Mom and Dad said they moved because they knew that old Wayne,
the Illinois landscape of corn and wheat fields, the windmills
and barns, and the crumbling brick silos, would soon be steamrolled
into the vortex of Chicago land sprawl. The writing was on the
wall, they said, with plans for bridges to connect the country
lanes to the city's arterial flow of traffic, and the farmers
parceling their fields to developers.
For Mom and Dad the last straw was in 1982, when the Swedish
carpenter Wes Peterson sold his 40-acre lot behind our house to
developers and retired to Wisconsin. I've pocketed the view of
that home since my family left it 20 years ago and kept it, like
a mental still shot, as something I never wanted to see changed.
No matter where I've been over these past two decades --
New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Germany or Switzerland --
I've always dreamed of having one more look at the old
house.
Last spring, during a visit to a friend in Glen Ellyn, Illinois,
I did have one last look at the place. I pedaled a 13-mile section
of the Illinois Prairie Path between Glen Ellyn and Wayne on a
bicycle, past the dogwood hedges and hawthorn blossoms that concealed
the scattered remnants of old railroad track. The prairie path
was once the route of the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railway
line.
The best view of the home was from atop a ridge on the path.
I parked my bike on the highest spot, once the starting point
from which we slid toboggans and sleds down the path until it
turned into an icy chute that shot us across the frozen ponds
clear to the beaver lodges made from the cattail reeds. In summer,
we fished for blue gill here and skipped rocks across the water.
Between bouts of swimming, we sat on the rails in wet cut-offs
and smoked Mom's Tareyton 100s, which we pilfered as often as
we could.
I wasn't surprised to see that the house was no longer visible
beyond the field. It's like calling an old girlfriend after 20
years and hoping she'll still have the same name and no children,
that she'll answer the phone with the same affection you knew
at 17. Family homes, like first loves, are perhaps better filed
under sweet memory, nothing more. A nest of million-dollar homes
has sprouted in the cornfield between the old house and the prairie
path. From the ridge, I count 15 of them, each settled on acre
lots with the nightmare randomness of Dorothy's Kansas home twisting
down to Oz in that tornado. A red, white and blue RE/MAX real
estate sign stands on the edge of the last remaining lot for sale.
The developers named the field Pre¢
du Chevaux, the place of horses. Probably they had Wayne's intimate
history with horses in mind when they mounted the plastic letters
onto the pre-fabbed stone entranceway on Powis Road. In the 19th
century, Mark Dunham made his fortune in Wayne by importing Percheron
draft horses from France. Ever since, Dunham's legacy has left
an indelible, storybook stamp on Wayne, one that the village has
incorporated as its Old World motif. People moved to Wayne to
raise horses, mainly. Marguerite Henry, author of such popular
children's books as Misty of Chincoteague and Cinnabar,
the One O'Clock Fox, lived and wrote here. There's a riding
and hunt club, and high on a hill the old Dunham castle still
overlooks the fields and pastures.
When I climbed off my bicycle and approached the old house from
the field, a matching pair of fat chocolate labs bolted out from
one of the backyards. The chocolate labs, like the new houses,
the driveways, the sod chunks and the empty flowerpots had a surreal,
Alice in Wonderland feel. With the timing of the dogs'
appearance, I felt as though someone was eyeing me from behind
the curtains of an upstairs bedroom the moment I'd crossed the
field. That's the thing about the byways of the wealthy in these
new subdivisions: You never see anyone in the yard playing catch
or planting flowers or even jumping rope in the driveway. The
facades of the homes have all the warmth of a corporate office
building in Houston. A moment later, the owner shouted for his
dogs. A cloth napkin stuck out his side pocket. He wore slippers
and a pair of sweatpants with bumblebee yellow racing stripes
tracing down the side of each leg. He looked 30, at least 10 years
younger than I. Whatever this guy did for a living, he was likely
making 10 times the salary my father made.
We talked for a few minutes. I told him that I grew up in the
house behind his and pointed to our old home, 50 yards away, past
the berry thickets and willow trees. "Wow, this must be pretty
weird for you then, with all the new development and such," he
told me. "I heard that horses used to gallop through here during
the foxhunts. Not anymore, I guess."
Next to these grand 4-acre duchies (starter castles, our neighbors
called them when they were going up) the old house appeared as
a simple box that seven people once used and outgrew, as simply
as a child outgrows a winter jacket. The clapboards were peeling
paint again. I scraped, primed and painted those boards again
and again, but the work never stuck for more than a couple of
years. The roof edges curled. Crab grass, pine needles and willow
branches had claimed the back yard, nothing like the sod squares
strategically plotted, roll by roll, over the old cornfield.
One of the first things Dad did when we moved in here was plant
a row of evergreen trees along the back edge of the yard. Although
you can't see the house anymore from the prairie path, you can
spot these trees. In 25 years, they've reached more than halfway
up to the surrounding willows. It's not the home, really, that
stands out in memory, but rather the trees that hint of something
more lasting. The evergreens defy the march of progress while
holding intact a sense of historical continuity. Who knows what
led Dad to plant trees right off the bat, but I figured there
must be some common sense, some instinctual drive that makes people
want to give something back to the landscape after they've disrupted
it with whatever size home they've chosen to settle in.
I didn't look at the house long. It was just an empty nest better
suited to childhood memory than the confusion of the present moment.
My sister always told me she never wanted to return to Wayne,
not because she didn't like it but because she couldn't. I understood
that now.
I wondered if it mattered that the new residents of Pre¢
du Chevaux would never realize what this field once was. When
thunderstorms or tornadoes neared, the wind first brushed across
the tops of the corn stalks until a chorus of dog-eared sheaths
warned of impending change. The new residents would never know
the intensity of the chlorophyll-green stalks against a blue sky
in June. Nor could they understand how the field measured time
and the season between planting in May and the pale ears lined
up for the combine by Thanksgiving. Snapping turtles crossed the
field in spring on their way to hatching. Fox, deer, rabbits,
coyotes and opossums appeared out of the folds of green onto our
back lawn, awestruck at having suddenly found themselves on the
edge of settlement.
Money, I suppose, still ruled in the village of Wayne, but my
past here also taught that class and distinction don't always
have to be ruled by the dollar. Good taste is often a matter of
good breeding, and both, I still want to believe, derive from
the land itself. Today, my childhood is recalled and defined only
with the phrase "I played outside."
I'm not exactly sure what the inherent value of an open cornfield
is meant to be. Perhaps the happiness of the new homeowners in
Pre du Chevaux overrides my perception of the field's nostalgic
value. Still, I want to believe that the real value of the land
or an old house does not lie in its potential to extract dollars
from dirt. Ideally, cornfields, the memory of home even, should
sustain their value indefinitely, whether as food on one's dinner
plate or for the expectation, however warped, that one might one
day return home and find things unchanged.
Pré du Chevaux has done away with the middle man -- the
farmer -- and milked the potential country homeowner in an agricultural
endgame where the only regenerating claim is a family in a starter
castle spread over 4-acre plots, families who come with a shrinking
knowledge (or care) of what preceded them. It doesn't mean Americans
are ignorant of the past, but when other interests step in to
reclaim open space for limited ends, then people are left with
stunted perceptions of what was.
It's a stretch of my imagination now to reconstruct my place
in Wayne's landscape, from the clapboard homes and the country
store, where we spent our nickels on vials of colored sugar and
rock candy, to Mark Dunham's world or draft horses, and more so,
to the Indian's world, as they knew the Illinois countryside.
To honor the American Bicentennial, the village hoisted a two-ton
rock out of the Fox River and set it in the village center. Chief
Black Hawk's words, circa 1838, are engraved in stone:
"It was a beautiful country. I loved my towns and my cornfields.
I fought for it. It is now yours. Keep it as we did."
On the ride home, back to Glen Ellyn, I thought of Chief Black
Hawk's words again. I don't think that what I saw in my hometown
this morning is the future Black Hawk had in mind when writing
about the gentle Illinois land.
* * *
Tom Washington was a journalist in Switzerland and Germany
before he returned to the Midwest. His essays have appeared in
numerous publications, most recently in the North Dakota
Quarterly and the Massachusetts Review.
(April 2004)
