Kieth Nielsen

A flat, faceless stretch of Illinois Route 2 in rural Winnebago County is not unlike so many others. The gray strip of aging asphalt separates the rows of houses on its north and south sides, like a weathered gray belt separating green pants from a green shirt. It is a very quiet place in a world so seemingly filled with noise.

However, places like this faceless strip of state highway have a way of talking to some people. The collected stillness can gather in the mind of a person connected in some way to this tiny area and create a deafening sound.

“I lost a lot in that creek bed,” said Kieth Nielsen, 44, of Rockford, shattering the silence created by cars whizzing past like bees in a flower patch. Nielsen nearly lost his life in this creek bed, about three-quarters of a mile east of the Byron Fire Department on the edge of Route 2, 25 years ago.

On a beautiful Saturday in March 2009, Nielsen stood on the narrow shoulder of the road when he noted the shoulder was not always as wide as it is now. He surveyed the still water some 15 feet below like a man searching for a lucky coin he had dropped years ago.

He became as still and quiet as the rust-tinted water beneath him, as the realization that what he had lost in that creek bed (which is really a Rock River backwater inlet) was never to be returned swept over him like the spring breeze. He turned and navigated his way back toward the parked truck, walking against traffic with the setting sun of an early March Saturday as his backdrop.

Nielsen had not dropped a wallet or set of keys into that murky, shallow water. Neither a wedding ring nor any other sentimental memento had escaped his grasp and slipped into that cloudy, motionless water he had been staring into.

He closed the truck door and inserted the keys into the ignition, just as he had done so many times before. He reached for a cigarette with hands bent from constant pain, and lit it after placing it in his lips. And, with one depression of the clutch, he was off. He glanced to his left at a trailer park, then up-shifted into third and began to accelerate noticeably.

What Nielsen lost in that creek bed on a warm night in August 1984 cannot be measured in monetary increments or weighted against sentimental value. But as he drove toward the east, his silence and facial expression made his loss—and the subsequent path of his life—tangible and palpable.

The trees just outside t