Ill winds - The Chemical Plant Next Door

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

All small towns are turned inward upon themselves: behind the times, idyllic, poor, happy, and at the mercy of whatever industry runs the place. Right at the literal center of Illinois, Illiopolis cropped up in 1833, when pioneers cleared the prairie grass and planted cabins. A fire wiped them out, leaving the land to weeds, until the railroad line from Springfield to Decatur made the town a loading point. The prairie was drained and there it appeared: farmland. Fed by decomposing roots, rich because for centuries it had been let be. Illiopolis grew along the tracks; by 1900 it had a railroad depot, grain elevators, a post office, a grocery store, a hardware store-mortuary combination (making it easy to hammer down the coffins), a lumber yard, blacksmith shops, two hotels, three churches, livery stables, a school, and, of course, a bar. Not a whole lot is different today, except that the shops that once serviced horses now service cars.

A white church with an elegant steeple looms over frame houses with added-on bedrooms. A ranch house huddles next to a rehabbed mansion, a trailer rests perpendicular to a beauty shop, a junkyard lurks up the hill from thin-walled family homes. Its bar proclaims Habits and Vices, a cavalier admission, a plainspoken truth. Johnson's Grocery sits beside the Citgo gas station with its all-night stock of liquor, chips and cigarettes. In the Business District--you know it's the business district because that's what the signs tell you--is the bank and an antiques store crammed floor to ceiling with ceramic figurines and Depression glass. That's it. Kids still drive around and around this "square" at night, swigging from beer cans in cup coolers. They honk at each other, swap joints, and screw in back seats, Then they settle down and get to the grinding work of factory shifts and child rearing. And when their children grow up, those kids drive around the square ...

RELICS REMAIN

After my parents died, I drove a couple times a week down Route 36, straight through Buffalo. It became familiar, like a rested Chevy with bad sparkplugs. The change came not in design, but in wear. Like my parents, the town had gotten old, and it seemed to be on the verge of dying, too.

The gray one-story befits my father's grimy years of commuting to Decatur's Firestone plant. I want to hate my former home. I want to understand my mother's furious depression. But although I can see that the house is ugly, it doesn't seem ugly to me. Lilies of the valley once drooped in the shade at the side of the house, peony bushes and rhubarb grew beside the storm cellar, the laundry line ran from the house to the shed, and an alleyway provided a path where my friends and I walked barefoot. I imagine that these relics still remain. The old neighbor's tended lawn, the tree that I climbed in the front yard, the holes that my brother and I dug with Tonka trucks. What kids remember.

Route 36 used to be the only road that linked the cities of Springfield and Decatur. This pitted two-lane takes you through or near a string of towns: Illiopolis, Lanesville, Mechanicsburg, Dawson, Buffalo, Riverton. As a child, I knew the road mostly as one that shouldn't be crossed. The countryside around it is littered with faded cafes and junked VW vans, silos and leaning barns. Cattails and coreopsis droop in ditches, while stands of trees clump amidst nothing. Make-out roads stop at a field's edge or a washed-away bridge. Folks live in the middle of nowhere because it's cheap and they're comfortable; as my mom said, "We don't have to put on airs. I can go out without a bra on and I'm invisible," or, according to Grandpa, "I can scratch my ass and nobody's going to take a picture." Along the road you'll see a house grown over with vines and weeds, whatever's visible needing a paint job, greeting visitors with a No Trespassing sign and a pit bull/hound. People keep a good distance.