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Illinois' Great River Road in the summertime.
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Mid-week crowds are light at The Loading Dock in Grafton, Ill.
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Weekends are SRO at Fast Eddie's in Alton; during the week, negotiating a seat is easy and the beer's just as cold.
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The cable-stayed Clark Bridge across the Mississippi River, now 20 years old, is beautiful in the daytime.
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And at night
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A field of Queen Anne's Lace. Once known as "Wild Carrot," the carrots we eat today were originally cultivated from this plant.
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Lowry's Shigaraki-style tokkuri and "the final flowering act of summer," Queen Anne's Lace.
Summer’s gone.
Yes, you had ambitious plans. And yet, the season dribbled out while you were not looking. May started leaking at little more than a plop’s pace into June right after Memorial Day. Then, by midsummer’s solstice the dripping swelled into a steady stream. It gurgled across the Fourth and at St. Swithin’s Day it was swirling and gushing, the September cataracts of Labor Day looming and too late to paddle out of the flow. You had the best of intentions, contemplating that cross-country trip, the cruise, the camping trip. Never got around to any of it. Now, you’re hoping to wedge in a weekend at a bed and breakfast somewhere in the Ozarks.
Good luck with that. For the moment, why not try something a little more manageable? A getaway where you can sleep late and still be home by the afternoon. It’s easy. Although, to be fair, the highlight of the jaunt is the opportunity to look at weeds.
Go across the river and turn left, up to Grafton, on the Great River Road. In another couple of months this stretch of highway’s going to be clogged with leaf-lookers. They and their touristy kind will also be threatening the maximum legal capacity of places like The Loading Dock and every eatery and bar from Alton to Grafton. Now, though, in the lazy, baked heat of late summer, the road’s open. In mid-morning, nearly empty. The asphalt wriggles and dances in waves of an August sun that shimmers off it. A distant smoke of dust and pollen softens the chalky bluffs and the sprawling, meandering bends of the river. Barges appear to be poised still on the water’s surface, the churning of their propellers just idling against the current of chocolate molasses.
Eckert's, just outside Grafton, is a legitimate destination, an excuse for the day’s excursion. Something will be ready for picking there. You’ll pay for the privilege. It’s odd in a way. Though you get a sense of satisfaction watching the basket fill with the fruits—literally—of your labor. So it’s worth it. The freeze last winter, stealing in for midnight vandalism long after it should have left the land, stunted the peach crop for the most part. Undulating rows of brushy blackberry canes, though, are bent over, top-heavy with their crop. The berries are oily black and ripe. They poke up like bruised thumbs from the spiky vines. No stoop labor this; they’re at chest height, ready to be plucked—professional pickers will tell you ripeness is a given if the berry comes free without any tugging. When blackberries loosen without a struggle the sugar inside is swollen, straining against the fruit’s skin, juicy; all the sweeter in that they’re still warm when you toss one in your mouth and your tongue is stained with August.
Go early enough the temperatures won’t wilt you while you amble up and down the blackberry hedge rows, picking. That way you can spend an hour or so, filling a couple of baskets that will be perfect for crisps and crumbles and, if you’ve got the energy and enthusiasm to make the crusts, pies. Then head back down the river, back to Alton, for lunch. There are all sorts of good eateries there. On the list of Things Every St. Louisan Should Do, a meal at Fast Eddie’s Bon Air is one of them. It’s always surprising to run across a local who’s never been there. Lunch during the week is a good time to go; the crowds aren’t overwhelming. The pace, even when it’s full, is slow. That free popcorn, the salty hunks of meat; they’re all fairly transparent incitements to your palate to wash them down with chilly beer.
Fast Eddie’s not open until one on weekdays. If you need to kill some time until then, drop in at Mississippi Mud Pottery, just down the street. It’s a co-op, with the work of several local potters and other artists for sale. We bought a perfect little Shigaraki style tokkuri, for serving sake, the surface speckled with chicken grit to give it a rough texture, that fits beautifully in the hand and practically begs to be touched, the color an earthy umber, like a farm field turned over in November.
On the way home, just across the Clark Bridge, the one we all think of as the “new bridge” despite the fact it’s been around a full decade this year, is the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary. It is a joint operation of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Audubon Society. The main building sits on the edge of a swampy backwater lake of the Mississippi. The flat glass of limpid water is rippled by a Trumpeter Swan or two; the black, marled shores are studded with a heron or egret, motionless and solitary, here and there. Again, when the eagles soar down from the north next February, the roads through the sanctuary and the visitor’s center will be jammed. On this day, you have the center largely to yourself. It’s nice. The collection of antique decoys alone is worth the visit, as are the walnut cups of hummingbird nests also on display. Massive windows look out onto the marsh. Spotting scopes are set up. At this time of day at this time of the year, there is little in the way of birdlife upon which to spy. The torpor of summer has settled in. Animals estivate, outwaiting the heat in a seasonal siesta. August is like a month-long afternoon nap for much of the animal world. Birds are sitting out the rest of the season, exhausted from rearing young or contemplating the upcoming trip south.
Step outside the center and the heavy air carries the raspy saw of crickets and katydids and the rustle of a breeze that brushes listlessly across the dry swamp grasses. There are trails that lead right down to the water and across the low wetlands. But it’s hot. And you’ve already picked at Eckert's and you can feel the dried perspiration tacky on your skin and the car’s air conditioner is beckoning with a pull more powerful than that frosty glass of beer back at Fast Eddie’s.
Head home; there’s still plenty of day left. And here’s the reason for the trip. It’s right there, all along the highway, 67, and it runs for a few miles, from East Alton until you get close to the I-270 exchange. It’s flourishing on the broad shoulders of road, shoulders left, blessedly, un-mowed by the state. Queen Anne’s lace, wispy white clouds of it, thigh high. It nods slightly in the wind the cars generate. Underneath the gossamer spreads of lace blossoms delicate as sugar snow is a carpet of red clover, already withered, the blossoms pale as if they’ve been dipped in bleach, the green leaves washed out, ragged. The clover’s moment in the summer sun has come and gone. Most of the other wildflowers along here have peaked and faded as well this late into the summer. Only the feathery rounds of cupped lace are still bright, the tiny clusters of flowers floating like little bird’s nests. The lace, nearly alone, has this season to itself. Queen Anne’s lace is the final flowering act of summer.
Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t any kind of prairie repristination. The lace is an import. A plant stowaway, an illegal botanical immigrant that sneaked in and has made this place home. The red clover did much the same, though it was given a pass for its value as a pasture crop. There probably isn’t a lot of flora on those shoulders that would have been recognizable to the Sauk or Osage who roamed this region.
Queen Anne’s lace is a romantic name for what’s just an impoverished cousin of the carrot, one that originated on the dry and dust-ridden steppes of eastern Russia. It’s more prosaically known as Devil’s plague. It’s a noxious weed to farmers and even to suburban landowners, if their yards sprout it along the edges where it hides until the flowers emerge. Early settlers accidentally introduced Queen Anne’s lace to North America; later on, women used a tea hopefully brewed from its blossoms as a contraceptive. Its skinny finger of taproot is tenacious, determined enough to anchor itself and stay and support the gauzy white blooms in the nutritionally bankrupt soil along the roadway. The stems are wiry, tough, stringy. They can dull a mower’s blade and maybe that’s the reason the shoulders here have been left alone. Or maybe it’s that somewhere in the bureaucracy of the Department of Transportation lives a soul that wants this flower, weed though it is, to have a chance to be appreciated.
You cannot slow down on this ribbon of highway. It’s too dangerous. Trucks are trundling along. Motorists—you’re the only one here simply for a day’s retreat—are going from Illinois to Missouri and are in a hurry to get there. And while you could stop in one of the parking lots of businesses along the way, get out and stroll through the weedy groves, you do not. It’s hot. You must keep driving. And those roaring past would think you odd.
The cloud drifts of the weedy white filigree go by at fifty miles an hour. Fleeting. Gone before you can really take them in. Beautiful, though you may not ever have taken the time to notice them or give them your attention as a thing of loveliness. They slip past, leaving just a blur of memory. Then they’re gone.
Like summer.
