So This Guy Walks This River
Chicago’s city flag is fairly recognizable: four distinctive red stars against a white background with a blue stripe running across the top and another across the bottom. Those two blue stripes, we are told, represent the north and south branches of the Chicago River.
I’d like to propose a modest change: rather than recognize the two branches separately, how about one blue stripe represents the Chicago River, while the other represents the Des Plaines River?
I’m sure this sounds like heresy to many, but in my opinion, the Des Plaines River has had a much more consequential impact on the city than its namesake river. And not just the city, but the entire Chicago metro area. At the risk of hyperbole, Chicago wouldn’t be the city we know if it weren’t for the Des Plaines River.
It gets no respect
There isn’t a single source where you can learn all the facts about the Des Plaines River, but that’s probably true about everything.
On Wikipedia, for instance, you can learn the barest of facts in a few minutes: it starts near Kenosha, Wisconsin and flows southward through southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois; it eventually meets the Kankakee River southwest of Chicago where together they form the Illinois River; French explorers and missionaries of the 1600’s dubbed it La Rivière des Plaines (River of the Plane Tree) as they felt that trees on the river resembled the European Plane tree back home.
There’s a little bit more than that, but not as much as I’d expected, and while as far as I can tell the information is credible, it’s mostly a bland, colorless recitation of similarly dull facts. In that curious way of many online information sources, some of the facts it includes seem odd (e.g.; there’s a six-lane cantilevered overpass called the Des Plaines River Bridge on I-80 in Joliet), as do those that have been excluded (there were two WWII Nazi POW camps on its banks, in Des Plaines and Channahon). As regards the former, big whoop: there are dozens of bridges called the Des Plaines River Bridge, spanning everything from country roads to Interstates (three alone on I-55, and let’s not forget the train and pedestrian bridges!); and as regards the latter: wait, what? How could such a thing have been omitted?
But it isn’t surprising, really. Wikipedia is a kind of crowdsourced encyclopedia, its content deriving from and reflecting the public’s interest, both in terms of researching and contributing, and the Des Plaines River apparently doesn’t merit that much interest. Compare it to Wikipedia’s article on the much smaller Chicago River. And its article on halitosis, for that matter. Even World Book and Britannica barely pay it lip service.
Despite its presence in a long procession of Chicagoland communities, including a four-mile stretch of the city’s western border, the river these days has little direct impact (when it isn’t flooding) until its southernmost stretches, where it facilitates commercial shipping activities, and, we’ve been warned, destructive invasive species as well. Otherwise, it’s mainly a source of recreation, running as it does through forest preserves, picnic groves and the occasional canoe launch in the suburban forest preserves managed by Lake, Cook, DuPage and Will Counties.
A deeper dive into the Des Plaines
So, the Wikipedia entry is incomplete. But in fairness to Wikipedia, and all of its selfless and presumably learned contributors, it would still be incomplete even if it had a billion pages about the Des Plaines River.
It wouldn’t, for example, mention the time I was nine and plunged into the Des Plaines while skating on the very ice I was forbidden from skating on, sinking to my thighs and trudging home like a robot as my pants froze into something like sheet metal, only to encounter my next nightmare: my mother hysterical with rage, alternating between clubbing me and hugging me.
It wouldn’t mention the time in fall, 1986, during a bout of historic flooding on the Des Plaines, when my brothers and I worked with National Guard troops to surround my parents’ house with sandbags.
It wouldn’t mention how we spread my mother’s ashes into the river, probably illegally, near that same home, in the summer of 2004 – off the muddy west bank behind the Fullerton Woods Family Picnic Area in River Grove.
And it certainly wouldn’t mention how I developed an unaccountable urge to explore the entirety of the river as a restless sixty-three-year-old who couldn’t decide if he was unemployed or retired, but who in any case had a great deal of time on his hands and needed the exercise.
Why walk a river?
It would be natural and reasonable to ask why I’m doing this. Why all the hiking? Why the fixation on the Des Plaines River? Why now?
Good questions. There are some easy and sensible enough theories, even to me, that seem at least to be contributing factors, such as the desire for fresh air and exercise, and to be outdoors enjoying nature. And then there’s just good old curiosity.
How that translated into me walking the whole river I don’t know. Even I don’t think this is normal, and I have a pretty high tolerance for not normal. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I grew up just two doors away from the Des Plaines River, in a town called River Grove, off a street called River Road, yet I knew little more about the river than the Wikipedia article. My familiarity with the Des Plaines River never equated to knowledge about the Des Plaines River, and so I’ve spent most of my life with only the vaguest sense of the river’s course – much less its history, its geology, or its geography. For example, there is a river further west of Chicago called the Fox River, and I will admit to “pre-quest” confusion as to which river passes through which towns. Had someone challenged me to say which river passed through Joliet and which through Aurora, I not only couldn’t have answered, but may have been surprised to learn it was two different rivers.
See the world while you still can
This is all background, as I understand the crime detective meaning of that word, but still doesn’t tease out the possible cause and motive for my mysterious, possibly obsessive behavior. I do, however, recall a frigid Thursday morning in early December spent walking the river’s banks in downtown Joliet (which answers the question posed in the preceding paragraph) and being driven into the waterfront casino in search of a rest room and some warmth. As I walked through its jangling, smoky game room, trying in vain to see if its architects had incorporated any views of the river (I think one of its restaurants does, but it wasn’t open), I was in the company of a small handful of gamblers idling at the slot machines and blackjack tables, most of whom, it occurred to me, probably represented my demographic: old, unemployed, bored, lonely. The word “desperate” also crossed my mind. It struck me then that we were all just killing time, and that if I’d been a more successful gambler in my youth, and more sociable in general, I could easily be sitting at one of those blackjack tables myself. I had one of those “there but for the grace of God go I” moments, and then got instantly taken down by the realization they’d say the same about me.
Disregarding questions about my sanity, at least for a moment, I feel lucky and grateful to be doing this. This is a discovery process – mainly about the river, but also about the city I grew up in. Exploration and discovery is central to the human experience, and in my attempts to connect more deeply with this river, it makes me feel more human.
Thank you for visiting this site. I hope you enjoy it, and learn something new. Chicago wouldn’t be the city it is without the Des Plaines River. The river’s story is Chicago’s story.
— Dan Witte
You can e-mail me at dan.witte@thedesplaines.com