NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL: VANDALIA, ILLINOIS, FEBRUARY 2, 2003 - (2)

I arrived in Vandalia about

12:30 p.m. I took lunch - General Tso's chicken - at the Chinese restaurant out where Interstate 70, Highway 51, and Highway 40 all congeal. It was as good a batch of General Tso's chicken as I've been served anywhere, in a place devoted mostly to take-out, with plastic silverware and foam plates, cans of pop, Formica table tops. The place is a little hidden treasure for those of us who like a sauce that bites back.

There really is a heat wave. I had to take my coat off and leave it in the car for the walk into the restaurant for lunch. This is not North Dakota.

When I stepped back outside into the lovely afternoon, I wondered if Vandalia is migrating north and west along the Interstate. Fast food places, the grocery store, the motels at the intersection of I-70 and Highway 51.

Walmart and Ponderosa and another development of businesses along Highway 40 a mile or so to the west. Downtown I count store fronts that look empty along the main drag, which is Gallatin Street, not Main Street. There are a couple braces of nice Harley Davidsons in front of a watering hole downtown. There are some ups and downs to the topography of Vandalia, some turns and curves, twists and bends, as if the city were a major river town, when all I see is the Kaskaskia. Perhaps the Kaskasia is more major than I think.

I cross what I'll call the "Going to the Sun Bridge" near the original Illinois statehouse downtown. When was this bridge built, why was it built to point you at the sky as you start to cross, why hasn't it been replaced? A set of railroad tracks passes beneath. If one is headed north, there is a stop sign right at the end of the bridge, where the cross street has the right of way. Why is that, I wonder. The history of a place is written in such cues of landscape.

I wonder - what is the Vandalia Railroad and where does it go? The building that houses the office of the Vandalia Railroad looks like the kind of building where a poet would have his office, if poets had offices. The building appears to sit very near the edge of city property. The Vandalia Railroad's tracks, they look aged and rusting rather than shiny with use, they don't appear to connect to the mainline that runs east and west through Vandalia. The little railroad that could, with an office building fit for poets. I'll have to find out more.

My fortune cookie at lunch said: "Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time." I spent a couple hours walking the streets of Vandalia, trying to get the lay of the city. Fellows on their Harley Davidsons waved at me as they passed. Drivers in passing cars waved. Friendly folks.

When I stopped at Walmart out on Highway 40 to buy some blank audio tapes, though, I heard some fellow not treating his woman very nice. I kept walking back to my car. As I sat in the car making notes for a bit, I heard another fellow yelling at his woman. I know one can't generalize from a couple of instances, yet a poet always wants a single instance to be all the time. I need more experience.

People in Vandalia speak broadly and a little more slowly than the folks of Rugby, North Dakota; you wouldn't mistake any of the people from Vandalia for Canadians, ay?

To be continued....