Sub-Urbia

I've been watching Strange Dreams... run throughs most of this week and have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the direction that the stories have gone in. Many of them are vastly different than when I wrote them, having been told back and forth and changed with each telling. It's been fascinating to watch.

The other day before the run began, Danielle and I were walking around Water's School Gardens collecting kindling for the campfire. Water's School Gardens, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is a wonderfully overgrown and rugged piece of land, fenced off from the city by an overgrowth of brush and grass. Tall trees block your view of the skyline and fences of fallen branches separate paths from garden plots. Walking through it feels less like walking through a community garden in a major metropolitan area than it does like walking through someone's backyard deep in Appalachia. As Danielle and I gathered dried wood (not from the fences), I commented to her that I could be very content living in that space and she agreed, adding that she really was a country girl, even though she grew up in the suburbs.

I thought about that. I grew up in the suburbs, too. Lower Makefield Township. If you go there today, you see housing developments made of row upon row of identical townhouses occupied by a strange mixture of elderly retirees and young parents or miniature mansions owned by folks living out of credit cards. The same folks who used to tell me they didn't have any money, back in my canvassing days. If you go there now, it's exactly what you expect a suburb to be. It's plastic communities, it's minimalls, it's conformity. But it wasn't that way back when.

When my family first moved there, LMT was still more farms and forest than anything else. We moved into a good-sized grey/blue house on Hollow Branch Lane in one of the newly developing subdivsions in the area. What I remember is that, if you walked to the end of my street, you were at the edge of the woods. It wasn't like living in colonial America or anything--I'm pretty sure the colonists were without malls--but the woods were pretty extensive, and my brother and I spent many afternoons walking up and down the mud paths buldozers were carving through them, mucking about in streams and drainage ditches, generally ruining our good sneakers and pants. My first book collection was a collection of Golden Guides. I had almost every Golden Guide to different kinds of animals and when my brother and I would go out on an expedition, we would come back with animals a plenty and explain what they were in great detail to my mother.

Gradually, my subdivision grew, as did the subdivisions around it. Local farms where my family bought our fresh produce were sold off as the farmers got old and developers offered them a healthy retirement package. Those bulldozers whose tracks made such good hiking slowly tore down the woods and leveled the dirt and dug foundations and laid down asphalt. As the subdivisions grew, they eventually overlapped, and it wasn't long before what had been woods and farm turned into a subdivision megalopolis with munchkin box houses as far as the eye can see.

Most of the woods around my house are gone now. Now it's subdivisions and strip malls, and the drainage ditches are festering and stale and nothing lives in them. Most of my childhood stomping grounds have been stomped. Sad as that is, it always makes me happy when I find a place like Waters School Gardens, a little bastion of overgrowth and nature that has somehow managed to keep itself cut off from all the clutter of a city like Chicago.