Day 21 – Chester to Red Bud, IL

Walking through this region, probably any region, can get monotonous. I understand the arguments for bicycles; they’d make it much easier to cruise through 10 miles of soybeans and corn unscathed, and on to the next interesting thing.

There is something quite profound, I think, about the supremely slow-burn of a long-distance walk. For one, there’s a sense of scale and scope that, while easily understood, needs to be felt. Anyone who has flown over the country has stared downward and marveled at the limitless agriculture; anyone who has driven through Iowa or Nebraska or Kansas will remark on the incessant cornfields. But walking through them? Corn blocks the view and can make one feel like they’re walking through a tunnel; soy looks like a rippling green ocean, tucked within looming woods. Hours and days of this makes for an indelible impression, searing the shape and look of the land into one’s memory.

Second, the repetitive scenery has unpredictable but interesting impacts on one’s thought process. At its worst, it can be like cartoon hallway-chase scenes, where no matter how far one goes, the hallway–same as it ever was–continues unceasingly. When you’re in a bad place, it’s tortuous. In other cases, though, it becomes like a stage backdrop, making itself secondary but complementary to the production through its familiar recurrence. In other words, its predictability is freeing, allowing the walker to travel inward.

Third, the slow burn makes arrival or change more novel, more momentous. When you might encounter no more than one or two villages over the course of 30 miles, those mean a lot. When you’re slogging through 15 miles of corn and soy, and you encounter a small patch of lawn under a big tree (without a ‘no trespassing’ sign!), you almost shed a tear. A gas station shop with a small table and chairs inside is like a dream come true.

And occasionally, one is hit by a flash of whimsy that reframes the entire walk. Today, while walking near the Mississippi River after Chester, I passed a nice, old estate, including a large farmhouse and a series of smaller surrounding buildings. A sign announced that this was Pierre Menard’s house. I nearly lost my mind.

Try to keep up here: the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is famous for the literary device that he created called “fictions.” Unlike full-fledged short stories, Borges’s ficciones were essentially vehicles for exploring an idea, in a kind of hybrid essay-story format. In one famous example, Borges wrote a mock book review of an incomplete book, its author recently deceased. The man had been trying to rewrite Don Quixote. Not translate. Not write an updated version for contemporary times. He was trying to rewrite it, word for word–not by something so crass as copying it, but rather by engendering and inculcating the mindset necessary to have it emerge naturally.

Borges’s mock narrator, or perhaps Borges the literary figure, or possibly Borges the man himself, marvels at the author’s perceptiveness, the jarring insights he delivers, the true brilliance that he harnesses in a way that Cervantes never managed to attain. The words are the same, of course–that was the goal, after all!–but the context has shifted. Anyone who has ever spent more than a few minutes reading literary criticism will recognize the kinds of pompous “analysis” that Borges is tweaking here.

Anyway, here’s the point: the author of this new Quixote? Pierre Menard. I stood atop the banks of the Mississippi, trying to manage a severe case of dropjaw, as I imagined Borges’s early 20th-century Frenchman transplanted here, into the realm of Twain and Popeye, trying to manage the French/English/Indigenous clashes while carving out space to channel his own inner Cervantes.

Now, the internet will tell you that Borges links his Pierre Menard to a 19th-century Frenchman, Louise Menard, making Pierre the grandson of Louise, but I prefer my interpretation. The fictional book reviewer JL Borges wrote a critical piece on the incomplete and incorporeal rewrite of Quixote, authored by a loosely-inspired but nonetheless non-existent 20th century Frenchman, and I have now been to the house of his 19th-century French Canadian-turned American namesake (or perhaps the actual home of the author, though this would necessitate a critical reevaluation of the text by mock-Borges), who also happens to be the first Lieutenant Governor of Illinois.

See, this is why one should walk.

Technical Notes

• Multiple ADT waymarks along the pseudo-riverside walk past Chester, one on a 4-mile sign for the fort and another as the road turns inland towards Ellis Grove
• Don’t be surprised if prison guards come check in with you at some point along the first half of this walk
• The ADT between Chester and St. Louis is long and lacks much in terms of towns along the way. In theory, it’s intended to stick close to the Mississippi (I think), but it rarely actually gets you by the river.  I’ve opted to take a more direct tack northward, via Red Bud and Waterloo, instead