“Is it past this playground?” I ask Dave.
“Just past the playground.”
“Where?”
“Behind those houses.”
“Are we in Wisconsin?”
“No. We’re still in Illinois.”
I have just driven a rented Nissan Altima up a roller-coaster-steep hill rising away from the two-block, two-story brick downtown of East Dubuque, in search of the Mississippi River. Not its source, which is far to the north, in Minnesota, but the point where it flows into Illinois. Once the river reaches our state, it drifts along it for another 580 miles, as the catfish swims, to Cairo. That’s a longer journey than the Mississippi takes past any other state. Yet even though the Mississippi defines our state’s western border, Illinois is little associated with the river’s lore — not as much as Missouri, which produced Mark Twain, or Mississippi, which produced the Delta blues, or Louisiana, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, just past New Orleans.
Along with Dave, the photographer assigned to accompany me, who is navigating from the passenger seat with Google Maps on his phone, I am about to travel those 580 miles over the next five days to give Illinois its due as the Mississippi-est state in the union — and to explore the towns that dot its western edge, so often over-shadowed by the skyscrapers of the modern metropolis on a Great Lake. (I inquired about procuring a boat, as English author Jonathan Raban did to write Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi, one of my favorite travel books, but was told I could not pilot it the nearly 600 miles to Cairo. “We can’t send someone all that way if it breaks down,” said the woman at Fun ’n the Sun Houseboat in Alma, Wisconsin. So we rented this car. It was the right decision. As we would soon find out, the Upper Mississippi is too far above its banks for navigation.)
“This looks like Pittsburgh,” says Dave as we slide back down East Dubuque’s slope. Illinois’s prairie flatness has collided with the Mississippi, producing the ridges and bluffs of a river town. High above U.S. Highway 20, Timmerman’s Supper Club looks down from its aerie. Dave lives in Chicago but travels all over the country for assignments and still carries a driver’s license from his native Washington State. The weekend before, he photographed the Kentucky Derby in Louisville. My work is confined to Illinois. I just finished writing a book about Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Seeking out all seven debate sites—Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton — felt like an adventure equal to visiting the seven continents. If I cannot travel widely, I will try to travel deeply.
Paul Theroux, the world-renowned travel writer, once told me, “It’s hard to write a travel book about the place where you live.” He said this to me after I handed him a copy of The Third Coast, my Great Lakes travelogue, which I’m sure he never read. I live on the Great Lakes, though, not the Mississippi. Can I find the exotic in what is, to me, the backwater of Illinois? And can I introduce my traveling companion to the magic of Illinois?
“Magic” is not a word much applied to our flat, Middle American state, but it’s something I feel while driving across the prairie at twilight, fireflies exploding on my windshield, and while standing in the long shadow of a Lincoln statue or watching a train of barges leave a rippling wake on the Mississippi.
At the bottom of East Dubuque’s hill is Shorty’s Saloon: $2 cans after 4 p.m. It’s only 3:30, but what the hell.
“How much are cans before 4?” I ask the bartender.
“Tuna quarter,” he says, reminding me that we’re only a mile from Wisconsin.
I order a Busch Light. “We’re at the beginning of a five-day journey,” I tell the bartender, “from East Dubuque to Cairo.”
“Cairo,” he says quizzically. “I’ve never even heard of that. Couldn’t tell you where it is.”
When I get to Cairo, I resolve, I will ask folks if they’ve heard of East Dubuque.
“Don’t go to Galena,” the bartender advises. “Galena’s not a river town. It’s a tourist trap. You have to go to Chestnut Hill to see the river.”
“We’re going to the Mississippi Palisades in Savanna,” I respond. That’s a one-stoplight town 45 miles downriver from East Dubuque.
“Well, be sure to go to Poopy’s in Savanna. It’s a great biker bar."
North of Savanna, we swim in the Palisades.
—Sufjan Stevens, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!”
season in Illinois, when morels still poke their filigreed caps from the mulch in damp, shady woodlands. Atop the limestone cliffs of the Mississippi Palisades State Park rise old-growth elms and cottonwoods, their trunks forming a prehistoric creature with a thousand legs. English ivy, mayapple, and
