The Journey Not The Destination

1 The Journey Not the Destination I lived in Northern Illinois for many years; for the last two I worked at a plant in another town. My commute was 30 miles one-way on a mostly two-lane road. I, as a Southern girl, had always felt 10 minutes was a far enough commute to work and now I was spending at least an hour and a half a day on the road. Rockford is about a hundred miles west of Chicago just at the northern border of the state. To get to Harvard, where the plant was, I had to drive east. The ‘highway’ ran along the northern edge of a forest preserve, with farms along the other side. Until I began driving down the road regularly, I never knew just how much wildlife still fluttered, hopped, and leapt around the area. However much I enjoyed my work, the journey was often better than the destination. Each day I drove north along Rockton Avenue, the main road a block from my apartment. Quickly I left behind the small stores, the groceries and drugstore, the little strip malls, and drove into the fields that surrounded the city. Depending on the time of year, there were tilled fields or young green shoots, ear-laden corn stalks or the dried-up browned stalks the wind howled through on October days and nights. Those fields were an impossible black, rich and moist. The ground smelled alive and nothing like the red sandy clay with which I had grown up. The only black soil I had seen before had come in bags from the garden center; the thought that entire fields held that soil, soil that would compress when squeezed but would fall apart again, soil that smelled rich and somehow ripe, never seemed normal to me. I remembered the bags and bags of soil my mother had worked into the clay of her yard to get her roses to bloom; she could have grown miracles in these fields. At the intersection of one unmarked road and another, I turned east. Farms faced the north edge of the road while the forest preserve ran along the south. Old, possibly

2 virgin, forest bumped against fences that strained to keep it from spilling over onto the narrow road. Trees stretched tall into the sky, deciduous for the most part, with few evergreens. All four seasons held the stage in Northern Illinois. Below the spreading branches was the second layer: the underbrush. This was true forest underbrush, as it had not been encouraged to overgrow. The sparse saplings battled with shrubs and vines for space and light. Scraggly grasses shot up through Nature’s own mulch – leaves and other detritus from season supplanting season. The sunlight flickered through the branches, a natural strobe in the bright summer months. Hawks glided high over the trees, riding the currents, waiting for some small mammal to make a fatal mistake and become dinner. Occasionally I thought I saw an eagle. Conjuring flight in my mind, I could feel the wind ruffling my pinions. Trying to soar with the hawk, as he effortlessly adjusted his glide with the tips of his wings, sometimes made me less than perfectly focused on the road. To bring myself back to earth, I searched for those who stayed on the ground: the raccoons, wild turkeys, and always the deer. The turkeys were never actually in the preserve; the times I caught a glimpse of the flock they were usually in the fields on the farms. I imagined that those humans, with their sowing and tilling, made the ground more hospitable for the flock. A family of raccoons lived on one side of the road or another. No one I spoke to was ever sure; the little family of father, mother, and babies would cross the road almost every day. You eventually planned for the traffic to stop during the little parade; they tended to trek across in the afternoon just as our shift was going toward work. They would pad across, the larger two in the lead with the small ones bringing up the rear. Somehow, these raccoons, with their dark masks and tiny-fingered paws, were almost

3 like friends who lived along the route. One day, toward the end of summer, I noticed that there was one less baby. The family’s loss was a hot topic in the break rooms that week. Then there were the deer. Sleek, timid, these mostly-brown furred creatures were breathtaking – in many ways. Watching a doe and her speckled fawn daintily taste the grasses springing from between the trees was heartwarming. The same doe and fawn leaping the fence and bounding across the road in front of you was heart pounding. The cows and sheep (even the llama) on the farms stayed politely in their own fields. Angus, Hereford, and more types of cow than I thought existed, black and white and mixed, were munching and chewing their cud most days. The flock of sheep that lived in a field on one of the curves of the road was always a strange sight; for some reason, their flanks were sprayed blue. The ear notches and tags I could understand, but blue rears were too strange; there was still a hint of blue on their skins after shearing. A highlight of the trip was if the llama were out of their barn. They looked rather like shaggy camels without humps. Rumor had it an ostrich – or possibly emu – farm was close by, but no one I knew ever saw one. Days too wet or cold for the fauna to stir dragged on forever, each mile worse than the last. When the flocks, herds, and families were about, the trip seemed to fly; it was over far too soon. For me, the joy of the trip was usually in the driving not in the arriving.