oh friend, i trust you to look forward

and so, eventually i did leave chicago yesterday. i drove slow through the streets that i had come to know well enough to understand where i was...and not need to drive slow because i knew them. so i drove slow symbolically. or maybe habit, i dont know. all i know is that there was a pull to not drive away but the centrifugal force of the vehicle in motion won out the battle of wills. i found the expressway and headed east then south on interstate 55.

i will say this, my truck was happy to be driving for a long stretch at fast speeds. it was happy to get warmed up and have most of the ice fall away from it.

with my new friend dean, in alton.

however, gas has gone up since the last time i had to buy some. i dont know why, but i think it will be cheaper the further south i get or the warmer it gets.

i drove a stretch of about 300 miles, south to alton, illinois. i think it was the longest stretch of driving i had done on this entire trip - about 6 hours (there were some stops in there). i rolled into alton just after 6:pm and called my friend alison. it was strange to see her again. it was about 5 months earlier when i saw her last and so much had transpired in my life to get me to this point. i guess this is the beginning of the retrospective part of my trip. where i visit some places and people that i had earlier on this trip and try to reconcile who i was with who i am and become who i want to be.

or something deep like that.

i met alison at her parents house where she is staying for a week or so. she just got back from a trip to costa rica and is soon on her way to ireland. i certainly wasnt excited about the idea of staying at someone else's parents house so i had thought about just skipping over this place. or just stopping for a couple of hours and then driving on to little rock or dallas or something like that. but, she arranged for us both to stay with her friends liz and dean.

and so, after being at her parents house for a couple of minutes - petting the cat - we were of again heading to another strange house in a strange places filled with strangers. luckily i have this switch that i can turn on that will make me a funny person and fun to be around. i turned on this switch and fell into the favor of liz and dean rather quickly. i was only planning on staying in alton for two nights but by the end of our night together liz was offering for me to live in the unfinished basement of her house.

we were at their house for awhile, and then we went out to explore some alton establishments. we made a path to fast eddies. this is a period restaurant, and an alton landmark. the draw is that the food here is all the same price it was 25 years ago when they started selling food...the drink prices, however, have inflated. so we sat there for a few drinks, acclimating ourselves to one another and just having a good time.

after this i wanted to go to a place called norbs. i wanted this because they had been talking about it and tonight was 75 cent draft night. we were supposed to party this night - get wild - and i thought it would be an okay thing to get real drunk as a way to reintroduce myself to the hard life of the road. but, alton is a small town and the people i was with grew up here. which means that going to any bar (and there are only bars and casinos in alton) is a guaranteed invitation to spend some face time with the people you grew up with, went to high school with, and sometimes dont even like anymore.

nearly immediately upon arriving alison had picked out at least one person she wanted to avoid. dean had been a regular here before and knew a number of the patrons and the bar staff - he put on some butterfly wings and socialized a bit. liz spotted some girl who she had a spat with in high school (she beat up her fake baby in the see-how-well-you-can-take-care-of-a-fake-baby class) so she went to apologize for that. i found this entire scenario absolutely hilarious and fell right in. this being a small town, everyone thinks they know one another. so i fell into that and insisted that some people had met me here before and they fell for the rouse.

one of the people that i convinced we had met each other at this very bar a couple of weeks ago, my friend paul owens, was also the person that alison particularly did not want to see. i received some reprimanding looks for commiserating with this fool. we didnt stay there very long, i had played my favorite jukebox song but didnt get to listen to it. thats okay, the joy of the song is watching the people in the bar listen to it but i can content myself knowing that the tree falling in the forest will still make a sound if i am not there to hear it.

then we came back to liz and deans house and just hung out for awhile. we drank some more beer, they smoked some pot, and we just talked and it was fun. dean is a hilarious person. he reminds me of my step-father gordon albeit 25 years younger. he talks about some very random things and will just keep talking about them, even if no one is really paying attention. it is a good quality for him. he talks about random things like music and books. gordon focuses on the weather and sports, so it becomes very redundant and boring quickly.

something about being in the small town where everyone knows each other is the gossip. it is amazing, how in depth people are about people that are peripheral. who is married and divorced, birthdays, who got into a fight or is cheating on who. all of these things. i have never paid much attention to them, but i do enjoy hearing other people talk about these things. i find it interesting and funny.

bob wad

in the morning we played some wii fit. it was liz's birthday and she received this as a present. they set it up and we played this for some time. alison had gone to school and i was left alone with dean and liz - two people i had just met the previous night, in their home, alone. these are not situations that i like to get myself into, but everything was okay. being a morning person, i like to allow people to have their mornings with some sanctity. but here i was just hanging out. everything was okay.

when alison came back we went out for lunch and then proceeded on the grand tour of alton. the first stop on the tour was the statue and chair of robert wadlow. bob wad to those in the know. he has a statue and a chair because he is the tallest man in recorded history. and he was from alton. he stood 8' 11" and it is a fun tourist experience to stand next to this tall person and compare yourself. or sit in the very large chair and think about what you would say to such a tall man if you were to ever meet him. he died from a foot blister. strange.

after that we went to a cemetary to where there is a statue of an abolitionist newspaperman. then to missouri. alton is situated on the mississippi river at the

the antarctic ice wastes

missouri border. this trip was purely for my benefit. the mississippi had mostly frozen over and the surface of it looked as if you could walk across it. this was untrue, but the surface of the river was all jagged and like a frozen wasteland from the barges pushing through and shifting the ice. we went to an island preserve and i was able to get some good shots of the ice wastelands. it reminds me of what the ice wastelands from the mortal engines quartet (probably my favorite book series) would look like.

i had fun out here and was truly amazed by how thick the ice chunks were and the enormity of it all. after this we went to the square where lincoln and douglas had a debate. to refresh everyones memory, douglas won this debate. then to the piasa bird caves. the legend of the piasa bird is that 1000 moons before the pale faces arrived a great bird beast lived in this cave. it satisfied itself with lesser animals until some native americans stumbled into the cave and the bird ate them. then it had the taste for human flesh and all hell broke loose.

the piasa bird painting

eventually the native chief prayed and a solution to this piasa bird situation came to him. he would stand in front of the cave egging on the bird and twenty of his finest warriors would be in the wait - guerilla warfare style - to shoot the bird down with poison arrows. this rouse worked and the dying birds body cascading harmlessly into the river and sank to the bottom/floated away. convenient for them - no evidence left. however, the cave system was still in existence. dean and i shimmied around a fence and went on some amateur spelunking. i like adventure and was happy and scared to be in these caves. they were huge, and went very deep for a very long time. we only walked a couple hundred yards into them. there was detritus strewn around from the various parties of local teenagers and undoubtedly the population of people who called these caves home.

this was about the end of the tour. we drove past a mansion said to be haunted and apparently featured on ghost hunting shows. it wasnt very exciting. then we were back to the house. we played wii fit some more and then dean and liz went out for dinner to her sisters house to celebrate her birthday. alison and i hung back and after a little bit of hula hooping and other things we went out to do the alton bar scene. we went to the regal beagle where i ate the robert wadlow sandwich. we had a few drinks here and then we were on to the ranch house. we sat there for a drink and commiserated with the locals and then came back to liz and deans house to play some uno.

it took awhile to get the uno game started, what with all of these computers and the wii around. eventually we started the uno game, but we didnt play regular uno. we played some uno slap game that required a computer to tell everyone when to play and stuff. it was a bit confusing and not as much fun as regular uno. dean and i crapped out and then everyone was mad for a little bit. so we watched some late night television and spent more time on the computers. it is a nice change up to be here, a good start to life on the road again.

today, however, i continue heading south. my plan is to go to little rock, arkansas. i put out a feeler to a person i met from there a number of years ago, but after researching the weather i feel fairly confident that it is warm enough there at night to sleep in my truck if necessary. and i guess now i really start being on my trip again. these are real nice people that i got to fall in with and it is a great thing to regularly be surrounded by nice people and generally be taken care of. it will be a strange thing when i get back to "real life" and have to do something about it.