Show Me—Natural Wonders covers Traveler Country and beyond
By Emery Styron
Traveler Editor
If you enjoy Traveler, there’s a good chance you’d find Don Corrigan’s book, Show Me…Natural Wonders, a satisfying read.
Corrigan, a veteran St. Louis journalist and college professor, has the same kind of appreciation for the region’s natural environment that we often encounter in Traveler readers. But he has ranged much further and wider than Traveler Country in penning this 217-page volume, subtitled “A Guide to the Scenic Treasures of the Missouri Region.”
The book contains 90 essays, all with a meditative flavor, on his experiences in places that are either in or within sight of the Show-Me State.
Corrigan is partial to bluffs, having grown up exploring them with his buddies around his hometown of Belleville, IL. “Sit a spell on Easley’s bluffs” overlooking the Missouri River near Columbia, “and you just might catch a second wind,” he advises. Or “unfurl your tired body on top of a smooth, bare rock, table top bluff” overlooking Pickle Springs in the deep shade of Hawn State Park, and you’ll find “a ready refuge from “a scorching Midwest summer day.”
Corrigan describes 30 bluffs, in locations ranging from Trail of Tears State Park near Cape Girardeau to Weston Bluffs, north of Kansas City. Crags overlooking the Meramec as well as those overlooking the Mississppi in his native Illinois are included.
Traveler Country is rich with springs and streams, as all our readers know. Corrigan’s late, lamented Uncle Stanley was his boyhood guide to Alley Spring, Blue Spring, Big Spring, Greer Spring, Mina Sauk Falls and other Ozark water wonders. He revisits 20 of those places for the book, traveling as far as Roaring River in southwest Missouri.
Caves and caverns merit 20 essays as well. Traveler office assistant, contributor and resident spelunker Jo Schaper is acknowledged for her help in explaining the cave hobby.
Corrigan finds cavers to be “cool people, He focuses on commercial caves because they are the best introduction to the general public of “the splendid wilderness underground.” He recommends off season visits to avoid crowds.
“Just Special Places” is the final section of the book, a places for places that defy categorization.
Elephant Rocks is described as “once-endangered stone beasts” that are “now a protected herd in a visitor-friendly environment.”
Allred Lake Natural Area in the Boothell, Corrigan suggests, might be the “primordial swamp” that our early ancestors are thought to have crawled from to become land creatures.
“Seeing Allred, it’s easy to understand why some folks prefer the Genesis story to evolution,” he writes.
Corrigan has a knack to absorbing the flavor of these places and connecting it the rest of our lives.
A valuable appendix gives detailed directions to finding each of the places described.
Corrigan’s late co-adventurer, Ed Thias, illustrated Show Me…Natural Wonders with detailed pencil drawings that reinforce the contemplative tone of the essays. A noted St. Louis architect, Thias tutored artists at St. Louis Community College and had many published illustrations to his credit. He died this year.
Corrigan says research for the book took a lifetime, but the writing was done in about two years. Editor and co-publisher of the Webster-Kirkwood and South County Times in suburban St. Louis, Corrigan has served as media professor at Webster University since 1978. He is a graduate of Knox College, with a masters degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
He live in Sunset Hills with his wife, Susanne, and two children.
Frequent attendance at journalism meetings has provided Corrigan many opportunities to sneak off and explore natural wonders in all corners of the state.
Readers will be glad he did.
Show Me…Natural Wonders was published by Reedy Press of St. Louis in 2007 and can be ordered from http://reedypress.com and major booksellers.
