Effing Ham at Effingham

It’s Christmas Eve, and what are we doing? We’re driving home from Ohio. Sue’s mom passed away in the early morning hours of December 20, and her funeral was yesterday. We’ve been in Ohio since December 9. It’s been a long few weeks—yet much, much too short, too. . . . We’re just tired.

Tired and dazed. It will be so good to be home again, sleep in our own bed, be reunited with our kitties, and see if the world won’t start spinning on its axis again at some point. One thing’s for sure: 2020 will be an unusual year.

Over the many years we’ve driven to Ohio to visit Sue’s people, we’ve always had to drive through Effingham, Illinois. In recent years, it’s had so much highway construction, it’s been a real pain. All those lanes of traffic, merging interstates, exit and entrance ramps, and people driving like idiots. Many of them are, as Sue calls them, Ill-annoying drivers.

Time was, Effingham was a place where we’d plan to stop, knowing there were so many options for gas and fast food. But for years, now, it’s a place, like Indianapolis, that we just want to get through. We’ll stop almost anywhere before or after it, but our goal for a long time has been to slip through this gantlet of crazy traffic as efficiently as possible. And the monstrously gigantic, tacky roadside cross is not something we particularly like to see. I’m a Christian, but really—though I’m sure it was erected with all good intentions, it makes me cringe. And as a sign of Effingham’s impending traffic, it’s rather ominous: “oh boy, here we go.”

So, Effingham. We’ve taken to calling it “effing, effing, Effingham.” As in, “seventeen miles to effing, effing, Effingham—do you wanna stop and get gas before it, or after?”

(The image above is a screen capture from Google street view.)

But tonight, we made an exception. I think we’ve set a land speed record, this trip, returning from Ohio. We simply haven’t stopped much at all. But around Terre Haute, we realized we were getting peckish, also a little slap-happy. It occurred to us we wanted comfort food, home cookin’—breakfast. And we knew there’s a Denny’s in Effingham. You can always count on Denny’s, huh?

Slap-happy plus peckish equals hilarity; from Terre Haute to central Illinois, it became our mantra: Hey, let’s get some effing ham at Effingham!

And that’s just what we did.

It totally hit the spot, and it tickled us, too. I had to post about it on Facebook.

And the coffee was completely welcome. And the people who work at places like this, on Christmas Eve, serving people like us, are doing the work of God. Our gratitude knows no bounds. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

. . . So very looking forward to getting home.

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

Collinsville, Illinois

I’ll talk even more about this place in a subsequent post, but I want to give you a little background first. Here’s the official Web site.

Waaaaay before there was a Collinsville, or an Illinois, waaaay before Europeans rode in boats to North America, there was a thriving civilization in this area. Their prehistoric city reached its peak between AD 1100 and 1200. As many as 20,000 folks lived in the community at that time, and they erected at least five “Woodhenges” (Stonehenge-like calendars made of red cedar posts, which line up with the sun on solstices and equinoxes).

The civilization that built the Cahokia Mounds is known as the Mississippian culture, which emerged from Late Woodland peoples who settled in the area around AD 700. By 900 the Mississippians were building homes and cultivating maize, and their spear points, pottery, and other tools continued to improve. As the community grew in population and sophistication, political and religious leaders emerged, and in addition to their tons of dwellings, 120 earthen mounds were erected in about six square miles. A two-mile-long stockade was built around the center of the town.

There are 80 surviving mounds in the Cahokia site, and the largest is Monks Mound, which has four terraces and is approximately a hundred feet tall. Its base is about the same size as the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s the largest human-built earthen mound in North America, and it stands like a flat-topped pyramid in the middle of the otherwise relatively level Illinois landscape. In fact, the mound builders actually made the landscape more level around the mounds, accentuating the mounds’ height.

Get this: The soil was transported by baskets.

The city at Cahokia (not to be confused with the modern town of Cahokia, several miles southwest of the mounds site) was the center of Mississippian culture, which extended throughout eastern North America. The city was gradually and finally abandoned by the close of the 1300s. Archaeologists can only offer hypotheses about what happened to the people and their civilization.

In the 1600s, the Cahokia tribe of Illinois Indians (unrelated to the mound builders) lived in the vicinity when the French reached the area, and so the site was named after them. Apparently there’s no real name for the people who built this city, with its marketplaces, sporting events, religion, arts, communal sense of purpose, far-flung trade connections, agriculture, and astronomical discoveries.

Photos, top to bottom: Two views of the steps leading to the top of Monks Mound, taken when we were there on Saturday July 25. Next, part of the huge mural at the visitors center (which I think is in three-point perspective, like the famous “turning” Eads Bridge mural at the Missouri State Capitol). And just above, the Birdman Tablet, AD 1300, a sandstone tablet showing a dancing guy with a bird mask and costume, an image that became part of the Cahokia Mounds logo.