This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In patches of virgin Illinois woods near Rock Island, one can still find remnants of the Sauk Indian Trail at least two hundred years old. This trail once ran from the nearby Indian village of Saukenuk, across Illinois to the tip of Lake Michigan, and from there north to the English fort at Malden, Canada.
Eastern Canada had been the ancestral home of the Sauk before they were pushed west by the Iroquois, and they still retained some English loyalties and trade relations there after the American Revolution.
These Illinois trail remnants parallel later trails: the railroad that came west from Chicago in 1854 and Interstate 80 built in the 1960s. These three routes provide an object lesson on American culture. The Indian trail is narrow as it threads between the trees. Indian file still means single file, with one foot in front of another rather than side by side in order to disturb nature as little as possible. The four-lane interstate disturbs nature as it pleases, cutting through hills in order to get from New York to San Francisco without a stop sign.
Which should we admire? Americans are often accused of not living up to their ideals, but the problem is we have two sets of dreams. To control nature and to be at one with her. To live in the woods like Thoreau, content with little, and to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. What does "dominion over" mean?
We Americans want it both ways. "America the Beautiful" sings about purple mountain majesties, but it also celebrates alabaster cities gleaming from sea to shining—which a cynic might read as urban blight.
Several years ago, my family was camping at Mesa Verde near the cliff dwellings. At the next campsite sat a huge camper from New Jersey, also getting away from civilization. But not entirely. As I walked past the camper one evening, the back door was open, and inside were five or six people sitting around an artificial electric fireplace so as not to have to be bothered with real smoke, a perfect example of the double vision so common among us all.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
