west side – they have little rap but much oil, as refineries a’plenty dot the roadsides. Jake and Elwood drove through here, and now you do to, and emerge on the north side waiting for the corn to return but it does NOT. Every field you saw before is replaced with industry, six billboards, and an Italian restaurant named after an obviously portly fellow. This continues for, oh, twenty miles until you realize suddenly with a jolt to your brain and mind that

YOU ARE THERE. Or, now, HERE.

CHICAGO.

Like her fellow tour stops, Joliet does not begin slowly but with a BANG as you move from fields and two-lane highways to three lanes and buildings and construction and BOOM you’re in the city and then BOOM you’re not. No gradual build, just corn then city then corn. You’re driving north on I-55, with Route 66 off to the east, taking a holiday on state route 53, and you curve north. A few miles later it’s bridge, I-80, mall, and all of a sudden you realize that you’re at one of those oases again, a brief respite from the corn. The fields don’t begin again, though, and it’s jarring as the city landscapes just continue until you swear you can see the Sears Tower and John Hancock buildings towering in the distance, and you realize oh yeah THAT’S what that shadow was that hovered over me as I snacked at the Cozy Dog in Springfield.

You feel the shadow in you as you drive through Central Illinois, even if you manage to avoid The Destination. It helps to listen to Radio 720 WGN – they don’t much like those national syndicated programs, nope. Cubs Baseball is the biggest culprit, drawing you not only to CHICAGO but also to 1060 West Addison in a fruitless search for tickets. Instead, you let the announcers manipulate you, drawing up that yearning to head north and partake in everything Second City, even if you’re only shuttling between Springfield and Decatur.

It’s just two-and-half more hours!

Heading south is depressing, as you watch the shadow grow dimmer and dimmer as you go along. The scenery changes little: corn here, other fields there, a stray U.S. highway on the left and the 1987 state champs of somethingorother on the right. It’s all very nice and homey, and you could live here, even if IGA has to stand in for Jewel or Schnucks. You’re just passing through, though, and the map you glance over while standing in line to pay for your fuel-up grabs your eyes and darts them in its own cruel directions. Up 51, over 74, up 57 – boom. There. You’re heading the opposite way, though, and it stings your heart. You didn’t make it There and you can’t believe you passed up the opportunity. Or perhaps you did, and it hurts more; the memory of There is fresh in your mind, and as you glance around this meager gas station on a slowly traveled street corner in a Central Illinois town, you notice how sunny it is outside the windows, and you realize that you can no longer see the shadow.

I have done a great disservice to Central Illinois here. There are great cities and much to see, and if I could live my life in Central Illinois I would most likely die a happy man. Some of that, though, would come from the fact that It’s just two more hours! Some would also come, I must confess, from the fact that traveling through the Land of Lincoln on a sunny weekday afternoon, WGN fading commercials into serene Coldplay bumpers, is a pretty good substitute for There.

Peter is not a resident of Central Illinois, because he lives south of Staunton. Therefore, he can’t see a shadow, and predicts six more weeks of Spring Training. Peter did, however, go to Bloomington a fortnight before he wrote this, but not Chicago, and the pain lingers still.