It won’t kill you to get out of the house

Summer rain pelted my face as I stood on my pedals, flying down the gravel trail alongside the I&M Canal. For one moment, boom, the whole knotted mess just fell away — the virus, the masks, the mango Lord of the Lies, everything — and I was just a kid on a bike going through the woods in far southwest Channahon. Gliding through green leaves, past great blue herons and angular waterways that were part of history yet also right there.

Or more precisely, I realized it was gone. That somehow the door to my electronic cage had swung open and I had slipped back into the living world. It took a bit of groping to reconstruct regular life: each day a carbon copy of the day before, walking the dog, meals, work, sleep, rinse, repeat.

How’d I get from that treadmill to a village in Will County? Looking back, they didn’t actually invite me. What the folks hyping Illinois & Michigan Canal — ”This outdoor museum, perfect for social distancing, is the nation’s first official National Heritage Area” — did was offer photos and a phone call.

”Please let us know if you would be interested in images or if you would like to speak with Robin Malpass regarding the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Area,” is how they put it.

How about, I countered, we explore the area together? Like most men, I had a hidden agenda — to clap eyes on the I&M Canal, the pathway that led baby Chicago on its first tottering steps from being a few hovels clustered around the pointy log stockage of Fort Dearborn to the sprawling, skyscrapered, dynamic, carnival of a metropolis — on summers other than this one that is — we know and love.

Annie Costabile/Sun-Times

To readers who aren’t nodding their heads, going “The I&M Canal, God yes, how vastly cool, I’d love to see the I&M Canal,” a bit of background: Work on the canal began in 1836, a year before Chicago presumed to call itself a city. Dug by hand by Irish immigrants, it stretched 96 miles from Bridgeport to LaSalle, completing the water link from the Great Lakes via the Chicago River, the Illinois River, and the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. It drew the commerce that’s been flowing through Chicago ever since.

From start to finish, the I&M Canal changes elevation 141 feet. The locks — gates that allow boats to enter, then water is raised or lowered before proceeding onto the next stretch of the canal — and lockkeepers’ houses are still here. It’s incredible to think this piece of cutting-edge early 19th century technology is still there, waiting for its beneficiaries to eyeball it.

Left to my own devices, I’d have probably strolled a mile or two, mulling over mundane matters, and called it a day. But we had ground to cover and biked some 15 miles, which helped pull me out of myself. Mentally, not physically, thank goodness. At one point, I did glance down at where my titanium hip was pumping away just to make sure it was staying inside where it belonged.

Should you hurry to Channahon? That’s up to you. I must note its promoters somewhat oversold the place. The “ghost town” does not, in fact, have any decrepit buildings, just a name on a map — Aux Sable. The replica barge doesn’t start up until July 11, maybe. The bikes we were riding are available to tourists only in theory. They’re working on getting up and running.

Who isn’t? If you go to Channahon State Park — 25302 West Story Street, if you need an address to plug into Google Maps — you’ll pretty much have it to yourself, except for the fishermen. So while not insisting you go there, specifically, I am urging you to go somewhere. It’s a big state. The only thing worse than coping with a pandemic in summer will be — and take this to the bank — coping with it in February. And when those frozen days come, you’ll want the memory of passing through some verdant landscape, seeing more great blue herons in two hours than you’ve seen in 20 years, some standing stock still in the river, stalking fish, others flapping their enormous, prehistoric wings, somehow becoming airborne. You have no choice, I’m ordering you to go.