Eagle Birds

(The Black Keys)

Month One of Starved Rock: ✔️

On the very last possible day — literally January 31st — I took my first 2026 monthly trip to Starved Rock.

It was arguably too many hours of driving for too short a visit. It didn’t help that my car is out of windshield washer fluid and I’ve been putting off fixing that, so I had to stop several times to wipe down my windows at gas stations. I also had to stop to fill up my tank with gas and a slowly-leaking tire with air and myself with a protein bar because I left approximately two hours later than I’d hoped to and it was too close to lunch to not eat before I arrived.

When I got there, it was cold and snowy but clear, clearer than it had been when I left the city.

It was so clear, in fact, that when I got to the top of Starved Rock and its wrap-around wooden boardwalk, there were several people standing with binoculars and long-lens cameras. I followed their eyes to find a huge eagle gliding in an arc over the Illinois River and the Starved Rock Dam. Below were scores of seagulls and presumably other, quieter birds and fish, and the eagle was surveying the premises.

I did not have binoculars or a camera and I have (increasingly) bad distance eyesight, so I can only imagine what kinds of details I wasn’t seeing. But I actually couldn’t bring myself to care that much. Because what I was seeing was incredible. I could see by the angle of the bird’s body that its claws were extended. (Confirmed when an older man with a camera said “I love it when their claws are extended.”) I could see the bird’s wings were wide and straight as a board or as the wings of an airplane.

I stood and watched and, after a while, it became clear that there wasn’t just one eagle. There were at least two, possibly more, but a mess of tree branches made it impossible to be sure. I continued around the circular pathway and when I came back around to the first outlook by the staircase, there was a family with three or four kids where I’d been standing, also watching the eagles.

Instead of picking another hiking route like I normally would — maybe French Canyon or Lover’s Leap — I walked a hundred yards or so down to the shore of the Illinois River. I leaned out over the concrete barrier and stared across the massive crust of ice.

I could hear it singing, deep tones of movement and high-pitched creaking. I’m sure I could easily find out what those sounds mean, what science was happening in front of me, but I was perfectly happy to just listen. I don’t have to understand everything to appreciate its beauty.

From there, I walked back to my car and drove to a cafe in nearby Utica for lunch and a little bit of novel-writing.

My “hike” at Starved Rock was a glorified walk; for those unfamiliar with the state park, the actual Starved Rock part is basically a flat quarter-mile paved path up to a flight of wooden stairs. The “real” hiking happens elsewhere in the park.

Part of me was tempted to treat this trip as a failure: nearly four hours of roundtrip driving for that?

But how could this possibly be a failure? I watched eagles soaring and heard ice singing and I finished an audiobook on the drive home and I ate a pretty good chicken salad sandwich for lunch. Why do I need to put a judgment on how much driving would make that worthwhile?

Perhaps… I don’t need to do that. Maybe I can just be grateful for the day. Maybe I simply can appreciate what is, rather than regretting what isn’t (the details on the eagle I didn’t get to see) or what it took to get there (the driving and the cleaning of the grimy windshield and the pumping of the gas). I can thank the version of myself that did all that for giving me the eagles and the ice and the fresh air and the rest of it.

Anyway, my next trip will (probably) be the week after next. Everything else is slow and hard and I’m fluctuating between impatience and gratitude and deep hopelessness. As I sit in my basement apartment editing audio and writing podcast scripts and feeling the futility of all of it, I know that somewhere on the Illinois River, eagles are gliding in search of food and the ice is singing.

Speaking of ice… let’s get ICE the hell out of Minneapolis and everywhere else. A couple places to donate to, if you’re able:

• Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee

• Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota

<3 Isabel