Rules of the Road Part 2: Not Just Another Pretty Picture
It’s taken me weeks to write this Rules of the Road installment. In fact, it stymied me so much that I inserted another blog, instead. The one where I tried to draw you into my garden with descriptive imagery and photos. I wanted to leave you with beautiful pictures to carry through the week.
I almost didn’t write this one. Because the pictures it brings are not so beautiful. And more than anything, I want to share encouragement with my blog, because we all need it.
The first Rules of the Road is filled with images of America’s heartland—things like volunteer firefighters creating a waterslide for kids in the park; boys scurrying barefoot across a small-town street; and mechanical horses at the grocery store that children can still ride for a penny.
I hope it brought you joy, a smile, maybe even a memory of your hometown.
This one will not do that.
I’d skip it altogether if that option didn’t make me feel like a coward. Not every picture is meant to be beautiful. The written word is not meant to be used only to make us feel better. It’s also supposed to be truthful.
And one truth is—I didn’t take pictures on that section of our road trip. The ones you find here I pulled from stock photos. I could offer excuses for that. Like: I was nearly out of storage space for my photos, and had decided I already had too many pictures. Or even that I was on vacation at that point, dang it, and wasn’t even thinking about my blog.
Until we drove into and out of Cairo, Illinois.
You know those horror movies where someone on a road trip gets stranded in some weird little town, and it’s obvious from the music that they should not stop there? And then, of all things, they knock on the door of some spooky-looking place in the middle of the night! As though they didn’t know this was the cue for zombies to come out of the shadows and grab them.
Yeah. Zombie movies. Apocalyptic movies. Horror.
They could all be filmed in Cairo.
As we drove into town, we noticed business after business closed down or boarded up. Homes stood abandoned as though the apocalypse had come and the people had disappeared. Or maybe they were still there, undead, watching through the ragged tatters of curtains, or bent and twisted blinds.
The burnt skeleton of a house rose on one side of the highway. A home with a caved-in roof slumped on the next street. And there was a brick house whose walls were crumbling into the yard a little further on. Vines swarmed over entire buildings, muffling the shape of the architecture. It looked like an omnivorous alien plant species had invaded the city and was slowly devouring it.
Then the road turned, and we crossed a bridge and left Cairo behind.
But those unsettling sights haunted us even as we drove through the green hills of Kentucky. We passed white fences and pretty mailboxes and horse pastures—the kind of scenery meant to be photographed. None of it grabbed our imagination like what we’d seen in the few short blocks we’d driven in that unfortunate town.
The next day when we met up with acquaintances who lived in the general region, we asked what had happened to Cairo. They told us that they thought it had been hit by a bad flood that decimated the agriculture in the region, only to be struck by another flood soon afterward.
Oh. Sad. But a likely answer, since Cairo sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. It hadn’t been the victim of the crazy pandemic or other dread disease. It hadn’t been destroyed by the abrupt closure of a manufacturing plant or the leaking of radioactive waste.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the little town in the southernmost part of Illinois suffered from some kind of long-acting doom. If this was a fantasy blog, I’d say Cairo was cursed.
I tried to reason with myself, and make sense of what I’d seen. If the road had led deeper into the town before it turned away, we might have come to the prosperous sector. Perhaps it was only the north end that was so run down. Or perhaps my imagination—so prone to making up stories—was only doing its thing once again. Doubtless Cairo's situation was not as dramatic as I was trying to make it out to be.
Driving through eastern Colorado, you can’t miss all the abandoned farms. Some are complete with rows of farm implements and stacks of hay bales rotting in the field. Empty, hollow-eyed farmhouses and sagging barns are scattered throughout the Midwest, relics of another time. A time when a family could make a go of it on a small farm. Maybe they were abandoned in the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl, when economic hardship forced people off the farms and into cities, looking for a better way to make a living. An easier way. Those empty houses don’t haunt me, although maybe they should.
A town filled with buildings that look like they’d been abandoned within the last decade or two seemed more threatening to me. Coming off the pandemic, it’s easy to let my imagination go wild.
I’d been all too relieved to cross the bridge—zombies, right?
Or something contagious.
My mind kept racing with questions. What’s the difference between this town and the ones we’d traveled through on the way here? Why is this town rotting away while others in the Midwest hosted heartwarming images of caring communities?
I had to know. So, of course, when our trip was over, I researched Cairo, Illinois. I was immediately struck by the irony. The town’s name is not pronounced like the Egyptian city. It’s pronounced “care-oh.” On the surface, it looked like the “caring” was what was missing.
There were floods, yes. But the rivers were not what plagued this little town the most, historically. A floodgate and a floodway equipped Cairo to address the threat of raging water. It was not equipped for the tides of racial tension, of hate and violence, that swept through the town and pitted neighbor against neighbor, repeatedly, for over a hundred years. But was that all? Was that not just another easy answer? Not every town torn apart by racism is dying the way Cairo is.
The creeping vine we saw? That’s not what’s devouring the town, either. Economic desperation is.
Whether they were fleeing the violence, or seeking relief from the steady decline of economic opportunity in the area, the population dropped from about 15,000 in the early twentieth century to under 2000 residents in the 2020 census. Most businesses closed.
Hopelessness. Is that the contagion spreading through Cairo, Illinois? Choking the life out of it?
Is it the same hopelessness that drove the farmers from all those family farms? How exactly does a community overcome that?
Can a community survive the constant threat of natural disaster combined with economic hardship? Those towns we’d driven through in Kansas were not exactly bastions of the wealthy—and they’re smack dab in the thick of Tornado Alley. What do they have that this town doesn’t?
Is there any way to save a town like Cairo? Can it overcome the hatred of the past?
Can the people who chose to stay and fill sandbags rather than run from yet another flood in 2011 work hard enough to bring their hometown back from the economic decline? If the only people willing to invest in a community have nothing left to invest, does it stand a chance?
How many small towns across America are fighting the same battle?
If you look it up, you can find pictures of Cairo yourself. You’ll find YouTube videos and articles calling Cairo things like “The Saddest Town in America,” “The WORST Ghost Town,” and “The most dangerous town of Illinois.” Labels like that spread the image of hopelessness. But there’s a Friends of Cairo Facebook page, and countless comments about how people grew up there and love their hometown. You’ll see some amazing architecture and learn of an Economic Development Committee. Some videos show lots of occupied homes, and if you search for it, you’ll also find the school district’s website. Families still live there. Children are growing up there.
What do they see when they drive through town? Vines devouring buildings and abandoned businesses? Crime seeping into every neighborhood?
Hopelessness staring back at them from vacant windows?
That, my friend, is what horror is made of.
But what if they see something I didn’t?
I wish we’d taken the time to drive all the way through. To tour Magnolia Manor, sample some barbecue at the restaurant, maybe get some diesel. Because maybe, just maybe, the residents who’ve chosen to stay see more than what’s on the surface. And maybe they’d have answers to my questions about their hometown.
Rules of the Road #6. Not every picture needs to be beautiful. Some are thought-provoking instead.
Rules of the Road #7. Remember that a town is built of buildings and streets. A community is built with homes and hope.
Rules of the Road #8. Remember every town you drive through on a road trip is someone’s hometown.
