As for Me…

I Must Be Going

      A Farewell Column to Southern Illinois

All it took was one long drive. My roommate and I crawled into his old Plymouth with the push-button transmission and pointed it south. It was my first foray out of Carbondale and into the countryside.

He wanted to show me Giant City and a couple of places he'd discovered, and while chugging along in that rusty old Plymouth, I fell in love with the landscape. I had no idea there was a world like this out there — rolling hills and winding roads; broad vistas, narrow creeks and the green Shawnee.

We spent the whole day putt-putting around, and I spent the rest of the semester begging him to take me for a drive again, or to give me the keys to his car. He did neither.

I came to Southern Illinois expecting to be here only a couple of  years, long enough to snag a college degree and get out. That first drive into the Shawnee was more than 30 years ago.

It's funny, how we find things. But perhaps it's the things that find us. We arrive at a particular place and it just feels like home. Southern Illinois has been like this for me from the start.

It is only recently that I have come to appreciate the importance of place. It is vital to my happiness, I have discovered, to feel attached to the land — a particular piece of land — or to a town or a house or a building, anything. To feel a part of the landscape is to feel that you belong.

Southern Illinois is that place for me. It has nurtured me from the start. I am of this land. This is my home. And it is difficult to move, which I am doing. I am packing my gear and heading to Kansas City. This is the last column I will write for The Southern Illinoisan.

I could list a hundred, a thousand different places that I love in Southern Illinois, and I could tell you why I love them. But if I attempted to list them all, sure enough, I'd forget to mention the Makanda Country Store or Mary Lou's, and I'd feel stupid.

There are so many favorite spots, from the Ohio River to Garden of the Gods, from Chester to Cairo, along the Big Muddy from Rend Lake to Grand Tower where the Bottoms lie. The parks, Ferne Clyffe and the Cache River.

I could wax philosophic about walking in the sand when the Mississippi River was low and skipping stones across the water with my son. I could tell you what it was like to catch my first bass at Little Grassy, or to hear my daughter scream in glee as she leaped from the ledge into the water.

There are sounds and sights and smells. Remember when it rained in the woods? How fertile it was? Can you hear the owl in the stillness? I can if I close my eyes. And when I close my eyes I will see faces, too, because it is the people who give soul to any place. I cannot possibly say goodbye to all of them.

Last night I went for a late-night drive. It was a beautifully clear sky and the moon was just this side of being full. Without consciously directing my truck there, I found myself parked at one of those favorite spots. It's a place just south of Giant City where you can walk out among the sculpted trees of the orchard and watch them march away down into the valley that stretches out for miles before you.

In the mornings here, or on moonlit nights such as this, you can see where the mist begins. As I stood there, I savored a memory of walking along the edge of the bluffs that are not too far way, where I danced once and hooked my arm around a precipice pine.

I expected myself to feel sad. I waited for the expected wave of melancholy, but it never came. I was strangely content, even happy. I was happy to have seen this place, to have known its people. I was happy to be driving something other than an old Plymouth with a push-button transmission.

And I'm happy because it doesn't feel like I'm leaving. In a way, I'm taking it with me. And at the risk of sounding schmaltzy, this place is in my heart so wherever I go, it goes.

And so do you. Thank you.

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