Why time began on Memorial Day (or, how I plan to make you care about Hannibal, Missouri)

How a ‘69 Chevy can make a kid feel like John Steinbeck

What you do when it’s 55 below zero and you live in the most maligned town in America

Why I learned to read at age 23
What I have in common with a 46-year-old, third-shift machinist

How I know God exhales over the Idaho sky

Where my heart skipped a beat: in the desert

How dipping my feet in Lake Erie scared me back to the sixth grade

What my oldest chum and my first love taught me about fashion and friendship

What mushroom soup says about my independence

Why a computer geek likes to pump his water from a well
A horse is a horse, but can a barn make a Hoosier?

THE CHERRY VALLEY LANDSCAPE was as tranquil as it was flat, and in that I found beauty. Quietude out there had a distinctive sound. The shimmer of crickets and the sway of cornstalks in the wind became symphonic. In my life I have been to many beautiful places, so I was shocked to discover I could be so moved by a landscape that was so ordinary. To express this, I actually tried my hand at some art. In the tradition of the Impressionists, who were so capable of revealing the immense beauty in simple, everyday nature scenes, I’ve sought to portray a decaying picket fence in a meadow on the farm.

AS I MENTIONED in Part II: What you do when it’s 55 below zero and you live in the most maligned town in America, I carried out the first year of the Rockford Experiment on a farm.

Yes, friends, I spent every night after work and softball pretending that I was the embodiment of rustic Backbone America. I plowed my own snow in the winter, changed my own oil in the spring and pumped my own water from a well in the summer. I wore steel-toed boots, canvas overalls and I had loads of fun getting muddy helping out with the corn and bean harvests in the fall.

On the farm there were lots of animals. Across the road (Winnebago County Rural Route 11) were some livestock, and I myself had a couple of horses. All these animals were great, really — and that's from a guy who thought about animals like gum on his shoes. But one of them did scare the manure out of me one afternoon.

There I was on a Friday, sleeping quietly away after a hard day's work. I was whipped and I had to get up at 5 a.m. to honor a golfing commitment I was wishing I hadn't made. All of a sudden I awoke to some strange clamoring close by. The culprit was unabashedly thrashing his way through my yard, it seemed. I got up (more pissedoff than frightened), hoisted the window, tore away the claspings of the screen and thrust my head through the gap to come nose-to-snout with... Angie the elderly quarterhorse, who had managed to get loose from the pasture and was wandering around the yard. That was my worst security concern out in Cherry Valley: a gimpy, arthritic horse. After realizing that, I decided I’d never have to lock the doors again.

Photo gallery: Basketball in the barn

When basketball season was in full swing, I longed to shoot a few free throws in the yard. I was in a Tuesday morning industrial league, but I needed something less structured to just relax me. Something where I could toss up a few foul shots and chase the elusive 10-in-a-row that I can never manage. When I told my landlord about this, he gave me the green light to go ahead and use whatever hardware scraps I could find to build a hoop inside the barn. So for two weeks after work, I sawed, sanded, painted and bolted until I had a regulation basket hanging inside, sheltered from the elements. I even strung up some flood lights from the rafters so I could play after work when it was dark. Straight out of the 1987 film Hoosiers, it was Backbone America the best way I could create it.

	Photo gallery: Cherry Valley I
	Photo gallery: Cherry Valley II
	Photo gallery: Galena, Illinois

ALMOST A YEAR-AND-A-HALF out of college, away from friends and family, I can say conclusively that the Rockford Experiment has been a roaring success. I think that a few simple bowls of mushroom soup tell the story best.

When I first arrived on the farm, I was scared out of my mind. Not knowing anyone, and having no handle whatsoever on the town, each day posed a new set of challenges. At work, I was being asked to run our entire Web page (I had never done anything like that before) and there was nobody there who knew enough about it to teach me any technical skills.

But my biggest obstacle: I had no idea how to live on my own. Laundry I could do. Bills, when they came, I could pay. But setting up utilities? Where would I start? Balancing a checkbook? I could scarcely add. And making dinner that didn’t come out of a microwave? Let’s just say that was a recipe for disaster.

On my third night in Cherry Valley, when I had run out of macaroni and cheese and hand no appetite for pizza, I decided to try my hand at a can of soup. This was already a big deal, because it meant going out one door, through the lawn and into a basement of another building where my oven was. There were other issues as well:

• Problem No. 1: I had no can opener. Not wanting to bug my neighbors, and feeling like I ought to be resourceful out there in the country, I searched for the biggest, pointiest roadside rock I could find.
• Problem No. 2: I identified the perfect rock, but it was only inches from a raccoon carcass that was half-hidden in the weeds. I looked elsewhere and settled on a less desirable but also less-likely-to-be-infected-with-rabies rock.
• Problem No. 3: When I got back, the wind had blown the locked door shut, so I had to peel away a screen and sneak through to the basement hands-first. But once I was back inside, feeling that I had really earned this soup, I was ready to rock and roll.
• Problem No. 4: After patiently tapping away at the perimeter of the can for a few minutes, I realized I wasn’t making any headway. So I wound up my arm, snarled my face, and plunged the rock right through the top of the can. If only there had been lightning, it would have been an exact replica of Tim Robbins shattering the sewage pipe during his triumphant prison break in The Shawshank Redemption. The only drawback was every bit of dirt and crap that was on that rock ended up in the soup.
• Problem No. 5: The milk I had brought from Evanston was sour, so I had to mix the soup with well water instead.
• Problem No. 6: After I thought I had the whole thing conquered (soup cooked and stirred appropriately, dished out in a bowl, even a little salsa thrown in to spice things up) I pushed it one step too far. When I turned the pepper shaker over to add a final twist, the cap came off and the whole jar of pepper emptied into this one bowl of soup.

I was truly this helpless. And I’m sure I would still qualify as a rookie in terms of life management. But now, that can of soup that so literally illustrated my tumbling entry into the real world is a sign of progress. My first dinner when I get back to my nice new apartment in Rockford tomorrow: Baked chicken breast with wild rice and vegetables, topped with a cream of mushroom sauce I make myself. I think I’m finally getting used to this independence thing.