Whenever I hear about the Mississippi River, I think of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn floating down the mighty river on their makeshift raft. Oh how I miss the days of my childhood when I sat down with ol’ Mark Twain and devoured every word he wrote. Incidentally Mark Twain is one of the powerful forces that helped unlock my mind, not with the popular Tom Sawyer books but with a more obscure short story called “The Mysterious Stranger”. Check it out if you get the chance.

I visited the Mississippi for the first time with some friends in September of 2006. My target was actually a small town called Galena. It’s supposed to be a winter sports destination, quite exciting considering Illinois is mostly flat. I also had hopes of a hot-air balloon ride but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time for that and I had a hunch the season was over. Suffice to say that the only type of skiing I assume can be done is cross-country skiing. Which I can’t stand. Nevertheless, Galena was a charming little town that I didn’t have time to visit but hopefully will be able to at a future date.

Before we reached Galena, we made a detour to the Mississippi Palisades State Park. This forest preserve is located right along the eastern shore of the Mississippi River and the whole thing is high up like a sort of plateau. We drove inside the park (which was very well kept) and then up the main road which winded up to the top of the plateau. Along the road, there were various strategic observation spots that overlooked the great River beyond. We picked one of these spots and spent about an hour admiring the magnificent vista that spread before us, seemingly to the ends of the Earth.

This spot is where I took the photos which follow. Sadly it’s the only place I photographed that day. My excuse is the little time that we had at our disposal and the fact that we spent most of the day driving.

Here, I got my first glimpse of the Mississippi. Even though this was just a tiny section of the river, it was grand nonetheless. It curved like a shiny giant snake to the north and south, finally disappearing into the hazy horizon. I could see vast marshes and a railroad along its shores. A steel bridge spanned across it in the south. And in the air, a lone bald eagle circled. I felt cocooned by nature, surrounded by it for hundreds of miles. There were signs of civilization in the distance, of course, but there was not a single sound of it.

Though I could stay in that spot for hours on end, we needed to move on. After we passed through Galena, we continued north and then west, over another steel bridge that crossed the Mississippi and into another small town: Dubuque, Iowa. I don’t know anything about it but to me it looked like the typical old industrial-port town, with it’s multitude of red-brick buildings, tall smoke stacks and wharfs. It also looked deserted, as if time had suddenly stopped - or at the very least slowed down - decades ago, when trade ships, barges and passenger ferries still moved briskly up and down the river. There were preciously few people on the clean streets and I deeply regretted that the lack of time and the swiftly setting sun did not permit me to stroll down those same streets with my camera.

We spent the final hour of daylight inside a casino. There is a floating casino in Dubuque, on an old steamboat, much like the one Mark Twain piloted such a long time ago. I immediately hit the slots and by the time we had to go, I was in profit, if only by three dollars.

The journey back to Chicago was a three-hour night drive.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel, Landscape, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.