Andy Warhol said
everybody will have their fifteen minutes of fame. I seem to be getting
mine a few seconds at a time. This time it was a brief mention in a Chicago Tribune article about Starved Rock State Park, published in the May 24 "At Play" section.
At Wildcat Canyon: Photographer Nancy Stone and reporter Barbara Brotman.
It
was, as many things are, an accident: I'd headed down to Starved Rock
with my biker buddy Stan to go look at waterfalls, particularly some
that only run for a few weeks in the spring. While on the trail, we
bumped into Barbara Brotman and Nancy Stone of the Tribune, who
were also looking for falls with actual water. So, Stan and I led the
reporters over to LaSalle and Tonti Canyons, where they got some nice
pictures. Along the way, they asked us some questions, and some of the
answers made it into the paper. I was described as a "veteran Starved
Rock hiker" and a "substitute teacher/science fiction writer/bagpiper,"
which isn't a bad description.
I just wish I could have worked a
reference to The Last Protector into her story, because there is a connection between the book and this park. There's a scene about midway through the book, as Scrornuck, Jape and Nalia are making their way up the mountain to the "Alpine Lake Winter Sports Area," and they stop for lunch in a beautiful sandstone canyon. That canyon is lifted straight out of this park. Literally lifted, as the park is in Illinois, and of course the "Grand Taupeaquaah Themeworld Project" is in central Kansas (not to mention an alternate universe and a different century). In one of the scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor (you can read it here), the characters actually discover numbers and joints in the sandstone, from when the canyon was carefully dismantled and shipped some 700 miles. (At this point I should note that the various things my characters do in this canyon, particularly jumping off the cliff into the pool of water below, are dangerous and illegal in twentieth-century Illinois. Scrornuck and Nalia are trained professionals, and fictional characters to boot. Don't try this at home!)
Stan inspects the LaSalle Canyon waterfall
Ah, but which canyon got picked up and moved? Well, neither of the ones pictured on this page, alas. The stretch of upper Illinois Canyon that I used in the book, a series of pools ten to twenty feet across, separated by small waterfalls, is unfortunately no longer open to the public. The trail to the upper canyon, which I think was built back in the 1930s, has deteriorated to the point where the state no longer considers it safe. Oddly enough, while this trail's been allowed to fall apart, others in the park have been turned into something I'd expect to see in Disneyland--trails up near the lodge area are almost wheelchair-accessible, with long boardwalks and stairs. Starved Rock itself, a big sandstone bluff along the river, is now so thoroughly covered in boardwalks and scaffolding that you make the climb to the top, go all the way around, and return back to the parking lot/visitor center level without ever touching your foot to the earth. It's almost like a Virtual Reality State Park... but that's another whole tirade.