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Wednesday, May 07, 2014

ILLINOIS MAN PROTESTS REST STOP CLOSURE, CLAIMS HE WAS CONCEIVED IN BUILDING

by Elizabeth Johnston


DES PLAINES, Ill. (CBS) – A 21-year-old Crystal Lake man staged a one-man protest Friday morning over the permanent closing this weekend of the Des Plaines Oasis along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. The reason will do doubt come as a surprise. WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports Kevin Walters chained himself to the door of the oasis, and said to understand why, you have to go back more than two decades.


A man in handcuffs imagines himself Adam
guarding the Tree.

Would not we all, if once we could,
chain ourselves to certainty:

Here life began,
against all odds
has purpose.


Elizabeth Johnston is a founding member of the award-winning writer's group, Straw Mat.  You can read her prose and poetry in various anthologies and literary journals, including Yellow Medicine Review, Mom Egg Review, Organs of Vision and Sense, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism, among others. She teaches writing and gender studies in Rochester, NY, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a menagerie of animals.