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7:24 p.m. - 2004-07-10 A Ride (Way The Hell Out) In The CountryThe town I live in lies approximately 23 miles northwest of Chicago's Loop. Back in the late 50's, it represented the far western edge of suburbia and was tauted as "Chicago's Smartest New Suburb." Gradually over the years, the town itself sprawled in a western direction and other suburbs built west of it, shaving the land as the sprawl continued, eating up Mother Nature, leaving a boring patch of little boxes on the hillside, made of ticky tack, sitting row by row on treeless, manicured lawns. When I moved back here as an adult in 1977, there were still a few farms left, and you could still get a fresh ear of corn without having to leave town. Today, I have to drive 20 miles to the west to see a cornfield and even those are just a patch here and there, surrounded by giant houses on the hillsides made of ticky tack. I have to drive another 10 miles west of there to get to a real, old fashioned, farm stand that actually sits on the property of the farmer that grows the corn. Today, I decided that it had been much too long since I'd seen vast fields of corn, and I got in my car and hopped on the tollway and drove 20 miles west to start at the nearest cornfield I knew of. There, I got off and took an old fashioned two lane road west, in my search for "The Country". I had to drive another 20 miles to find true country, with proper working farms and quaint old towns with pretty old houses; the kind with 4th of July bunting hanging on them. It had been 3 years since I had been out this far and then, some of these little towns were no more than a grain elevator and a gas station......Well, not any more. Suburbia, in it's race to clone every square inch of Northern Illinois has spread out this way too. Like a couple of mavrick cancer cells that spread from the main tumor to infect another organ, I found giant housing developments going up in the cornfields, 55 to 60 miles west of Chicago. What really got me down, was that there was no effort what so ever to try to blend these monstrosoties into the quaint little towns they were destroying. Row upon row upon row of houses all looked the same. The same layout, the same landscaping, even the same color; and the color was (yuck) "putty" color. Yes...every $350,000.00 mini mansion, was an ugly putty color, no matter what town, no matter what builder, no matter what development. Another thing that I found funny was that here in the middle of the wide open spaces, the houses were built about 10 feet apart from each other. It looked like a habitat orchard instead of a neighborhood. I turned to the north off of the main drag and drove past the town and out into the cornfields. Ah, there were still miles and miles of open road with nothing but cornfields on either side, and nothing but tiny farms surrounded by corn in the distance. I turned from one un-named country road onto another and another and another until I was hopelessly lost in a vast sea of green, green corn. I drove for miles and couldn't find my way back to anything that even remotely looked like suburbia and after a while I started to panic. "What if the car broke down, what if I get thirsty, what if I have to pee. What if night comes and I am still lost in the corn." My suburban culture was showing through. Raised in an area where you could have anything you wanted within 3 minutes of getting into an automobile, I was uncomfortable with being alone with my thoughts and the beautiful day and the corn. I smiled to myself as I assured my inner suburbanite that it was only noon and I had plenty of time to find my way home. After all, isn't this what I set out to find, a place so remote that putty colored mini mansions with boringly manicured lawns didn't exist? A place that would hopefully remain untouched by suburban sprawl for at least another 20 years? A place where wild tiger lilies grow along wild roads? Yes, this was exactly what I had hoped to find. P. I. Yarnsmith
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