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A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just
off lowest Lake Michigan between
the towns of Whiting and
Gary. The desolation of human
endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been.
Not much more than 150 years ago this was
a region of marshes,
dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it
perfect for running railroad
track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone,
and the numberless small
shops and sheds that turned
out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways.
The one gigantic enterprise still going was the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping
orange flame from gas too cheap to sell lurid against
the Great Lakes sunset in
a lower key of rose and salmon
pink. The refinery was there to support the only other visible activity in region, which was motoring.
In a place so desolate it
was hard to tell where everybody was going in such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the
immigrants settled five generations
ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed
just imagining how depressed the remaning denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls,
one inferred that the old Eastern European
population had been lately
supplanted by a new wave
of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure
for daily life that was utterly devoid
of conscious artistry when it was
new, and now had the special patina of supernatural
rot over it that only comes from
materials not found in
nature disintegrating in surprising
and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain
angle to the sun. There was
a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it,
as of the longed-for end of something
enormous that hadn't worked out well.
Yet people were coming
and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even
more spectacular tatters
of Gary, where the old
front porches are disappearing into
prairie grass and the 20th century
retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I suppose, people were interested that the Michael
Jackson nativity occurred
there, but that, too, is a shred
of history now merging with the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North
American mastodon. You might
draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many
of the ones I saw in this forsaken corner of the
Midwest were classic beaters occupied by young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for something that is not there.
I was never so glad
to get out of a place than
those hundred-odd square
miles of soured American dreamland.
I was driving too, along with
everybody else, on the
Dan Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20
miles or so, from Pullman
to the West Loop, the traffic
barely pulsed along, like the contents in the
terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal
tract. This is what remains out in the Heartland of
our country: a place so
dire that you want to race shrieking from it and forget
what you saw there. I have a feeling that its agonizing
return to nature - or what's left
of nature - will not be mitigated by anything Barack
Obama or Mitt Romney might
propose to do. I wouldn't want
to be around when the driving stops.
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