enodia anthedon
Sunday, July 15, 2007 — 5:35 pm
Lake County, Illinois — Lyon’s Prairie
Six or seven Northern Pearly-Eyes were chasing each other low in the shade beneath a large oak in the woods. They would frequently land on the trunk of the tree, but before I could get a good photo (these are somewhat blurry), they were chased off by an orange butterfly I wasn’t able to identify.
junonia coenia
Sunday, July 15, 2007 — 5:25 pm
Lake County, Illinois — Lyon’s Prairie
This butterfly was flying low through the tall grass above the Fox River marshes. It landed and let me approach closely, then flitted to another nearby perch.
Shortly before I got married, it occurred to me that I needed to buy a car. But instead, I bought a Datsun.
My Dad knew a guy who knew a Datsun dealer who had a car for sale in my price range — a sickly-looking yellow Datsun B210 four-door sedan. (See the little yellow job in the back of this ad? That’s my car exactly — except without the rust and dents and
missing pieces.) I knew nothing about cars, but I figured this guy was a friend of a friend of my Dad — surely he could be trusted. The price was $2,544. I put down $1,000 and borrowed the rest from a bank at 15.54% interest. Yes, you read that correctly. These were the Jimmy Carter years.
I picked up the car on Halloween, which should have warned me, I guess. It had a clutch, which made things interesting. The only clutching I’d done was at the car wash where I worked for two years during college. I used to drive the cars from the front of the line out into the parking lot for detailing. I’d never gone beyond first gear.
But first gear is the toughest, so I was soon on the road and on my way home. Of course, the gas tank was empty. After two miles, I pulled into a gas station. The attendant came out — this was way back when gas stations had attendants — in fact I actually worked as a gas station attendant for a time … Anyway, the attendant came out and said, “Sounds like you need a tune-up.”
Great. I’d owned the car for seven minutes and already it needed a tune-up. The car had a 30-day warranty, and during those 30 days I had to take it back to the dealer about 10 times.
I kept the car for about two years. Here’s a short list of adventures.
The most exciting adventure took place one winter when my wife and I drove the car to Arkansas. We left for the long drive home (about 14 hours at the 55-mph speed limit of those times) early on a Sunday morning. It was raining and cold as we drove through the dull and dirty Mississippi mudflats around Memphis. The rain and fog obscured everything, which is why I didn’t notice the steam coming out of my engine. I was about four miles north of West Memphis, Arkansas on Interstate 55 when the car died. I managed to pull over to the shoulder, but there we were, stuck in the rain in the middle of nowhere. We’d passed an exit about half a mile back, so that’s where we walked. We were drenched when we arrived at the closest of two gas stations. It had no repair facilities, so we walked under the highway bridge to the other station, a Shell. They had a tow truck and a mechanic, but they were in no hurry. We sat in the dirty chairs in the front room for two hours before the driver decided to help. We climbed into the cab of his truck with him and headed out for our car.
When our car finally made it back to the station. We sat in the front room for another two hours (during most of which time our car sat unattended in the dock). We finally got the news — our heater hose had split and all the water had drained out of the car. That, of course, caused the engine to overheat. It was a Sunday, remember, and the regular mechanic wasn’t on duty. We were given a choice. We could get a room at the local motel and have the regular guy fix it in the morning, or the genius on hand could plug the heater hose with a spark plug, fill the radiator with water, and we could be on our way. We chose option #2, and for this (and the tow) we were charged $55.
When the “repairs” were finished, we climbed in with the “mechanic” as he took the car for a test drive on the frontage road. He decided to see how fast it would go and actually managed to get it up to 80. It was mid-afternoon before we got back on the road.
And it was still raining. We’d gone approximately 10 miles when the driver-side windshield-wiper blade — not just the rubber part, but the entire blade assembly — flew off and disappeared into the gathering dusk. I couldn’t see a thing. I managed to get to the next exit and pulled off the road. I got drenched all over again as I stepped out of the car and pulled the blade off the passenger side and stuck it on the driver side. This worked fine as far as clearing the windshield in front of the driver. However, the blade arm on the passenger side wore a grove into the windshield that was there for as long as we owned the car.
As dark descended, it continued raining and getting colder. (We had no heat. The hose was plugged with a spark plug, remember?) The windows were fogging up, and the only way to keep them clear was to open the passenger-side window. (The driver-side window wouldn’t open — or close — remember?) It wasn’t long before we were completely numb. We took turns driving, and whichever one of us was behind the wheel would alternate hands: one hand on the wheel and the other hand being warmed by the passenger. We struggled on in this fashion through northeastern Arkansas, the boot-heel of Missouri, and into Illinois.
By the time we reached Mattoon, we were frozen solid. We stopped at a restaurant to eat supper and bask in the warmth. We ordered hot chocolates, but before they arrived, I realized I didn’t have my keys. I ran out to the car and, sure enough, there they were, hanging from the ignition. I borrowed a hanger from a passer-by and ten cold and wet minutes later I got the door open and grabbed the keys. (Fortunately, the driver-side window didn’t close all the way.) I went back inside to my now-cold hot chocolate.
It was 9:00 pm, and we had ate least four more hours of driving ahead of us. I’d had enough. There was no way I was getting back on the road this night. We didn’t have much money, but we got a room at a Best Western. We slept the sleep of the dead and woke up somewhat refreshed. We ate breakfast at the McDonald’s next door and headed for home.
About 100 miles later, my wife realized she’d left her purse on the seat in the McDonald’s. We pulled off at the next exit and found a pay phone at a Stuckey’s. Amazingly, some honest person had found the purse and turned it in intact. Some kind soul took our address and mailed the purse to us. It arrived a few days later with nothing missing.
The ordeal had taken its toll on the car. Over the next few weeks, it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. A good friend of my father’s was an auto shop teacher in a small town in north-central Illinois. He offered to fix the car as a class project. It just so happened that he was attending a seminar my Dad was giving in Pontiac and was willing to drive the car home from there. I found a friend to follow me down and drive me home. When we got to my parents’ hotel, they were nowhere to be found. We sat around for an hour or so, but my friend had to be back home for an obligation, so we couldn’t wait any longer. I don’t remember why we didn’t go into the office and talk to the management about leaving the car and the keys. Instead, we climbed into my parents’ hotel room — in the middle of the day in the middle of Pontiac — through a partly-opened window and left the key with a note. It’s amazing that we didn’t spent the afternoon in jail, but nobody noticed us.
The rest of the story is short. My Dad’s mechanic friend picked up the car that night and drove it home. Before he arrived, the engine froze up and he had to drive the final 35 miles at a speed not greater than 14 mph. The overheating in West Memphis had torn the engine to bits and pieces of the pistons were floating around in the cylinders. The friend put in a totally rebuilt engine (which cost me $100), and from that time on, the car drove like a dream.
It drove like a dream, but it looked like a nightmare. Pieces continued to fall off regularly. I can still remember the day that the entire muffler/tailpipe assembly just dropped off without warning as we drove down a road near home. We finally decided to get rid of the car and took it to a Chevy dealer as a trade-in. The guy we were working with looked at it with a very frightened expression on his face. When he opened the hood and saw the pristine rebuilt engine, his look turned to one of absolute amazement. I don’t remember if he gave us any money for the wreck, but he did take it off our hands.
I think it’s fitting that, in the only photograph we have of this car, the hood is up, and one of my friends is repairing the head gasket. We had noticed it was leaking oil rather badly — it turns out that the person who had replaced the head gasket had missed one of the holes.
I took my camera for a walk to Hickory Grove this evening. The weather could not have been nicer — clear, low 70’s, light breeze. And I had the place to myself — at least as far as people were concerned. There were tons of birds, butterflies, dragonflies, moths …
This is a Viceroy. It looks very much like a Monarch but isn’t very closely related. It is considered a “mimic,” a tasty butterfly that looks like a butterfly that tastes lousy. Birds get confused and leave them both alone.
This is a Monarch — well, actually, this is two Monarchs … They’re on milkweed, a plant named for the white liquid that oozes out when the stem is broken. The caterpillars feed on milkweed, which is what gives the butterflies the lousy taste that makes birds avoid them.
The Monarch is larger than the Viceroy, but the easiest way to tell them apart is to look for that black line that cuts across the hindwing on the Viceroy.
When I first walked up, the Monarchs fluttered off, still connected. They circled around and landed back on the same plant. The male resumed feeding while the female … They were still there when I left.
I walked on a ways and came upon another milkweed that was providing dinner for two other creatures.
The thing on the right is a Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth. I don’t know what the red and black job is. The moth hovered and backed up and flitted around exactly the way a hummingbird does. Here’s another shot.
I didn’t have my binoculars, and birds don’t generally let me stick my camera two inches away from them, but I saw some cool ones — Indigo Bunting, Great Blue Heron, Eastern Meadowlark, Eastern Bluebird, Great-crested Flycatcher …
When we finally finished lunch at The Red Oak, we explored the town. There wasn’t much of it — five streets running east and west and eight streets running north and south. Most of the historic buildings were clustered around Bishop Hill Park in the center of town.
Bishop Hill was a utopian community that was started in 1846 by a group of Swedish settlers under the leadership of Erik Jansson. After living in dugouts for the first winter (during which 96 members died) they built a town of bricks they made themselves and farmed more than 12,000 acres. The community was particularly well known for the furniture it crafted, much of which 
was used in local towns and so was easy for the state to reassemble. 
Jansson had delusions of grandeur. Some of his quotes were posted on the wall in the church. It didn’t do him a lot of good — four years after the colony began he was murdered by his son-in-law. The colony continued under a board of trustees until it dissolved in 1861.
Our first stop was the Colony Store, built in 1853. It is still a store, specializing in Swedish candy, gifts and postcards.
The Colony Hotel is owned by the state of Illinois. It was built in 1852 as housing for eight families, each with their own room. In 1855 it was converted to a hotel to accommodate the increasing-number of visitors. One of the colonists, Sven Bjorklund, ran it until the colony dissolved. He converted the third floor into a ballroom that became the town’s meeting place after the colony years.
We were met at the door by our guide, a former history teacher. He knew his stuff and was interesting and eager to tell us as much as we wanted to hear. Most of the furniture in the building was built in the colony, and he pointed out the particularly-interesting pieces.
See the piece of furniture in the back left-hand corner of the kitchen? Our guide is holding the lid open in the bottom right photo. That’s a bench with the lid shut and a bed with the lid open. It wasn’t very wide, and we all agreed it would be very much like sleeping in a coffin.
We wandered across the park past the Steeple Building. It was built in 1854 as a hotel but never used for that purpose. After some disagreement (over issues of celibacy and education) it was used as a school. It’s now a museum, but we didn’t go inside.
A thunderstorm was rolling in fast from the west as we arrived at the Colony Church (also owned by the state). The guide inside was worried about the rain, so I ran upstairs for her and closed the church doors. While she showed us around the ground floor — divided into rooms as family residences — the storm hit. We got wet as we dashed up the stairs.
The building was put up in 1848, the first building in the colony. We had the sanctuary to ourselves. It was divided down the center to separate men and women and had a balcony. The pews were very uncomfortable, as I suppose you could expect from a sect like this. We hung around until the storm settled down.
We drove to the Bishop Hill Museum, a modern building built by the state primarily to house the paintings of Olaf Krans. Krans lived in the colony for 12 years as a boy and painted scenes of life as he remembered them. I wasn’t impressed. That’s one of his paintings above — a guy leaning on a stick while watching women do the work.
We drove back through the town and looked at some of the other historic buildings from the car, then headed back toward home. We didn’t see all the buildings, but what we saw was interpreted very well and I got a good feel for what went on there.
