Elegy
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.
