This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Don't bother to ask anyone in Chicago for directions to Rock Island. They don't know. They don't care. Their answer for any location in Illinois outside that growth at the tip of Lake Michigan is, "It's downstate."
Downstate could just as well be the uncharted Australian outback or northeast Greenland. "Do they have electricity out there yet," a Chicagoan might ask you. "Is there indoor plumbing?"
To be truthful, we downstaters are not too thrilled about Chicago, either. Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre have given all of Illinois a bad name in the world. Add to that the Chicago Bears. And the Cubs.
We know that the gangs infesting even our innocent small towns kids are sent out from Chicago, and that our taxes would he cut in half if we bulldozed the Windy City into Lake Michigan.
How I envy Minnesota up the river. Minnesotans are proud of their Twin Cities. For rural Minnesota, trips to Minneapolis and St. Paul are not visits so much as pilgrimages. Pilgrimages to shrines such as the Foshay Tower, Nicolet Mall, skywalks, Dayton's, The Humphrey Dome and the Twins: six of the seven wonders of the world. They raise their taxes to keep their Twin Cities clean. They send their kids to the University. They faithfully attend the Minneapolis Aquatennial in the summer and the St. Paul Winter Carnival in January.
Meanwhile, back on Rock Island, we suffocate in the shadow of Chicago. In 1916, Carl Sandburg described Chicago as "Hog butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads…stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
I wish Sandburg would let us Rock Islanders revise his poem to show a more downstate perspective. "City of Traffic Jams," we would sing, "Big Bully, Smogger, Player with People's pocketbooks, Clogger of Interstates."
In spite of all this, if you ask us downstaters about Chicago, we'll cheerfully repeat what Mark Twain said, "It's that character in Last of the Mohicans."
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
