when one goes on a long trip across the midwest, one often plays the alphabet game, in which one looks for the various letters of the alphabet, in order, a-b-c-d-e-etc. on roadsigns, license plates, virtually any place outside of the car; we always get stuck on j, q and sometimes x, but usually make pretty good progress if we don't lose interest. Another game is the Missouri cow game, taught to me by a friend, in which people on the right side of the car compete against people on the left to count cows; whole herds just count as ten if you can't count quickly enough, and a cemetery makes you lose all your cows at once.

But, in the absence of competitors, or people old enough to actually count the cows, one can always just keep track of license plates themselves, and see how many states one can come up with, in a given trip, in this case across about half of a single state, illinois. now in my case i enjoy writing the names of the states, as i see them, on a scrap of paper, in this case an old envelope, and speculating about how each distant traveler came to be on whichever particular road at this particular time. now with this game as any other you have dilemmas about how to count. what about truck licenses? what about canadian provinces or mexican states? what do you actually do with your list when you're done; do you compare it with lists of bygone trips, at different times?

can't answer those questions; i might play it different at any given time. this time, I saw a manitoba, but it was a truck; saw a host of the usual suspects, in, ia, oh, mi, ks, ok, tn, ky, mo, ar, al, ms, and a few from farther away: tx, mn, va, sc, nc, fl. the motel parking lot and the interstates were, as usual, the most fertile grounds. at least one car was clearly exotic but sped by us too quickly and i missed it. in the small towns i was surrounded by il itself, proof that, even on a holiday, the vast majority of people on the road were just going from here to there, to the store or to grandma's house. illinois is not one of those states where you can discern what county someone is from, by careful study of the plate; however, if you live in the same small town for years, you can get better at knowing which ones are from your own. you get a funny feeling knowing there are all these bluish lincoln-images in transit down there at number-level, and wonder if that bothers anyone besides the wisconsin traffic police, who assume we are all from chicago, or weary iowans, perhaps used to a more genteel pace of traffic. someday obama will be on those plates, maybe, though they change only, maybe, once every sixteen years. i assure you that tourists are not destroying the place, except maybe on their way through. it's the same as usual, and, for what it's worth, it's not too crowded, except maybe the toronto road cracker barrel.