One More for the Road, Dad!

There is a road that runs the length of the state of Illinois. It is not the main road north and south through the state anymore. The interstates carry the most of the traffic now a days.

It has been many years since I drove this road down to what we call Little Egypt, Cairo, Illinois. When I drove this road I went with an old man. Of course he wasn't old in reality; it's just that I was young, and everybody seemed old.

The old man was my father.

We took a road trip together.

Unlike many father and son relationships we got along. Well. We shared many of the same interests. My father liked history, liked seeing what was around the next bend in the road, and like out of the way places that most people flew past at eighty miles per hour.

We detoured off Interstate 80 and headed south. Our first stop was Mathiasson State Park, where we hiked in the limestone valleys created by ancient rivers rushing through and around the soft rocks. It was a warm summer day, and it was easy to get lost in the easy natural setting.

From there we continued down Highway 51.

We reached Cairo, then headed east towards Missouri, camping for a night on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River. In 1812 a massive earthquake struck and diverted the flow of that river as well as the huge Mississippi River not too far away. An entire town was abandoned and moved, so powerful was the shifting of the earth. Even the cemetery was moved. The old stones now sticking out of the side of the hill near our campsite were lined up like silent soldiers, all in a line and facing the water.

It was night and we listened the the crackly radio from St. Louis.

We went bed and then turned back upstate the next day.

We stopped in New Salem, the town Abraham Lincoln called home as a young man. We walked through the restored town on the bluff and tried to imagine life on the prairie 150 years ago.

We visited the graveyard in Oakland Cemetery, outside of Petersburg, where Ann Rutledge is buried. She was Lincoln's first --and some say only -- love, who died young and left Lincoln crazed and depressed.

Her gravestone had the lines on them:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music!
'With malice toward none, with charity for all'.
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

We stopped at some old barn roadside selling a collection of junk the owner proudly called antiques.

Finally we neared home again. We stopped in Kankakee for lunch. Our suburban world as we knew it was only an hour away.

We had been gone about a week over all.

It was a good week, I thought even then at lunch.

I didn't know how good.

Two years later my father was dead of lung cancer.

That was twenty-one years ago, August 28.

We never traveled again together.

But when I am on the road, which is often, he is with me.