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East Side, Best Side

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The only reminder that this isn't a packed West Virginia roadhouse is the Kurt Warner jersey on the bartender's back.

A few miles down the road sits Louie's Kampsville Inn, a large blue restaurant/bar that neighbors a dock where cars board the free Kampsville Ferry to Carrollton in mainland Greene County (the two public ferries to Illinois are free, while the privately operated Missouri-originating pair exact a small toll). In the bar, a group of strapping duck hunters, one a ringer for ex-Cardinal Mark McGwire, orders a round of Busch cans while Flava Flav's VH1 reality dating show pipes in on the TV set overhead. Meanwhile, the restaurant portion of the Kampsville Inn is packed with catfish-craving Caucasian families (Calhoun County is 99 percent white and about 50 percent German), dispelling any notion that the Midwest is a region best skipped by seafood aficionados.

The great flood of 1993 all but wiped out tiny (population 650) Grafton, Illinois, which rests at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Unlike nearby Calhoun County, however, Grafton's re-emergence has been more of a cultural awakening than stubborn retreat to status quo.

"We were really hit hard in the flood," says Richard Mosby, Grafton's mayor. "We lost 150 structures and a third of our population. From that day on, we knew we had to bring some people back, and we've tried to be progressive about it."

Essentially what Grafton has done is to embrace its own natural wonder. Atop the Tara Point lookout, the critical mass of sailboats weaving through virtually uninhabited forestland in the wide confluence below gives you the impression you're on a secluded Pacific isle. Newfangled condominiums and wineries dot the highland; downhill, in warmer months, tanned patrons of a riverside cabana called the Loading Dock adopt a Grand Caymanesque mindset, ingesting Coronas and beer-battered halibut while yachts and fishing trawlers cruise past.

But things can also get a little dirty down there.

"You've seen our large and not unattractive piles of mud around town," Mayor Mosby quips. "They're there because a 200-slip marina is going in this spring. The first set of docks is on-site but not set in place yet. It will all start happening very quickly, which will change the complexion of our community. And that's good."

Only on the surface of its Main Street corridor does Grafton become distinctly Midwestern.

At noon on a Sunday at Senger's Tavern, a gaunt old man with three-day stubble nurses a cold Busch at a corner barstool. On the walls: a plethora of mounted taxidermy and a street-sign replica that reads "Bullshit Blvd." Senger's ceiling tiles are covered in permanent marker musings; and its weekend bartender is a sweet grandmotherly type who cautions a hangdog patron against pouring too much Jim Beam hot sauce in her bloody mary.

As happens often on sunny Sundays in Grafton, two motorcycle couples roll in, dressed in black leather. Enthralled by the looks of the aforementioned mary, the bikers order four more, heavy on the hot sauce.

A half-mile upriver is the Wild Goose Saloon, whose parking lot is packed with Harleys. When the weather's nice, the Goose's stilt-supported deck offers an Illinois River view unrivaled in the lowlands. Indoors there's a big-screen TV tuned to a sexy country-music pool party wherein it's revealed that "tequila makes her clothes fall off."

Indeed.

Behind the bar, bumper stickers abound, some tender ("There are no strangers here, just friends we haven't met"), some cheeky ("Since I've used all my sick days, I'm calling in dead"). One witticism perfectly captures the modern-day river town's laidback ethic: "Grafton, IL: A quiet little drinking town with a serious fishing problem."

"There're some people who would say that's the way it is," Mayor Mosby acknowledges. "Some people fish, some drink. Some do both."

The drinking-fishing hierarchy is inverted in little Nutwood, where there are two bait shacks for every tavern — meaning there are, literally, two bait shacks and one tavern in this middle-of-nowhere Jersey County community fifteen miles north of Grafton on Highway 100.

"Nutwood is definitely a one-bar town," explains Jonah White, who has welcomed a handful of the hamlet's residents to his spread in Michael for the erstwhile Billy Bob-a-Palooza festival. White no longer hosts the annual bash, which featured up to a dozen live bands and kegs galore, on account of one camped-out inebriate's sleepwalking off a dock in the middle of the night two summers ago. A security guard making out with a female reveler nearby dove in to rescue the wayward lush after catching the errant dive out of the corner of his eye (White hired off-duty Calhoun County cops to maintain order).

With their pipeline to the Kingdom clogged, Nutwood residents make do with the fare at the no-frills Nutrock Saloon, a squat rectangular structure that signals the town's presence to passersby. At the entry of the saloon is a man with a large hunting knife holstered to his belt. A pool table is crammed into one corner of the edifice — basically a double-wide stocked with liquor — and the jukebox's heavy-metal tendency is counterbalanced by Scrubs on a small TV set opposite the eight-ball sharks.

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