Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
specialty was the ability to get hopelessly lost without ever actually losing sight of his tar-
get. He never arrived at an amusement park or tourist attraction without first approaching
it from several directions, like a pilot making passes over an unfamiliar airport. My sister
and brother and I, bouncing on the back seat, could always see it on the other side of the
freeway and cry, “There it is! There it is!” Then after a minute we would spy it from an-
other angle on the far side of a cement works. And then across a broad river. And then on
the other side of the freeway again. Sometimes all that would separate us from our goal
would be a high chain-link fence. On the other side you could see happy, carefree families
parking their cars and getting ready for a wonderful day. “How did they get in there?” my
dad would cry, the veins on his forehead lively. “Why can't the city put up some signs, for
Christ's sake? It's no wonder you can't find your way into the place,” he would add, con-
veniently overlooking the fact that 18,ooo other people, some of them of decidedly limited
mental acuity, had managed to get onto the right side of the fence without too much diffi-
culty.
Springfieldwasadisappointment.Iwasn'treallysurprised.Ifitwereaniceplace,someone
would have said to me, “Say, you should go to Springfield. It's a nice place.” I had high
hopes for it only because I had always thought it sounded promising. In a part of the world
wheresomanyplaceshaveharsh,foreignsoundingnamesfullofhardconsonants-DeKalb,
Du Quoin, Keokuk, Kankakee-Springfield is a little piece of poetry, a name suggesting
grassy meadows and cool waters. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. Like all small Americ-
an cities, it had a downtown of parking lots and tallish buildings surrounded by a sprawl of
shopping centers, gas stations and fast-food joints. It was neither offensive nor charming. I
drove around a little bit, but finding nothing worth stopping for, I drove on to New Salem,
twelve miles to the north.
New Salem had a short and not very successful life. The original settlers intended to cash
in on the river trade that passed by, but in fact the river trade did just that-passed by-and
the town never prospered. In 1837 it was abandoned and would no doubt have been lost
to history altogether except that one of its residents from 1831 to 1837 was a young Abra-
ham Lincoln. So now, on a 620-acre site, New Salem has been rebuilt just as it was when
Lincoln lived there, and you can go and see why everybody was pretty pleased to clear off.
Actually it was very nice. There were about thirty or forty log cabins distributed around
a series of leafy clearings. It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon, with a warm breeze and
soft sunlight adrift in the trees. It all looked impossibly quaint and appealing. You are not
allowed to go in the houses. Instead you walk up to each one and peer through the win-
dows orfront doorand youget an idea ofwhat life was like forthe people who lived there.
Mostly it must have been pretty uncomfortable. Every house had a sign telling you about
its residents. The historical research was impressively diligent. The only problem was that
