Bad Trip

Twenty-eight years ago, during the widespread malaise and recession that plagued the American community, marauding bands of developers and realtors spread throughout the fields of what was once western Cook County, Illinois. For weeks I could see the dust from their caravans on the eastern horizon. One morning I was awakened by the dishes falling out of the cupboard. I could feel the rumble of their wheels. I knew it was time to leave. At midnight I gathered up my few belongings, stuffed them into my yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and fled, heading north to the Wisconsin border. It was not a moment too soon. I vacated just ahead of several caravans of heavily armed house-hunters. I think I saw lawyers too.

As I crossed into the land of milk and cheese, I could see the red glow on the low-slung clouds to the south. Savannas were being burned, prairies pulled out by their roots. Families bribed with cheap metal trinkets to give up their will. A heritage lost. A proud nation humiliated. One could find the parents, shaved and shamed, forced to give up their shovels and pitchforks, standing on street corners with briefcases, dressed in white shirts, staring at the sky. And their children, listless, packed into cinderblock compounds, struggling to learn a new language. Can you say "means of production"? "Division of labor"? "Standard of living"?

Here we go again.

Does anyone know how to say "limits to growth" or "resource depletion" or "failure to thrive"?

Ah, what do I know.

Well, I settled in the north country, a region populated with lakes, bogs, rivers, far away from the ravages of the great land wars that raged to the south. The conversation of birds threading through a breeze that shattered the surface of a lake that reflected the star filled sky at night. Everything was clear, the edges were defined and sharp.

But there were tiny hills that the locals insisted on referring to mountains; I.E. The Porcupine Mountains, Rib Mountain, Blackjack Mountiain. Now, this qualifies as an embarrassment. These are not mountains at all. I have seen the aged run up and down their gentle slopes for hours without tiring. A strong wind might move one several miles before a gaggle of schoolgirls gather and tow it back to its place. But some say, what is the harm? Why should one prevent anyone from indulging in a playful illusion from time to time?

That is, if it does not involve mind-altering drugs. To refer to them as mountains gives the impression of grandeur and sweeping majesty, it conjures up talus, cliffs, stunted spruce flagged by wind, icy lakes, amphitheatres. The random sweep of avalanches, a team of starved pack horses, ribs like piano keys, and gaunt men wandering around in circles. A jumble of stranded war wagons, smoke rising from the burning wreckage, things like these. I suppose I can look up at these hills and imagine such things. I am a mountaineer for a day. No harm done.

But, twenty-eight years later, the developers have made their way into this northern community. I see families selling their lives for small metal trinkets, the children being corralled into wagons and shuttled to education camps. I hear people talking about means of production, division of labor, standard of living. It is happening again. My dishes rattle. Someone tells me I am seeing things.

But I want to know, Where will all of this lead? I want to see the future, so I steel my nerves and pull my car onto that road that leads to the south. I am heading back to the wreckage I left behind.

And I see blocks of houses, tumbling out of the city center, stacking up at first, like the rush hour traffic, but further out, they fall into rows, tightly packed, with midget shrubbery and trees. The air is a blue haze at ground level, but above the trees it becomes brown, in fact, the whole metropolis has a brown dome. I guess the wreckage still smolders. But what is this. The community is named Prairie Creek View, but there is no prairie, and there is no creek, and there certainly is no view. My eye catches a culvert, presumably to subdue the raging prairie creek, but instead of water, it spills lost toys into a dry creek bed.

I look up at the brown haze and inhale. I cough. I feel dizzy. I feel drugged.