Road Trip-Getting Started

I didn’t need the road atlas when I headed  south out my driveway onto Caton Road in Ottawa.  It was 5:57 a.m., still dark, and the glowing green light from the odometer told me the Buick had 118,213 miles on it.  It was Tuesday the 27^th of February and I was leaving home with a full tank of gas. 

Like most,  I travel the same streets and roads over and over.  I left the radio off on purpose and put the windows down.   The air was cold and clean.  I rolled past my neighbor’s houses.  Few had lights on.  It felt like  just me out there.

Caton Road begins on the bluff near Interstate 80 and winds down the hill onto the Illinois River valley.  If you slow down to 20 mph or so and let off the gas when you enter the first curve at the top of the hill you can take your feet off the pedals and coast till you bottom out past Norris Drive and climb up to the second set of tracks past the Shell station.  It's steep at the top so you go  fast at the start, have to tuck into the second curve pretty tightly, and exceed the speed limit for a while.  It’s best done when there are few cars on the street.  It alarms passengers so I’ve learned to only do it solo.  I did it that morning.  Gravity can be fun.  I felt good.

Route 23 South took me through downtown Ottawa, across the Illinois River, and out of town.  I turned right past Grand Ridge onto Richards Road, left on a blacktop that took me through Kangley, skirting around Streator, and crossed Route 18.  I stayed on that blacktop, more or less, until I got to Towanda.

The sun rose yellow in a flat orange sky over empty fields as I crossed those bad curved tracks on the uphill grade past Ancona.   

That blacktop, more or less, is the way I used to go from Ottawa south to Danvers, Bloomington, and Springfield in the old days, when Route 39 was unfinished and Route 51 was a crowded mess.  I say more or less because it is not a single road.  There are jogs you have to make, usually right then left, picking up a different road.  I know the turns so well it feels like a single road to me.  In Gridley you have to think a little, go south past Route 24, turn right, stay on the east/west blacktop for two sections, then turn south.  I was a little unsure, but as I drove I knew by the buildings, the barns and such, where to turn.  It’s familiar territory.  I love it out there.

I jogged right over Money Creek then turned left toward Towanda.   I used to pick up Route 55 there and stay on it when I was going to Springfield, or take it to Veterans Parkway when I was going somewhere in Bloomington Normal.

This time I crossed over 55 and took the frontage road.  There’s an short section of old Route 66 alongside it.  Small stretches of the mother road are sprinkled here and there, and people try to follow the route.   I’m not that much of a purist, but I was trying to avoid interstate highways.  Too fast, too bland, not for me on this trip.  Being near Bloomington Normal was nostalgic.  I was getting close to home.  

 I ended up on Ft. Jesse road, took Towanda Avenue south, and went west on Washington Street.  As I got close to Bloomington’s downtown I knew I was somewhere near the place Hubbard’s Cupboard used to be, could feel Lucca Grill and the Grand Cafe, still in business I hope, a few blocks away.  I saw the old State Farm headquarters up ahead near the McLean County courthouse, where  a college kid I had an interesting meeting with a judge and a state’s attorney. 

I passed the Castle Theater.  It’s a music venue now but I used to watch movies there.  I remember disappointing my first high school girlfriend by not making out during "Bonnie and Clyde", preferring to watch the movie instead.  While a freshman at ISU I saw "Easy Rider" there, and later "Woodstock."  Washington Street took me by the Pantagraph, the newspaper where I worked part time during college.  I kept going west on Washington, turned north on Morris Avenue, then west on Market Street which is Route 9.  Past I-55 and Farm and Fleet Bloomington thinned out and disappeared.  I was driving on the road that would take me past my family’s old dairy farm. 

I began to pass farms where I knew the men and women, virtually all dead now, who worked them in the 50’s and 60’s.  I knew where the blacktops off Route 9 would take me.  I saw places where cribs once stood, buildings where I scooped, sometimes freezing sometimes sweating, ear corn into conveyors that took it to an old sheller.  I passed fields where once I baled hay.  At the T intersection, which used to be the 3 mile Y, I turned north.  Huge silver corn bins, topped with a web of augers high in the air, now surround the Ernst place.

At the top of the hill I followed the curve west past the Y tap.  The Buick was now on the stretch of Route 9 I once thought I would never escape.  I used to think if you drew a line with a pencil, even faintly, on a paper map each time I made a trip on that little three mile stretch of road, between our farm and Danvers, it would be black and shiny.  Worn through the paper most likely.  I was driven by Mom in a car to and from Sunday School and church, on a tractor driving corn and oats to the elevator, on a school bus, on a bicycle, then finally driving myself.  It seemed I would never get off that piece of road, the shortest distance between the farm and our little town. 

I knew every farm along that road, who farmed them, tenants  or owners, their kids’ names, what kind of tractors they used, their dogs, what the wives cooked best, how their haymow was configured, their corn cribs laid out, everything. 

Those barns, like the cribs, are doomed without purpose.  I dreaded seeing the barn on our former farm.  It was erected in 1941 as a state of the art 24 stanchion dairy barn anticipating Grade A milking standards.  It featured a separate milk house, an electric vacuum system for milking machines, lots of natural lighting, insulation and good ventilation, a self supporting roof and obstruction free hay mow.  It was built with pride and maintained with great care.  My father, even after he sold the cows, had a new roof put on to preserve the building for its next users.  There were none.

I passed the Biddle house, the Shifflet place, two Lemons farmsteads, Duane Smith’s farm, the place Bait Correll farmed, Paul Mehl’s place, and the dirt road to the timber.  I slowed the Buick down as it climbed the hill toward the farm I grew up in, then turned in the driveway.

New owners, now the second since us, painted our big white house brown. New pine trees form a windbreak in the north end of the big yard.  They choke off he space where my Dad used to hit me flies and grounders till it got to dark too see the ball.  I sat there for a moment.  I wanted to go to the hydrant by the deep well and get a drink of that good hard water.  I stayed in the car instead, letting it idle. 

When I looked at the barn it was nearly more gray than white.  The paint was flaked off and the boards below it weathered.  Louvers in the vents in the big gable end to the north were missing.  Trash trees grew up by the foundation.  I couldn’t get a good look at the roof, so I backed out of the drive, headed west, and turned north on the road that ended at John Twenty’s old place.  I stopped short of it, turning around where there was a culvert for a driveway that used to take you over the ditch to Roy Miller’s.   

Roy Miller lived in a little house there set back from the road and began collecting old vehicles.  Over time his house was dwarfed by a sea of cars.  Amazingly, those cars, at least some of them, are still there.  A fence, and brush, surrounds them now and a big Keep Out warning is on a faded gate with a phone number for those inquiring about storage.  What’s more lonely than an abandoned junkyard?

I headed slowly back towards our farm, and saw the hole in the barn roof.  I’d been told about it but didn’t want to admit it was there.  The shingles were gone and the wooden boards under them rotted through on the south end of the west side.  I imagined rain getting in and ruining the floor, that huge wooden mow floor polished slick with bales of alfalfa hay and oat straw over the years.   I sped up and turned down the blacktop going south.  The asparagus patch is gone.  On the opposite side of the barn roof another patch of shingles is missing.  The sub roof won’t hold up much longer.  Once the roof goes, if not quickly repaired, the barn will be done.  I don’t think I want to go by when it begins to lean, or when it sags and falls in. 

I get it.  You can’t make money milking 24 cows anymore even if you wanted to.  They don’t use the kind of bales we stacked in the tall hay mow above the stanchions.  It’s not a working farm, but merely a residence   Only the house has real value, and the new owners need the barn for nothing but perhaps storage.  As an asset the barn doesn’t warrant investment, not even apparently the cost of tearing it down.   But all those realities didn’t help the disgust (or was it hurt?) I felt as I drove south, keeping my eyes off the rear view mirror.  Everything changes but you don’t have to like it.  It’s so hard not to look back.

I was lost in thought as I took the blacktops to McLean.  I still had the radio off.  I didn’t need to think about where I was going because I knew all those turns by heart too.  Past the Stringtown road, jog left then right to Stanford (a jog right takes you to Minier). At some point when we lived on the farm the county numbered the blacktops and gravel roads, and put up markers.  We stubbornly ignored them.  Soon I was in the parking lot of the Dixie Truck Stop.  It’s now a Road Ranger.  It has changed constantly over the years.

The McDonald’s across the road has no doubt taken away a lot of the Dixie's business.  It’s now almost exclusively truckers.  I took a stroll.  Of course they’ve taken out the pay phones, which I used before cell phones to call the office for messages.  The Dixie is  halfway to Springfield for me. They've replaced the Route 66 museum with expanded retail space,and put in more showers.   The men’s room is a little iffy.  But all in all the Dixie still has character.  I bought a decal for the Buick.

I had breakfast at the counter and brought  the Atlas in to peruse.  By the looks of it all the other diners were having the buffet.  I knew what I wanted before I sat down.  Fried mush and eggs.

It’s hard to find a place that serves mush.  Mom used to make it, almost sheepishly, calling it depression food.  We’d have a bowl of mush for supper, the three of us, and she’d put the leftovers in a loaf pan in the icebox and slice it in the morning, frying it in butter in a skillet.  We ate it with syrup like pancakes, always with a side of eggs.  Something about those old time meals seemed to delight Mom and Dad.  They acted the same when Mom cooked brains with toast.  Almost giddy.

When the waitress walked up I knew my order without looking at the menu.

“Will you be havin’ the buffet sir?”

 She was young.  But then, you know, everybody looks young these days.

“No.  I’ll have the fried mush, 2 eggs over easy, glass of milk, whole milk if you got it, and black coffee.”

Those were the first words I’d spoken all day.

“You seem pretty sure about that order sir.  Anything else?”

“Nope.  That’ll do it.”

As I waited for my order to come up I opened the road atlas to Illinois and looked at where I might go next.  The Dixie was as far as I’d figured it out.