PARIS, Illinois — For three springs now, I have made the long 10-hour overland drive back to the boyhood haunts of my grandparents’ flatland farm country in eastern Illinois.
A prime draw is to hunt wild turkeys in the small woodlots of four farm tracts that are now maintained in a family trust. We also fish ponds and small lakes. But each time I’ve found the journey turns into much more than a cast and blast trip.
I love traveling to all parts of our great country. I like to take in the different landscapes, cuisine, architecture, history, customs and sensibilities of people that change with significant jumps in longitude and latitude from Lancaster County.
“Hunting and fishing give you the ability to enjoy parts of the country that one would not visit,” mused my nephew, Logan Crable, who had flown in from Austin, Texas. “It’s like a hidden life hack.”
There are few things more worthy of your time than sitting at the base of a large tree and watching a woods unfold on a dewy morning. That’s where I found myself one clear morning on a woodlot off of Brinkerhoff Road, where families by that name still live roadside.
As Sheldon Horst, of Lancaster, and I cocked our ears in the direction of a gobbler sounding off from its roost in a tree, birdsong like I have never heard rose up from the forest floor and trees.
Oh, to be able to identify birds from their calls. There was no mistaking, though, the resplendent three indigo buntings that frolicked about in the understory trees at one point. The rising, overlapping chatter was consolation for the gobbler shutting up and not responding to our entreaties.
I turned around to glance at my turkey decoy in the cornfield just in time to catch a diving red-tailed hawk deliver a thuddering boink to the head of my plastic lifelike decoy. The decoy did not change expression and continued to stare out into the field.
Walking through the woods in search of a turkey to be fooled by our calls, I was again distracted by bursts of color filling in the grids formed by deer trails. Trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, trout lily, rue anemone, Virginia bluebell, woodland phlox, spring larkspur and other wildflowers crowded into this small woodlot, their sheer profundity overpowering for now the deer’s appetite for them.
My younger brother from Salt Lake City, Brett Crable, traipsing the family land for the first time in a decade, marveled at the bounty. “I think of the forests as micro sanctuaries for songbirds, wildflowers and old hardwood trees, particularly walnuts,” he said.
Indeed, I, too, was struck by the presence of huge black walnut trees here and there that dwarfed any other tree in our various woods. Walnut trees are slow growers and contain valuable wood. Our woods have been logged on occasion in the past, so I do not know why they were spared. But their massiveness was a thing to behold, and I wrapped my arms partly around their swollen girth.
In a field near a pond, we were startled to come across a large snapping turtle in search of a mate. I have been involved in a couple rescues of snappers — not that this one needed to be rescued — and had picked them up by the middle of their shell behind their head. This time, however, the peeved snapper made an athletic lunge with his gaping mouth straight over the back and nearly caused major damage to my fingers. Lesson learned.
I did concentrate on the business at hand long enough to take a young male jake turkey that will serve up fond memories at future dinners in our house. I earlier missed a jake after crawling on hands and knees to ambush it amid tall grass.
Driving desolate back roads one morning, we came across a knoll with a cluster of old homes and the Grandview Town Hall, established in 1831. What is the meaning for this settlement far from anywhere, I wondered. There has to be more to the story.
There was. The road through the crossroads once went to Vandalia, the first state capital. The knoll amid so much flatland offered fine views of the unfolding prairie for early settlers. Thus Grandview. Abraham Lincoln spoke here a couple times and perhaps boarded in the town.
Sadly, the town, which once had more people than Chicago, declined and became a back-road mystery to people like me when the railroad was built a few miles away in 1853.
Edgar County is one of the most sought destinations in the United States by hunters in pursuit of large, big-racked deer. But it seems turkeys are an afterthought.
There were only 80 turkeys taken in the entire county in 2021, compared to 1,174 deer, half of them by archers. This theory was driven home one morning when I got out of the car to pump gas in full camouflaged clothing and the guy next to me inquired if I was going duck hunting.
While we pursued the life of leisure, the area’s farmers put in long hours in the fields, racing against a wet spring to get crops planted before yields were affected.
We hunted hard for turkeys all morning, and the four of us boarded a pontoon boat in the afternoons for leisurely fishing trips on a small lake. We dubbed them sunset cruises.
We had caught only largemouth bass in the lake the past couple years. But one errant cast by Horst sent the lure dangling over a limb 10 feet above the water. As the lure bounced up and down just below the surface, a fish grabbed it. We—perhaps the fish too—were shocked that the jigging motion had hooked a crappie, a fish we did not even know populated the lake.
“It’s a kind of metaphor for how nature teaches us things we didn’t intend to learn,” Horst observed.
Near dusk that evening, we spotted a gaily colored wooden bobber floating near the shoreline. Suddenly it moved. The bobber darted underwater whenever we got close but finally we were able to snag it and release the poor bluegill that had been forced to drag its added burden through the water for who knows how long.
Growing up, I remembered a shoebox full of arrowheads and an ax that my father had found somewhere in the fields. Walking across a plowed but unplanted field one morning, I found the larger part of an arrowhead or cutting tool, which made me wonder if a Chippewa tribesman had long ago hunted this spot as I was.
That night we dined at Sam’s Steakhouse in Marshall, a place where you get $2 off if you grill your steak yourself.
My brother and I sat in the family woods he had not visited in 11 years and watched deer appear ghostlike. We visited our grandparents’ graves in the cemetery where once as a kid I saw an oak tree set on fire by lightning, and we were comforted that someone had left two sea shells on top. Ties that bind.
Ad Crable is an LNP | LancasterOnline outdoors writer.
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