Illinois & Missouri Travelogue

We started our vacation in Alton, Illinois, near where Tom's aunt lives. It's a town on the Mississippi River. We all drove upriver to Grafton, a smaller town with lots to do. You can walk along the river or watch it from high on the bluff. This is just downstream from where the Illinois River joins in. I tried to imagine Huck Finn floating by on his raft and camping on the island.

The countryside was pretty and typical of Illinois, with a lot of slightly rolling farms, and trees along the edges of fields. We visited an orchard, which was offering both apples and pumpkins. We liked the gourds.

After a couple of days, we made the six-hour drive to the south edge of Missouri and the town of West Plains. Here's a picture of the sleepy sidewalks leading away from the town square.

West Plains is a town of about 10,000, much bigger than it was thirty years ago. For some reason the area is thriving. New businesses and houses have continued to be built throughout the past two years in spite of the economy. My aunt lives thirteen miles south of town on state highway 17, a two-lane blacktop road paved in the 1950s. Driving out of West Plains, you pass some century-old fieldstone houses built of reddish rocks dug up, probably, around the foundation of the house when they were building it. There are plenty of new houses on highway 17 too, mostly brick ranch houses. People leave most of the trees around their new houses so the yards look natural. It's a nice area and nothing like the hillbilly stereotype. This is true of the Ozarks in general. There are plenty of old-timers who rarely leave the county, speak in a unique Ozark dialect, hunt deer and turkey and other things every year, but they also go out of their way to help neighbors and strangers, and they're not defensive toward the city people who move into the area for retirement. The men in my family there are carpenters, so I guess they like the opportunity to build for the newcomers and natives alike.

My aunt and Tom and I went for a walk in the woods in two or three different places on our first day. We saw a lot of nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, and a red-bellied woodpecker. We loved watching him hammer with his head, which had an amazing range of motion. The birds wouldn't sit still for a photo, though, unlike this garter snake:

In the Vanderhoef Conservation Area near Lanton, we walked along the west fork of the Spring River. My favorite thing in the whole world, a creek. Ozark creeks are lined with sycamores. I love their rustly leaves and their white flesh that is exposed when the bark peels off. I also think they smell good, though I've never heard anyone else agree with me that you get a nice smell when you stand under a sycamore. I don't have a very sensitive nose, usually, but I always know when I'm under a sycamore without looking up.

We were lucky to have a warm, sunny day, so I had to wade. Ozark creeks, being spring fed, are always warm enough to walk in, unlike the glacier-fed streams here in Washington. Plus, they smell good. Algae grows, but the water flows and is refreshed by springs along its travels. The creeks have a clean organic smell that always takes me back to catching crawdads and swimming in my aunt and uncle's creek when I was young. To stand in the clear water with my feet on the brown gravel, to smell the water below and the trees above, to hear the green leaves rustle and the birds call and peck, to bend down and watch silver minnows swim by or a crawdad zip away backwards, is perfect heaven, a merging with nature, knowing that the places I love are still there, other people love them enough to protect them, I can always come back to the Ozarks and feel transparent, porous, completely joyous, with the natural world flowing through me.

After our walk and wade, we stopped by a tiny rock church that I think is amazing, with tapered supports all the way around, all built of the same local rock. Stuart Union Church is its name. Here's the outside…

…the back, with a woodpile and a plain cross of branches, I wonder why it's out here?

…one of the windows, peering through to a window opposite…

…and the pulpit:

Behind the church is a tiny cemetery, not unusual. The next day, we decided to visit some springs I hadn't seen before. The Ozarks are full of springs, which continue to be the most beautiful and spiritually awesome sights I've ever seen. As much as I've loved seeing the mountains and natural arches of the West, rugged coastlines, deep lakes, and the Parisian skyline, nothing makes me want to prostrate myself like clear spring water flowing silently out of a shadowy blue-green pool at the edge of a river.

This spring was unusual in that its point of origin is concealed by a stone tunnel and a mill, Hodgson's Water Mill, built over it more than 100 years ago.

Because the water cascades out of the side of a bluff instead of bubbling up out of the ground, it was used to power a grinding wheel. You can look down beside the water wheel and see the water pouring out of the stone arch. Then it fills a quiet pool before flowing off as a medium-sized creek suitable for skipping stones, fishing, and of course, wading. My aunt got so involved in skipping stones, as Tom and I explored the gravel beach, that it looked like she had forgotten us. Eventually all three of us managed to skip one all the way across.

We decided next to try to find a spring that my aunt hadn't seen for a long time, one of nine called Blue Spring. We pulled into a campground on the north fork of the White River which, although the weather was warm and sunny, had only one tent among three campsite loops. This was true of all the beautiful, wooded campgrounds we saw. If you want to do some uncrowded camping before Memorial Day or in the fall, try the Ozarks. We had a hard time finding the spring because the signs are not very frequent, big, or clear, but that's ok because it gives you a nice sense of discovering a secret. It was at the end of an inconspicuous trail off of the last campground loop road. We tramped down some old stone stairs and up some more and followed a trail along the edge of the river. The river was wide enough to be sunny even though it was surrounded by leaning, arching trees, and a high bluff on the far side:

We found the spring within a quarter of a mile. It was so tranquil, and the adjoining river was so clear itself, that a hiker in a hurry could have gone by without noticing that it was a spring. It was in a little cove off of the main flow of the river and had just a hint of the telltale blue-green color that makes springs look so different from the surrounding water:

That's my aunt sitting on the edge. We both love to sit and gaze into the clear water. This is one of my favorite springs because it's so tranquil, because it's surrounded by such a beautiful river setting, and because you can get close enough to sit down and dip your feet, which I did. The tranquility and clarity of the water, even though it's rising under pressure, is part of what awes me, makes me long to throw myself into the water and float. (But it's only 58 degrees.) The pool here is just deep enough so that the upward pressure of the spring doesn't give it a boiling appearance like Greer Spring (another favorite) has. Whether or not you can see a "boil" also has to do with the width of the channel the water is flowing through. This one must be big enough not to speed up the water very much. Maybe it would look different after a rainy season when more groundwater would be emerging from the same channel.

The next day: another spring. This one is called Big Spring, and it's the biggest spring in the Ozarks, gushing almost 12 million gallons of clear water per hour. It emerges from the bottom of a bluff just off of the Current River in Van Buren, Missouri, and on our visit it looked very blue:

The trail allows you to walk right up to the source of the spring, cross it, and explore the bluff on the other side. I had bought an old glass bottle at a flea market back in Illinois, so I filled it with spring water right out of the mouth of this one, to take home as an inspirational souvenir. The bottle is clear with just a hint of blue, perfect for reminding me of the natural color and clarity of the deep spring.

Again the nearby campgrounds were deserted and the old stone lodge was closed for the season, so we had the trails to ourselves. We walked along the edge of the Current River downstream from the spring, with the river on our left…

…and the rocky woods on our right:

The rough rock shelves that thrust out of the hillsides are so ancient looking that you can just imagine the Ozarks as a mountain range so old that it has worn down to foothills. I don't know if that's a geological fact or not, but it looks as if segments of the earth's backbone are poking out everywhere you look.

And for our final trip highlight, here's a picture of the Spring River at Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, just below the spring and the dam. The river holds the blue-green color of the spring for a mile or so downstream so it's an especially beautiful river.

Mammoth Spring is the second-largest spring in the Ozarks, producing nine million gallons per hour, but you can't see the "boil." The area was marshy and was dammed long ago for electrical power. The surrounding area is a state park with a visitor center, lots of picnic spots, and geese looking for a handout. The dam and the landscaping make the spring resemble a pretty, blue, manmade lake, but you appreciate the power of the spring when you look over the side of the dam and see how much water there is:

Spring River gets most of its water from that one spring. Mammoth Spring is the name of both the spring and the town. It's on the Missouri-Arkansas border, about 40 miles from where my aunt lives now. My mom was born and is buried in this town. Her mother, my Granny, had us sprinkle her ashes into the Spring River because she loved it so much.

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