White Castle, Monks Mound and carrying dirt

For almost 30 years, as long as I've lived in Illinois, I've driven past Cahokia Mounds on the way to St. Louis. Monks' Mound rose impressively on the left of the highway, but I never visited the state historic site. However, last Monday after a doctor's appointment in St. Louis, Ron and I decided to break with tradition.

Ron hadn't been there either so after lunch at White Castle (one of Ron's favorites but not mine -- those little onions on the sliders do weird things to my digestive tract) we drove to Cahokia Mounds near Collinsville. Leaving the interstate, we ventured into what appeared to be substandard commercial area. There were a lot of businesses with bars on the windows, never a good sign, but we pressed on and soon were rewarded with a sign pointing to the Cahokia Mounds visitor center.

Pulling into the parking lot, we were surrounded by many mounds of various sizes. The landscape was beautiful, tree-lined and rolling, no surprise that the ancient people decided to settle here way back in 900 A.D. Of course, the fact that Cahokia sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers doesn't hurt its desirability as a location either.

Monks Mound back in the day

 We watched a movie that told us some backstory including:

• Between 10,000 and 20,000 people lived here at the height of Cahokian influence, around 1250 A.D.
• The city covered 6 miles and contained 120 mounds made of earth. This earth was carried in baskets to make the mounds. Now that's manual labor! Some were used as burial mounds but the majority had ceremonial uses and were bases for temples or the homes of leaders. If you were important you lived on a mound, looking superiorly down at the rank-and-file.
• The inhabitants of Cahokia didn't even get credit for building Monk's Mound! Even though they spent 300 years hauling 814,000 cubic yards of dirt, the largest man-made earthen mound in North America was named after some Trappist Monks who lived on one of the nearby mounds. I think something like Generations-of Indians-Who-Worked-Their-Butts-Off-Carrying-Dirt Mound would have been more appropriate, but no one asked me.

Note the subdivision in the lower part of the photo.

The Big Mound in St. Louis

The site has had a chequered past and briefly was both a subdivision and a state park. Nearby St. Louis used to be known as The Mound City because of its abundance of Indian mounds (all sadly destroyed). The largest Native American mound in St. Louis was the Big Mound, which stood at least 30 feet high, was 150 feet in length, and had three terraced approaches facing the river for religious ceremonies. At one point in the 1820s, a small resort building was constructed at the top of the mound.

Ron climbs Monks Mound

Kukulkan Pyramid

After the movie, we walked around and Ron decided to climb Monks Mound. I would have too, but there was no accessible trail so I contented myself with taking photos. Monks Mound looks like the Mayan pyramids that were built about the same time. El Castillo (The Kukulkan Pyramid) at Chichen Itza in Mexico is a 75-foot-high stone pyramid, shorter than the 100-foot-tall Monk's Mound and built earlier, between 550 and 800 AD. The Great Pyramid in Giza is bigger, 481 feet, than either and was built around 2500 B.C. Still, they all three have similar shapes, triangles pointing up to heaven. Even 2,500 years before Christ man had a need for to worship.

Don't bring your sled to Monks Mound!

Now when we drive by Monks Mound on the way to St. Louis I can say I've been there.

Snow White and fairy tales

Fairy tales have always fascinated me -- they were a staple at bedtimes growing up, maybe because my mother was a children's librarian before she married and had a particularly good grasp on storytelling. The dark scariness and happy endings where good triumphed and the princess married the handsome prince shaped my expectations about life. Yes, it would be hard but in the end, justice would win out.

When the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was reissued in 1987, I took my oldest daughter, who was all of three years old. She was bored with the trilling singing and simplistic animation (she loved The Little Mermaid, which Disney released in 1989). We continued to read fairy tales and, even though she's all grown up now, she's still a devotee.

Modern-day evil queen on Once Upon A Time

These days fairy tales seem to be enjoying something of a resurgence.  The story of Snow White has been made into two movies this year and is the basis for the current TV show Once Upon a Time. In the first movie, Mirror, Mirror, Julia Roberts played the Evil Queen, while Charlize Theron was cast in the juicy role of the queen for Snow White and the Huntsman. I missed the first movie but loved the second movie's interpretation of the classic story. It was less than faithful, but enthralling for its visual and special effects.

There are scary parts to most fairy tales, like when the evil queen makes the poison apple for Snow White. But, in the end, the evil person meets with an often grisly death and the good people live happily ever after. Snow White and her handsome prince marry, but the evil queen is forced to put on white hot iron slippers and dance until she drops down dead.That's the way life is too -- we live in a fairy tale and just don't know it. Time to start reading ...

Maybe the best TV show ever -- Dark Shadows

Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins

Barnabas Collins, the middle-aged vampire star of the gothic soap opera  Dark Shadows, was my adolescent crush in the late 60s. I was captivated, nay obsessed, by this series, a half-hour TV show that ran from 1966 through 1971. Since this was long before DVR (or even VHS) to record shows, I seldom got to watch the 3 p.m. soap, since school didn't let out till 3:30. But this didn't keep me from following the adventures of the Collinwood gang, even buying cheesy books about their world.

In reality, the daily soap opera was plagued by extremely low production values that often resulted in shaking sets, muffed lines and mike shadows. However, none of this could mar the high drama of the Collins family's uncountable time changes, assortment of supernatural beings or the high romance of the story. I wanted to be Angelique, the beautiful witch doomed to love, but not be loved, by the erstwhile Barnabas.

Tim Burton

So I was overjoyed when I discovered that Tim Burton, director of such classic movies as Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, was making a 2012 version of Dark Shadows starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas.

Depp apparently wanted to become Barnabas when he was growing up, although he hardly seems old enough. The previews I've seen for the movie place it in the realm of high camp, exactly where it belongs. The special effects of 1966 are woefully inadequate today, but the premise of a dysfunctional family, an old house, and various vampires witches and ghosts is timeless.

I can hardly wait till May 11 when the movie is due to hit the big screen. You can be sure that I will be there -- popcorn and soda in hand -- ready to be 13 again!

Regionalism put to the test

Working at an international company based in the Midwest made me aware of just how small the world has become. I learned that when it's 8 p.m. in Springfield, they're just getting into work in Singapore, and morning for us is mid-afternoon for a writer in Great Britain. It gave me a glimpse of how much alike we are. It doesn't matter if you live in Australia or Germany -- people want to be treated with respect as the individuals they are.
But I wondered about regionalism. There seem to be a marked difference in the way that I talked with an ad rep in New York City and a magazine editor on the West Coast. One was hyper and one was so laid back I thought she might fall asleep.It seemed to me that how you acted was highly dependent on where you grew up.

I didn't coin the term "regionalism." It came about back in the 1930s when a group of artists including Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton painted scenes of romanticized rural settings. These were oddly reassuring to the American public, waist-deep in the Great Depression, and showed them that there was still a place where life was good and that place was the farm.

Regionalism was short-lived, dying out in the mid-30s. Perhaps someone found out that farms are just regular places to live, only with animals. But I still wondered if pockets of regionalism had survived, so the other night I asked one of my friends for her opinion, since she's lived on both coasts as well as here in the Midwest. She didn't hesitate with her response -- by and large she didn't see much regionalism in people. No matter where they live, the overriding factor was individual personality.

It's a small world and the web is pulling us even closer. When before would it be possible for grandparents to Skype their grandchildren in China from small-town Illinois?  A schoolteacher get a video off YouTube to supplement next week's lesson on the water cycle? A woman with MS connect with so many others with this disease from around the world? It's good because we're sharing. And because we're all basically alike and because, in the end, we've got each other.

A flower collection

Spring Larkspur

Forty-one years ago, a now-forgotten science teacher in Creston, Iowa gave his class an assignment: turn in a collection of 35 dried flowers gathered in the area by the end of May. He was met with a silent groan from his class of sophomores -- I was one of them.

Flower Press

The project seemed impossibly huge and un-doable.  I doubted that 35 wildflowers existed in the hills of southwest Iowa. But my dad and I dutifully made a flower press out of two pieces of wood and I spent about a month combing the streets, roadsides and pastures around Creston, picking the wildflowers and carefully pressing them between sheets of waxed paper.

Dad

I know I didn't want to make the flower press, but it did the job well.  The collection, carefully stored in a Ziploc bag, contains yellowing sheets of paper on which are arrayed the wildflowers we picked that spring over 40 years ago. Some even retain hints of their original color.

Each flower is painstakingly labelled with the scientific name, common name, location, date, student name, amount of flowers in that locale. Here's an example:

Denturia lacinata
Toothwort
Northeast of Creston
April 17, 1971
Melinda Hall
Abundant

My dad took a real interest in the project.  Fortunately, he was a hiker and loved driving into the country on Sunday afternoons where we nonchalantly climbed over fences and trundled down hills in search of elusive Jacob's ladder, mayapple, and Dutchman's breeches. Those sunlit wildflower-hunting expeditions are precious memories, now that my dad is gone. And the names of many of the flowers have stayed with me, so that I can identify toothwort, columbine and false anemone with superiority and not a little pleasure.  


Wildflowers are everywhere -- abundant even on the hills of Iowa. May I always see the world with abundance!

Honeysuckle

Jacob's Ladder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lily of the Valley

Spirea

Toothwort

             

Reading enjoyment at the Rochester Library Book Sale

I spent last night and this morning working at the Friends of the Rochester Library book sale. I am a member of the Friends and the book sale is by far my favorite event. I get to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a long time, browse used books, and hang around the library. What could be better?

Last night was a Members Only preview night, essentially the only tangible benefit for belonging.  I was in charge of checking off Friends names from the list. Of course some had not renewed their membership and I was willing and able to help them with that!  Last night was busy, but since the sale was open to the public today, it slowed down enough for me to do a little shopping.

Chelsea had asked me to look for books for her third-grade class and I found several by some perennially popular authors; Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, etc. I also picked up a copy of Harriett the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, a book that played a major role in my writing ambitions. Finally, I couldn't resist buying a couple of books for me: Little Bee by Chris Cleave and Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. They  only cost a quarter each so I'm not out a lot of money if I don't like them.

When the sale closes tomorrow at four we will draw a Friend's member's name for a free Nook e-reader. It's somewhat ironic to give away an e-book reader at a used book sale, but the fact is that e-books are rapidly growing in popularity and many titles are available for free via booksonthego.org through the library. The role of the library itself is changing, but I hope that the idea of having books available for free, to everyone, never goes out of style. I'm not sure how long printed books will be around, but I do know as long as there are readers, there will be used books.

Eaglefest!

An eagle floating backwards down the Illinois River. RT McDonald photo.

We went on a mini-vacation last week to the area around Alton, Illinois with the express goal of seeing eagles. According to both anecdotal remarks from friends ("There's a lot of eagles there in January") and online research ("The eagles love to float down the river on the ice."), there were sure to be lots of eagles who had flown south to escape the winter ice up north.

Well, as often happens, things were somewhat different than expected. For one thing, it's been much warmer than usual due to global warming (a reality and not, as my GOP friends might have you believe, a myth created by Al Gore). According to the official eagle guide at Pere Marquette State Park, the number of eagles was down by at least 50%. Nonetheless, I got to see enough eagles to make the three days a great success.

An eagle's eye view.

On Monday we left Springfield, turning south and driving down through Calhoun County, a magical part of Illinois cut off from the rest of the state by the Mississippi River on the west and the Illinois River on the east. The otherworldly nature of this rolling area is enhanced by the fact that several ferries bring cars over the rivers -- so much more poetic than bridges. 

We glimpsed our first eagle along the Illinois River in Calhoun County north of Kampsville, peering out of an enormous nest and haughtily ignoring the passing traffic. After that we saw eagles all the way to Pere Marquette State Park, where we were staying in a cabin and took advantage of a Bald Eagle Special for $79 which included 2 glasses of wine and $10 off a meal in the lodge restaurant.  Now that's a good deal!

Ron and pelicans

Ron took pictures along the Illinois River in the twilight.   There were no eagles, but three pelicans swam up the river and headed somewhere onshore for the night. Lovely...

Eagles hang out in a tree.

After a night of wine drinking in the awe-inspiring lodge, we rose early to catch the bald eagle tour led free by the state guide (it never ceases to amaze me the free services given out by the state). An informative talk/video (did you know that the national bird was almost the turkey?) was followed by a several hour caravan through prime eagle territory, including one stop below Lock and Dam 25 on the Mississippi, where a whole bunch of eagles seemed to be taking a break on a tree. The trip ended at an establishment called The Barefoot Bar in Hardin overlooking the Illinois River. I had a yummy lunch of chicken livers and Dr. Pepper, which later disagreed with me and sent me for considerable quality time in the restroom of the Hardin Shell station. 

We caught dinner at Fast Eddie's in Alton where the hamburgers are 99 cents and the beers are $3.70 (and you are required to have a drink). Still a good deal. 

Me at the cabin at Pere Marquette

Midway through the night, we awoke to scurrying and scratching sounds from the general vicinity of our attic. The wildlife had decided to get warm. Oh well, that's what you get when you bunk in a state park.  More alarming were the yells next morning around 8 outside our door when the convicts started trimming the bushes. Although I pleaded with him, Ron refused to take a photo of the group with their armed guard. Now that's a photo op!

An eagle as big as a building!

It was raining  and no eagles were in view, except for this large blow-up one outside the Melvin Price Locks and Dam.  We headed home. It was a wonderful vacation though, but it has not quenched my desire for our magestic national symbol!