Ill winds - The Chemical Plant Next Door

E: The Environmental Magazine, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Becky Bradway

From the time I was eight until I was 10, I lived in a pea-sized town down the road from the chemical plant and the munitions factory. Buffalo, Illinois had a bank, a grocery store, a post office and a park. And enough houses to hold three hundred people. This was where we moved, a few miles from my grandparents, after we left Phoenix. My mother never wanted to come back to Illinois. Once she was there, she only spoke to the relatives, and when they were with us they seemed to mask the hole in her life.

I loved that town nearly as much as my mother hated it. She hated it so much that she never went outside except to get in her car and drive away. She sent me to the post office and the grocery store, had my dad do the yard work. She sat in the dark living room watching soap operas and folding clothes. The kitchen was for packing my father's suppers. He worked swing shift--3 to 11 p.m.--or graveyard, the night shift. When he was gone, we would eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and carrot sticks. When he was home, we would have pork chops or the end of a roast. We tried not to spill the milk or sing at the table.

Anyway, it was the town that mattered. A town, or what it should be, is a community of hope. It's bustle and defiance out here in nowhere. Buffalo was my sanctuary, my circle. Friends, school, church, street, sidewalk, lawn, bells. They were not artificial constructions. They were not just institutional and conformity-approving props. We need these places. I needed them.

Concerned grown-ups asked questions that I would dodge. I took their offerings of Bible verse and story and hid them beneath my bed, to be brought out at quiet times, l kept the letters from pen pals and the stamps from foreign countries and I told the man and woman at the post office some jokes. I ambled the sidewalks, looked up at the leaves, listened to mourning doves, chatted with pals on the steps of the church, rode my bike anywhere I wanted to go, even past the edges of the town. I never passed the tavern, and I avoided the stares from that weird (some said retarded) man who lived alone and spent his days on his porch. I played jacks, petted dogs, swapped notes. I learned to say dirty words, even though I had no idea what they meant. My boyfriend, Toby, gave me a gumball machine ring, a rectangular green stone set in bendable gold.

The town was heaven. Not that it was really that way. All is comparison and perspective--what I chose to see, what I didn't have to know. I didn't know about unemployment and pollution and the other weights that pushed under the people. I didn't care about commodity prices and the sale of beans and hogs. The world was sun and dark, and I would choose my own gradations and ignore the rest.

Buffalo, this town where we lived, was right down the road from Borden Chemical.

BORDEN AND BUFFALO

when Mom got sick, I decided to dredge up the dirt about Borden. She didn't link the floating fish to herself; but as her thoughts grew foggy, and she grew thinner, she kept coming back to the fish kill. She was sure Borden was the murderer. Was her body telling her something? I owed her some cause-and-effect explanation. I read books, tapped into environmental and scientific list serves, and watched documentaries. Whatever I could dig up about the chemical industry, I dug. Pesticides, herbicides, industrial chemicals, even cow shit: I know it all. Factories, coal tar, farms, sewage: put them all together, and beings die.

But Mom wanted to know about Borden Chemical. That bulbous monstrosity on Route 36. In looking there, I came across Buffalo again. I came across people. Those who I knew, whose fates were tied to the wind that blew vinyl chloride across their town. Why do we bring disaster upon ourselves? Embrace it, fund it, serve it? Facts don't mean that much. It's feeling that matters. It's earth, the ground where we plant our feet. It's what we do to compromise, what we ignore in order to stay in one place. To understand Borden, I'd have to understand the town that allowed the factory to stay: Illiopolis. And to understand Illiopolis, I'd have to go back to the town where I lived for two years: Buffalo. These were the towns nearest to Borden. I lived there. I drank that water and breathed the air. I had cancer, my mother and uncle died of cancer. Is this what fed the cells? Made us dizzy, made our joints creak, created multiplication inside that we couldn't even feel until it was late and it had compromised our systems? In comprehending these places, I hoped to get a grip on death and rage and the dark side and sex and all that stuff that comes up in nightmares, as if by grasping it all with logic I could keep from being consumed. Maybe someone would stop it.

Nobody cares about rural people, though. Let's be real about that. They're the butt of jokes; they have no power. A friend who teaches in Illiopolis joked that everyone in the town is inbred. They all have the same last names. Uh-huh, I said. Tell me about it. Feuding strands of my cousins' family, the Pattons, wind all over Central Illinois. The inbreeding isn't a matter of genetics, but of attitudes and ideas and career options and life choices that limit them to a 10-mile radius. Kids look to the chemical plant, figuring they can get a I job there after they get married. They marry soon after they graduate high school, or even before. Some want to leave but lack opportunity or nerve, so they stay stoned, vandalize, fight, or maybe kill themselves driving too fast on the curving country roads.