A day’s drive from Chicago, exploring a very different Illinois
We left Chicago before sunrise. By noon, the Shawnee Hills cloaked the horizon and the flags — American, Confederate, Trump, Thin Blue Line — spread like kudzu along the highway, clustered like knotgrass in the side streets of tiny Omaha and Enfield and the scrappy thickets of hickory and pine. We hadn’t yet entered the national forest — our final destination — but it was clear we had arrived somewhere else, somewhere vastly different from whence we came. Some call it the “Illinois Ozarks.” Others call it “Egypt” or “Little Egypt,” a nickname derived, some say, like the nearby town of Cairo, from the fertile bottomlands that once resembled its namesake. Philosopher Baker Brownell, in his penetrating 1958 book, called it simply “The Other Illinois.”
“From this Illinois a black report drifts northward now and then, foggy with rumor of a mine disaster, a massacre, or some other desperate instance of life and death, but that is about all that most people hear of it,” he wrote. “This southern Illinois sits on the back doorstep as poor as Job’s turkey, as beautiful as redbud trees in spring. It may be more passionate, more violent, stubborn, stringy; still it is a sweeter Illinois with soft southern linguals, magnolia blossoms, and a generous heart.”
