By Abdon Pallasch
Our first Covid stay-at-home wasn’t a month old and already I yearned to bust out of the house. Huge sandstone outcroppings rise above the Illinois River at Starved Rock, less than an hour and a half from away. Snowmelt in the spring sends waterfalls cascading from the canyon walls. This is the height of exotic in the flatlands of Illinois . You feel like you’re in the mountains.
“Let’s go to Starved Rock,” I proposed to the wife and two daughters when the cold still gripped Chicago and we were all working or studying remotely in the same house.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the enthusiasm I got back registered around minus-1.
“I’ll just stay home,” one of my daughters said.
“You’d rather stay in bed another day than reach out and touch a waterfall?” I asked.
At Starved Rock you can walk underneath and behind the LaSalle Canyon waterfall. You can try to slide down it like a waterslide if you’re daring and the water isn’t too cold. We’d had great adventures with the kids there when they were younger.
“We’re going,” I laid down the unpopular law. “We could all use a bit of fresh air.”
Sure, there was a statewide stay-at-order order, and we lived in the pestilence-ridden city. But it was virtual Spring Break and the temperature was supposed to shift and hit 70 for the first time all spring. I explained to the gang that the stay-at-home order didn’t mean you couldn’t drive from one place to the other.
So off we went.
Starved Rock gets its name from a conflict in the mid-1700s between warring Native American tribes. A group of Illini Indians fled to the top of the tallest sandstone butte at river’s edge, where the Ottawa and Potawatomi Indians trapped them until they starved. The area was designated a national historical landmark in 1960 and is now Illinois’ most popular state park.
Sure, OK, so technically, yes, the state parks were closed out of an abundance of caution. But there are so many waterfalls and so many trails. Surely, we’ll be able to find one of the more obscure ones that is open for us to wander on without passing another soul, I told my wife and daughters. If not, I had contingency plans for other natural areas nearby.
I soon found out I underestimated the diligence of the state’s Department of Natural Resources. They had barricaded every road leading into the park and posted ominous warning signs threatening to tow the car of anyone so foolish as to park there. Even the lesser-used trail heads were blocked. They had left nothing to chance.
I had a back-up plan: An impromptu picnic along the historic Illinois and Michigan Canal where it pokes through Utica, Illinois. The canal was an engineering marvel in its day, dug largely by Irish immigrants in the 1840s to connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. We enjoyed our lunch while the girls talked and laughed. The canal’s waters don’t move much anymore, but they host plenty of frogs, turtles bathing in the sun, ducks and other wildlife. We walked along the grassy banks, my youngest and I breaking into a game of tag as we approached a pedestrian bridge over the canal.

We strolled past a one-room schoolhouse built in 1865 that serves as part of the LaSalle County Historical Society. The director asked me to help her move a vintage wooden trunk and I happily obliged – the only time I came within six feet of another human not in my family all day.
The buds were just emerging on the trees lining either side of the canal. Cicadas filled the air with their xydeco washboard sounds. The girls came upon a Caterpillar land mover and climbed aboard to explore. I kept a nervous eye on a state trooper parked nearby as my daughters jumped off the Cat.
“Where are you folks from?” he shouted to us.
If I said “Chicago,” that would light his fuse and make his day. I manically flipped through my mental Rolodex find any tenuous claim I could make to be from some small town nearby.
“Chicago,” my wife answered loud and clear.
“GET BACK IN YOUR CAR AND DRIVE BACK TO CHICAGO RIGHT NOW!” the trooper thundered. “ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY! I’M NOT KIDDING!”
I smiled and said “OK!” as we headed toward the car. It wasn’t the time to pull up a copy of the Governor’s stay-at-home order and go over the finer points with him. I’m sure I made his day, allowing him to go home and brag that he yelled at a family from Chicago not to bring their big-city Covid to LaSalle County.
On the drive back we pulled off the interstate at a Culver’s for chocolate shakes. We beat the dark storm clouds back to our house and were inside before the rain started. My daughters would not admit to having any fun during the picnic and the walk along the canal, but they conceded to liking the shakes.
The trooper and my daughters might have thought it all quite non-essential. But I disagree.
-Abdon Pallasch covered politics for the Chicago Sun-Times. Now he directs communications for Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza. And he writes.