Mountains may well be firm, but, well, they’re definitely not “around us.” In fact, Illinois is both the second-flattest and the second flattest-looking state in the country (after Florida). According to the internet, the closest mountain to Chicago is in Wisconsin, about 120 miles away from us. And calling it a “mountain” might be a bit of a stretch—it apparently rises like 450 feet (though from certain angles it may look like up to 1,000 feet). That’s a fraction of the elevation change my family hiked over our summer camping trip in several Arizona, Utah, and California national parks. To an actual mountain range? It’s more than 550 miles to the Smokey Mountains and more than 700 to the Poconos.
And also, if we can hear the desert singing, it must be singing LOUD. The closest desert to Illinois is probably the Chihuahuan Desert, which covers, inter alia, Texas. And Texas is about 1,000 miles from Chicago.
(I will note that, before I texted these thoughts to my family—sans the specifics of how many miles away these things were—one of my daughters mentioned that she really liked the song. And this isn’t, by any means, a knock on it. It’s literally what singing the first verse made me think!)