Midwestern Sublime

Those of us raised on the flat plains of Illinois have heard the story too many times. Travelers from other parts of the country have seen all they need to see of the state. They have seen it through the windows of their cars travelling at seventy miles an hour on our interstate system. Those flat plains bore those passing through; they provoke dread in those coming to stay. A landscape without hills is like a sky without stars, an endless nothingness as far as the eye can see. “The towns feel like they just dropped out of the sky; there is no reason why they should be one place rather than another.” “I couldn’t live here,” says the passers-through, head wagging. “We may have made a mistake” cough the second-guessing stayers.


I usually nod in agreement, taking a kind of pride in the personal virtues which my lamenting friend must attribute to me, virtues which give me an unimaginable strength to live in this nowhere land. But my nod is a lie. I disagree. My traveling friends are blind. They travel the country, and they hope along the way to see the beauty of the earth. They find it in New England and New Mexico, in Michigan and Missisippi, and they think they should find it in central Illinois. When they do not find it, their eyes fail them. So, for my traveling friends, I will offer a few meditations on how to see central Illinois.