TRAVELING THE UNKNOWN SOLO

All right, Springfield isn't Paris and downstate isn't Tuscany; but about every March I try to celebrate my birthday by including a special kind of solo. A lazy drive from one of the world's most vigorous centers of steel and glass to experience one of the world's most fertile, black-earth-basins of food production. The byways between Chicago and the hamlet of Cairo can be an Aladdin's journey for any city boy...

Can't travel them all, just enough to breathe something besides asphalt and exhaust fumes. There's the fragrance of Columbine, Cone Flowers and Nodding Onions; not to mention the pungent smell of the turned earth, the grazing cows and the mounds of feed. All missing in our cities, but each a little link with the planet the rest of so take for granted.

And there are the winged surprises like the Harrier Hawk, the Harlequin Duck and the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. Back here, to find a Robin in March is a special discovery; to find scores of different species flooding the downstate skies is an everyday delight.

No, I'm not going to move downstate. Wouldn't know what to do once I got there. But what a spectacular outdoor museum for a kid who's never really plunged his city-neat hands into the soil, or watched the furrowed fields yield up their gifts. If only once a year, it's a magic carpet trip that makes me feel just a little like Tom and Huckleberry. Finding and feeling their way through little empires of natural ecstasy. Whereas the city confines you, the countryside releases you.

And so this city boy plays Thoreau for a few hours. The rolling fields of planted crops...the parade of red barns...the speckling of pickup trucks and tractors gathering together for their annual victory march. It's something you shouldn't forget to feel. After all -- they and that all came well before this and us!

Like visiting the distant aunts and uncles you never see, but whose genes you share. Against your first instincts, it's usually a trip well worth taking...