For installment number two in this travel series I take you on a trip across Illinois, with a stop in Springfield, the state capital. Springfield is about a three and a half hour drive southwest of Chicago, but you can add an extra 90 minutes if Chicago traffic is uncooperative (which, is common).

The trip is entirely across the flat midwestern prairie, where geographic landmarks, other than the horizon, are rare to non existent. Any romantic thoughts conjured by the idea of the golden prairies of artists’ imagery, literature, and movies should be put out of your mind. Getting to Springfield by car on Interstate Route 55 is as dull a trip as you could imagine. Leaving behind the 9 million people of metro Chicago requires traveling through over 50 miles of sprawl. You read that right, 50 miles, and that is the interesting part.

I55 starts out south of downtown moving through an industrial zone adjacent to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a trench constructed to shuttle Chicago’s sewerage away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River. Eventually, you pass into and through the massive and seemingly endless residential and commercial sprawl zone ringing the city. Probably 90% of this car-centric mess was created over the last 40 years. It is an incomprehensible tangle of roads surrounding Chicago as well as the historic cores of the region’s many, still charming, old railroad satellite cities and towns. Casinos have been added to a few of the poorest of these, in an effort to help prop up their failing finances and inject some life into them. In the mean time billions of dollars continue to be spent on more of the sprawl infrastructure that destroyed the old towns in the first place. After the subdivisions you start passing the big (and I mean very very very big) box warehouses. You pass through a several mile long zone of these giant box buildings lining both sides of the highway, some with hundreds of truck docks. There is always at least one new one being constructed with an assembly line like process. Sometimes they spend a little extra design effort by adding some decorative stripes or some jazzy angled detailing or a glass wall near the office area. But other than this, these buildings are more machine than architecture. They are there to move stuff in and move stuff out. No need to bother with trifling things like making them a nice place to be.

After an hour or two of driving we finally we leave the outer ring of sprawl and pass into the rural countryside. Rural is a generous description, because the sprawl never really ends in Illinois. Scattered subdivisions can be seen here and there, for most of the trip. These are combined with the dryvit hotels, gas stations, and fast food chains that cluster at almost every highway exit. Occasionally you see a smoke stack sending who knows what into the air. Endless rows steel truss towers march to the horizon carrying power lines here and there. Eventually the farms do take over the landscape. Theses are the farms that feed the world, the great American breadbasket. But, these are not the quaint family farms you might be imagining. These are massive industrial farms, growing thousands of tons of commodity crops like corn and soy. These crops are not sent to the produce stand. They are sent to processing mills to be turned into fuel for cars or corn syrup 0r other highly processed, highly unhealthy additives in packaged food. It is all quite depressing, except for the few miles where you pass through a massive array of wind turbines, which share the farmland about midway along the trip.

After an hour or two of farms, the sprawl comes back into the landscape, signaling that you are nearing Springfield. Springfield, as I noted is the State Capital. Its population of just over 117,000 people, anchors a metro of about 208,000. The skyline is dominated by the dull and aging , 30 story tower, of the Hilton Hotel. It is about 3 times taller than anything else in town. It upstages the gorgeous dome of the state house, the other prominent skyline landmark. I am sure the Hilton was once the silver bullet that was going to bring 24 /7 life to a dying city. It didn’t.

Downtown Springfield is still filled with a relatively dense cluster of attractive historic buildings. You can see the signs of past prosperity. But, like so many American cities, its downtown is dead. The streets are empty of people. Big wide open one way streets promise fast travel for anyone who wants to come into town. But they don’t come. In this sleepy downtown, a scattered restaurant or two, a lonely store, or a small cluster of tourists mock the bustling city that was once here and should still be here. Like most American cities, Springfield has been sacrificed for the car and for sprawl. Parking and big streets trump street life for people. Cities aren’t for people anymore. Cities just obstructions in the way of cars.

So, now that I have depressed you, I want to tell you about what is really nice about Springfield. As the home of Abraham Lincoln, this small midwest city is one of the most important historic sites in the country. It is worthy of a visit if you have the opportunity. Within just a few walkable blocks downtown, you will find the incredibly impressive, afore mentioned, Illinois Statehouse (recently renovated), as well as the beautiful, original Civil War era Illinois statehouse. Barak Obama officially announced his run for the presidency on the steps of this building. Across the street is Lincoln’s Law Office, an unassuming building mingled in with the regular city building fabric. Just a block further west is the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum. The library is one of the largest repositories of Lincoln archival material and papers in the country. The museum is full of very moving displays and life-size dioramas. It is one of my favorite museums. On the edge of downtown is the Lincoln Home. The house and the surrounding streets and buildings are restored to the way they were in Lincoln’s own time with dirt roads and wooden sidewalks. Each, house has a story plaque describing Lincoln’s neighbors and their relationship to him. It is an impressive experience, giving a genuine a sense of a simpler slower time and a deeper understanding of one of our most important leaders.

Springfield is a place of extraordinary history and is the capital of one of the 50 states in the most powerful nation on earth, ever. But, Springfield is dead, just empty, just surplus. Our cities are disposable. We hold on to a few trinkets of history, as they did here in Springfield and that is supposed to be OK. We save the destination but not the place. If you only have destinations everything in between ceases to matter. We no longer value place in our cities. Beauty and communal urban life are not deemed necessary for our daily lives in modern America. Getting places fast, at will is what is important in America. Everything in between is unimportant. This is what Springfield makes me think of.

I was not sure how to end this travel installment until BRO commenter ‘Sweetlinolnsmullet’ suggested in the intro story, that I am a hypocrite for using a car on this trip. It is a comment I expected and one that gives me a perfect closer to this segment. I suppose I could have traveled by air instead. That would have been prohibitively expensive for us and not necessarily more environmentally sustainable. What about trains you say? Well, America’s passenger rail service has been systematically dismantled over the last 60 years. Many of the places we travels to don’t even have train service anymore. For those which do, service is rare and sporadic. Truth be told, I would have had a much nicer vacation if it were still remotely possible to travel by train in America. Sit back and relax, sleep, read, or simply look out the window as the country rolls by, YES PLEASE! But no, our car culture won’t allow that. We can’t fund trains and highways so highways win. That makes me a hypocrite because I am forced to live with sprawl and the system that it yields. I don’t get to choose. Sprawl was chosen for me before I was even born. Instead of a relaxing train trip I get to stop at some seedy roadside gas station every few hundred miles for a first hand experience of the sad life of so many people who only know sprawl and have had the life sucked out of them by American car culture and its oppressive environment needed to make it work. So sad that many of these people will never experience anything else. Sad that the incredibly beautiful places I would soon be visiting are the exception rather than the norm these days. But yea, I am a hypocrite. I took a one-time long distance trip by car that adds up to fewer miles traveled than a substantial number of people drive every single month of the year.