Tracing Footsteps Not My Own: Going Through the Motions, Learning to Write

1.
Guiding my food tray through the crowded cafeteria, I leaned toward the young woman sitting by the window and whispered, “The ducks fly at midnight.”

She nodded, soon rising from her own seat to relay the message to a friend, who relayed it to another, until at last, all interested parties had been informed of our midnight rendezvous by the giant elm just outside of Old Main.

This was in the fall of 2003, when I—a fresh-faced first year at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois—was busily experimenting with the freedom that comes when one’s parents are 364 miles away. Not that anyone was counting.

That September night—once the homework was done and my laundry was safely on spin cycle—I made the lonely walk across the empty quad. Yet with each step it seemed to grow more populated, one silhouette after another springing forth beneath the street lights.

Maybe there were six of us in all, all budding writers whose love for the written word far surpassed our ability to actually write them. Undeterred, we’d stuffed our pockets with our poems anyway, and then—just hours after our coded, hushed whispers had been tendered and received—began our trek to poet Carl Sandburg’s birthplace, just a mile or so off campus.

Shuffling beyond the safety of the dorms, we cut across what looked like prairie: an expanse of field doused in milky moonlight. At 19, I didn’t even know what prairie was, figuring it was just the name we gave to a nondescript landscape. The word we used when we couldn’t get away with “mountain”, “meadow”, “ocean” or even “plain.”

Our late night pilgrimage across the prairie should have been taken with reverence, but at our age we gave it none. It was simply a place to pass through en route to another place. Kind of like our understanding of