At 4:15 on a mid-June afternoon, it is 99 degrees in the shade. The digital sign in front of a small-town bank across the road says so. Just in time for my annual trek home, a heat wave has swept in from the Great Plains to settle on the Midwest for corn-growing season.
Since I visited last, folks added something new to the local lexicon. The “heat index,” printed with Faustian glee in the Peoria Journal Star every morning, combines humidity and temperature to create a distinctly Midwestern mark of misery:
“For example, at 95 degrees with 80 percent humidity, the heat index is 136. The heat feels like 136 degrees Fahrenheit,” the paper instructs. “But at 100 degrees with 50 percent humidity, the heat index is only 120.”
I’m on a day trip, a drive up Highway 29, one of central Illinois’ two answers to Pacific Coast Highway, searching for a Vermont-style country inn, lunch and the soul of Peoria.
You know the place: “Will it play in Peoria?” The butt of vaudeville jokes, All-American city, test market to the nation, and so on.
Peoria is Middle America–slow-paced, provincial, myopic–and that’s why I escaped as a young man, first to Chicago and now, for nearly a decade, to Southern California. After my father died in 1987, I figured my next trip to Peoria would be for my mother’s funeral. Even Dad didn’t stick around: His ashes are buried in my mother’s family plot in Erie, Pa.
My brother, his wife and daughter were already in New York (they later moved to Colorado Springs), and my mother loves to travel. So I figured we could see each other plenty on trips to Alaska or Mexico, New York or Prague. No need to trifle with Peoria.
Yet she chafed at her boys. It was our duty, she said, to return for the holidays. We’d cemented that obligation when we decided to move thousands of miles from home. We disputed her logic.
I stubbornly stayed in California, but we reached a truce: We agreed to travel together.
Two years running, she passed on motor-homing through Canada with friends. She made reservations, then canceled, for a weeklong cruise. She just felt too unsure of herself, physically.
Three years ago, just before her 70th birthday, I relented. I was coming home to run in a Steamboat Days race, I told my mother. I remembered it from 20 years ago as an appendage to a downtown summer fair. Since then it’s become a draw for world-class runners tuning up for fall races.
I was startled to see her, to see her at 70. A Parkinson’s shake would overtake her when she felt pressed. Some days, she just stayed home rather than face clerks or waitresses whose impatience only exacerbated her shaking.
I decided then to return, twice a year if I could. I’d come back every summer to run, and perhaps every Christmas, too. So it was that this year, after I’d made my reservations, she dropped a bomb:
“Would you mind very much if I wasn’t in Peoria when you visited?” Her older sister’s son had rented a villa in the French Pyrenees for them for the month of June. Who could object?
Canceling the flight was more trouble than it was worth. And by now I was eager to see what charms had escaped my notice but held her and a cadre of loyal friends in Peoria.
A half-dozen mostly retired couples, these friends call themselves the GOOFs, for Grand Old Order of the Flamingoes. The name gives homage to a mysterious prankster who has been planting garish plastic birds on their lawns for years. They travel together, gather for holiday feasts and hold tight through tragic deaths that seem to have struck every family. And they like Peoria.
So, I set out to turn obligation into vacation. To find a great country inn in the farm country that encircles the town and lends it an insular but steadfast character. To have some fun.
I visited travel agencies, coffee shops, newsstands seeking advice for a good day trip. Nothing much out there, folks said, it’s kind of boring. I kept trying.
In Mobil’s 1994 travel guide, I found a fetching description of the Spoon River Valley Scenic Drive. I bought a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 classic, “Spoon River Anthology,” which tells the dark secrets of a fictional small town and is the progenitor of works as varied as “Our Town” and “Twin Peaks.”
The drive starts 20 miles west of town on a two-lane highway. Even though I’d spent 20 years here, I didn’t know where to start. I asked a clerk. She didn’t know, either, and told me to ask the manager, Crellin.
“Why, you can’t go out there now,” Crellin told me, aghast. “That’s only in the fall.”
“But, I’m here now. Why can’t I go?”
“Well, in the fall, that’s when people come out; they set up craft booths and food stands along the whole route. The trees are turning. But there’s nothing out there now.”
I persuaded her to trace a route on my map and point me in the right direction. She was right about the trip, and she was wrong.
Little towns like Ellisville were deserted in the wrenching summer heat. But rolling hills shouldered the Spoon River beautifully along its narrow, ambling course. Bright fishing dories dotted the banks. A spectral, white crane stood in the shallows at one spot, a harbinger of understanding.
Emboldened, the next day I struck out for a second day trip up Highway 29, along the bigger Illinois River. I still hadn’t found a good country inn, and I never did. I lost more money on the river’s floating casino than I care to share. It was so hot and humid on race day that I didn’t finish the Steamboat Days 15-kilometer run.
But I came to understand what my mother and the GOOFs seemed to intuit: that the soul of a place resides in its people and in the joys we find there.
After the visits and the years, I see a place more complicated than the simple town I fled. In the complexity, I see why people choose to live there.
My mother and her sister so enjoyed their month in the French Pyrenees that they vowed to spend four or five months a year together–half the time in Peoria. She, my brother, his family and I gathered in Colorado for Christmas this year, together for the holidays for just the second time since my father died.
We’ll find our way to Peoria again, too. I’ll be there next summer, testing the heat index.
