Visiting Chautauqua

Chautauqua, Illinois could keep you out of trouble. The tiny, members-only village-like resort in a shady crevice along the Mississippi River is a version of Utopia that – it seems – is only quietly celebrated.

Walk the length of the picturesque village and back in half an hour. Pass miniature vacation cottages whose screened, wrap-around porches are bigger than their main caverns. Count three hands’-worth of door-flanking bird-feeders and wind chimes, observe cottage names like Weather or Not and Witt’s End and a rusty bicycle-built-for-two, leaning undisturbed against lattice-work.

Hear the peaceful central waterfall spill a fine 14 feet and catch its pool.

Cars don’t drive the streets of Chautauqua; bicycles and golf-carts provide the quickest transportation, and some long-time residents scoff at the latter. There’s a craft building, and an administrative building where residents get their seasonal mail. There’s a chapel, though the community’s religious tradition has relaxed in recent decades.

This place, one of several Chautauquas around the United States that was perhaps formerly held together by faith tradition, maintains many of its ages-old ways because a number of its tenants are life-long members, whose light-washed cottages have lasted generations.

A ladies’ council (membership mandatory) meets to play cards and plan community-building programs. There’s a men-only Roque field, though I’m told few men or women would attempt to play these days. Chautauqua calls in its children from the pool, the road and the hiking trail for lunch and dinner by sounding a bell.

They use that chilly, quiet waterfall to cool watermelons for barbecues.


***

It’s a beautiful, sun-soaked October day, and the bustling late-summering population of Chautauqua has relocated their home bases back to their houses in St. Louis’s metropolis and better-known suburbs. The road is empty, and cottages are locked. There are leaves on the Roque field; the assembly hall is dark. The pool-side snack shop’s refrigerator door hangs lazily open and there are no balls in the foosball table pockets.

If you’re bold, peak in on a wrap-around porch and peruse titles of summer reads sitting in small piles under wicker tables. Find colorfully-patterned throw blankets, cushioned hammocks, pictures of lighthouses, over-sized ropes, watering cans full of flowers.

Chautauqua gets frustrated cell phone coverage–indeed, you might find reception at the place’s river look-out point on its West edge, or at the end of a hike up to the rocky bluff that overlooks the Mississippi.

But that’s if, upon reaching the wide-open bluff some 200 feet above river-level, with a clear view of the Mighty river, you haven’t forgotten all about your phone, and your call, and everything but the shine on the water stretching miles to your left and right.


***

My good friend Audrey hosted me at her home outside of St. Louis for a couple of nights this week. Audrey and her brothers spent many of their childhood summers at Chautauqua with her aunt and uncle, and she suggested we hike through the forest up to the bluff, high on the hill next to the village.

Audrey’s a well of knowledge who imbibes history, knows the words to great classic rock songs and writes postcards from everywhere she goes; she’s up for anything and jokes around with strangers; I like to tell her she’s a renaissance woman with an adventurous soul.

Audrey and I, who only discovered a common zest for life in the last semester of college and have still had little more than a handful of chances to hang out, tend toward endless, easy discussion.

Even so, after we navigated Chautauqua’s forested hillside path, lowered ourselves down a short slope by knotted rope, emerged onto the sandy boulder’d cliff, and set to gazing out at the wide, dark Mississippi, we found our words swept away by the moving water.

We happily looked out. We felt the sun and watched it catch the current. We saw the flow and smiled about it. We lost minutes and unhurriedly found them again.

Eventually, Audrey and I threw our voices around again like pebbles, and finally we rose and wound our way back down the hill into Chautauqua. I was markedly refreshed. Amidst a great couple of days in the St. Louis area, delightful exploration and a bounty of charming characters and livening discussions, Chautauqua and its bluff were my simple peak. Ther is something about water, and the sky – and the two together! Gosh.


Do you find yourself so moved by water, too?