Vistas
The Source
Fresh perspectives. If nothing else, the very act of traveling gives you a new viewpoint of your home stomping ground. If you spend a couple weeks eating the haggis of Scotland, the bangers and neaps of England, and the borsht of Russia you’ll look upon McDonald’s in a new way. The same goes for your local landscapes. Take a trip to the hills and lakes of Branson or the valley-laced vistas of Central Iowa and you’ll return to the Jacksonville area with a fresh eye for the Central Illinois landscape. Say you were a visitor from Melbourne or Mississippi. What would our local landscape say to you? Do we have any vistas that might cause the passing visitor to pause and say, “Now that’s nice!” Vista One: Drive just west of Jacksonville on old 36 to where you can exit toward Chapin or Murrayville. Pull off the road near the 67-north exit and look out across this piece of Illinois prairie. According to Ed Anderson, my authority on “all things in the known universe,” you’re sitting on top of a “kame,” a place where there was once a hole in the Illinoian glacier, allowing sediment to trickle through a build up to a rounded knoll. In fact, Mound Road got its mound-ed-ness due to a “moraine”…the edges of the glacier melting at the same rate of its advance. The result is one totally stunning sight, especially at sundown. Kansas and Oklahoma, eat your heart out. Vista Two: Exeter’s “esker,” an embedded creek with twists and turns formed by the same glacier retreating and dropping gravel as it slowly retreated northward. The topography is still evident as the road still curls and curves around the old creek bed. Vista Three: Drive to Arenzville just before sunset. Stop at the top of the hill just south of town (before descending on the world’s most dangerous winter bridge), shut off the car and if you listen very closely you’ll hear Julie Andrews singing “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music” somewhere in the distance. Okay, so maybe your imagination isn’t quite that vivid, but the view is pure Grant Wood with just a touch of Normal Rockwell around the edges. Traveler Hint: View this before they harvest the corn since the Pioneer test plot now happily obscures the new convenience store. Grant Wood did not paint convenience stores. Vista Four: The Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers converge just north of Joliet and flow southward picking up the outflow from the Mazon River, the Fox, the Vermillion, The Mackinaw, the La Moine, and by the time it roars by Meredosia it’s one powerful sight. About 10,000 years ago a lake formed in Indiana, comparable to one of today’s Great Lakes, and when its dam burst our present Illinois River was formed in a matter of days… days! The resulting river bottom spreads out before you in full Technicolor as you top the final hill west of Bethel and descend toward Dosh and Bluffs. By-golly breath-taking. Vista Five: My vote for the world’s most tedious stretch of Interstate is the corn-fence-corn-cow-corn stretch of I-72 between Jacksonville and Springfield. It’s like watching 30 minutes of an Infomercial on the Pocket Fisherman. But take that same Interstate west out of Jacksonville and as it veers west toward the Mississippi river bottom you’ll be treated to some of the most idyllic landscape in Western Illinois. The four-lane hugs the cliffs giving you the sight of the bluffs on your right…small farmsteads tucked neatly into the folds and crevices of the hills, and the fertile valley on your left. And there’s hardly a billboard to block your view as you head into Adams county. Vista Six: Once upon a time while doing a play in the Morgan County courthouse, two very young actors ran up to me and said, “Mr. Bradbury, you gotta come look at this!” I followed them up the dusty and bat-friendly series of stairways leading to the very top of the courthouse and through some broken slats (the boys said they were broken when they got there) we looked out upon the Athens of the Midwest. Know what? We have one beautiful little city here. At least from the top down. We were too far off the ground to hear the Open Line grumblings and for a moment we were taken back to the sight that might have greeted the early settlers to Morgan County. We could see why they decided to stay. I have no doubt omitted some of your favorite local vistas and that’s okay. You know where they are. But if the economy is putting a pinch on your traveling budget, turn off the TV, stow all your personal electronic devices under the couch, and take a drive tonight. There are things to see.