I grew up in a semi-rural unincorporated area outside of a small Illinois town thatâs 30 miles east of Chicago and a few miles from Schererville Indiana.
The midwest has a reputation as being flat, and of being all prairie, but the specific area I lived in used to be wetlands. Kind of swampy. It was wetlands interspersed with stretches of wooded area, mostly oak I think. At least itâs oak now, but that might have been planted later.
My particular subdivision, which was exactly one block long before development was abandoned, was where wetland met wooded area. All the dirt excavated from the 3 rows of houses on that block was taken and dumped into a wetland area in an attempt to create more usable land for later development. Iâm pretty sure this was illegal, but the crappy houses were built in the 1970s so maybe it wasnât back then. They were built to house migrant farm workers, though, which probably feeds into the possibly illegal dumping and the shoddy work on the homes and also why they were built in a swamp.
Anyway, a lot of land surrounding us was not just wetlands but federally protected wetlands. My mom was super big into bird watching, especially herons and stuff, for a while. Weâd travel out to larger wetland areas to lie in wait for Great Egrets, Sand Hill Cranes, Great Blue Herons, etc. It was... pretty boring. I liked looking through the thick bird book, though, picking out birds I recognized and thinking about where they go when they migrate and about the birds not common to our area.
For most of my childhood the farmland surrounding us grew corn. When I was in high school they started alternating corn and soybeans. I prefer the corn/soybeans alternation because theyâd do corn in one field and soybeans across the road in another field. Traveling down a narrow sun-bleached asphalt or dusty gravel road in a tunnel of tall green corn is really claustrophobic. Itâs also dangerous because itâs hard to see upcoming cross roads and whether or not thereâs cars coming. We always had deeper than usual ditches on the side of the road for water to sit in after a hard rain, but at one point they got dug out super deep and steep, dangerously so. The ditches always had ditch lillies (tiger lillies), cat tails, and other water plants in them. One of the most beautiful things is a red winged blackbird perched on a swaying cat tail on a sunny day. There were frogs and various turtles living in the water, too. Some friends of ours in Monee had a pond on their property and a snapping turtle lived in it, huge and mossy.
All of our yards were really thick clay soil, unless that was removed and replaced with dirt, which a few of our neighbors did. Thereâd be grey or yellowish grey clay deposits that youâd turn up when digging a garden or something, heavy and wet, and actual clay that you could squish around and shape into things. I entertained some kids once by digging up clay and making little people and a house for them to live in: the people all about the size of my hand, the house big enough for them to stand up in. Our yard, front and back, were really shady also so grass didnât grow. Our sideyard was nothing but moss, in fact, for years. One of my college summer jobs was working for a landscaper, though, so I rescued a bunch of native shade-loving plants like Solomonâs Seal, Lungwort, Bloodroot (great name, so goth), Jack In The Pulpit, etc. My mom planted the sideyard with those, put in some bricks for a walkway so we werenât walking on slick moss and clay, etc.Most of the âlawnâ was crab grass, creeping charley, dandelions, violets, and Canadian wild ginger. And bare patches. And hosta. Good old hosta. (I also rescued about 500 tiger lillies, which my mom planted in the drainage ditch along the front edge of our property, and some rose bushes and other things. I got paid $10 an hour cash but also brought home hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of plants that people didnât want anymore.)
We didnât go exploring in the wetlands a lot, for a few reasons. One of the big ones was the sticky sucking clay mud that would pull the shoes right off your feet. Then thereâs the fact the land was protected and we were warned against fucking around with endangered creatures, their young, their eggs, etc. Mom didnât want us back there. There were also people hunting illegally (and out of season), and people doing other illegal stuff. Like, the guy managing our sewage treatment plant (and letting excess sewage run into the wetlands, another reason we didnât go back there, who wants to splash around in raw sewage) was running a chop shop.
Weâd go tromping through the woods a lot, though, especially in the forest preserve. By us, there was an old brick factory that had been torn down or fallen down decades ago but you could still see remnants of it. In some of the forest preserves there were the ruins of old shacks, or just the foundations of them, and weâd picnic among them. Iâll write more about the woods later, in a separate post. After a certain point, though, I was pressed into babysitting my brothers when my parents werenât home (after school, all summer). Cell phones didnât exist then, so I had to sit inside where I could hear the phone. They got to run around outside and do a lot of exploring. It was a shitty situation for me, cooped up in a house with no cable tv, barely any regular tv reception (it was a valley surrounded by power transformers and we had no roof antenna), no air conditioning, etc. So boring. My parents both were working full time, but couldnât afford child care. Wooooo USA! Best country ever!! If I didnât have younger siblings, or they were able to take care of themselves, I probably would have gone âinto townâ more... a five mile or so ride by bike. We had an ideal library set up... it was super small but directly across the street from a big park. Iâll write more about that later, too.
Maybe this will be helpful to people writing about the midwest, I donât know. Midwestern Gothic seems to be A Thing right now, but a lot of the stuff Iâve seen floating past donât apply to the part of the midwest Iâm from or are just kind of generic jump stuff. This is pretty super specific, but maybe thatâs what a story needs, a specific setting instead of bland vaguery.
Iâm probably going to write about the woods next, and the deep ravines cut by narrow streams; about the oak trees and their gnarled bark covered roots digging into the soil like grasping elderly fingers; about the once vibrant and thriving rich people resorts that are now abandoned; about the abandoned train tracks and train stations that once served the resorts; how many houses were allegedly stops on the underground railway; how dangerous a dry stream bed can be; maybe the race track out there? What itâs like living in a town that has a single stoplight? The sound of coyotes? The fast moving freight trains and the terrifying train safety filmstrips we had to watch?
