Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad
Americans unlucky enough to grow up in more recently built towns and exurbs are stuck having their entire lives defined by the spatial needs of cars. Their neighborhood density is low, their mobility options are limited, and the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they “walk” to a “corner store.” Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road.
When I graduated high school, I was one of those people that got the hell out of their hometown. I decamped for college, then for a city, then another city, and finally the mountains of the West. When I left, I had a chip on my shoulder, convinced that those of us that leave are somehow more than those who don't.
But as time passed and the years turned into decades, I reconsidered this position. People that stay must surely have something those of us Leavers do not. Wisdom, an intimacy, a folksy understanding of place. It's simply too easy for us Leavers to think we are better than Stayers.
But I've been back in my home region for several months and, well, there's no other honest way to put it — this place is shitty.
Not that there aren't good things about it. Any person worth their mettle can find beauty anywhere.
But there's something about this place, on the outer edges of a large American city, that's undeniably anemic. The people, the land, the culture… it's all so flat, boring, dull.
The landscape, mostly farmland, has long been stripped of anything natural. Even farmland, once the provenance of farmers, is now just industrial agriculture — as far as the eye can see, petro-chemical fertilizers sprayed on corn and soy, neither grown for human consumption.
And the above paragraph is the perfect crystallization of the people and culture.
Family Dollar to close almost 1,000 stores
The parent company of Family Dollar said it would close approximately 1,000 stores, citing market conditions, store performance and other factors.
Dollar Tree, which has owned Family Dollar since 2015, said Wednesday that 600 Family Dollar stores would close in the first half of 2024, with another 370 locations closing over the next several years.
The husks of these stores will become a new hallmark of rural America.
Indiana Nature Notes
Farther down beach, sand gave way to thick slabs of gray clay, slippery. Whole veins of it where waves took away sand covering. Geologists say last glacier pushed in clay (and gravel and dirt), creating Valparaiso Moraine: kind of ridge here at southern edge of lake. Glacier = bulldozer, bulldozing moraine, which then acts as dam or divide. North, the great lake; south, water drains into Kankakee floodplain. M. and I stand at ancient, slippery edge.
Conservationists See Rare Nature Sanctuaries. Black Farmers See a Legacy Bought Out From Under Them.
The loss of Black-owned land in this community exposes a cruel irony. Pembroke has been one of the few places Black landowners could gain a foothold in Illinois, in part because this land was passed over by white settlers who presumed its sandy soils were worthless. And now, after generations without large-scale development or landscape-destroying corporate farming, this land has become sought after by outside conservationists because Pembroke’s savannas remain largely untouched.
Another story of black land being “taken” (through entirely legal means), but this one has a unique backstory:
No one knows how Joseph “Pap” Tetter escaped the horrors of slavery in North Carolina, only that he, his wife, children and extended family arrived in what would become Pembroke Township in a wagon one day around 1861.
Tetter homesteaded 42 acres of land, which he parceled out and sold to fellow settlers. Proceeds went to help liberate more enslaved people via the underground railroad, according to oral histories.
Unlike the black, spongy soil that made Illinois an agricultural powerhouse, Pembroke’s sandy soil — widely considered some of the poorest in the state — didn’t retain moisture that would allow commodity crops like corn to thrive. But the land offered a fresh start for people who had been owned as property and forced to farm under threat of violence. Through trial and error, they found what could survive the sandy soil, growing specialty crops like okra, collards, peas and watermelons.
I grew up just a few miles from here. I had never heard of Pembroke or Hopkins Park until last week. Never a mention at school, never a mention at home. This week, I messaged some friends from my hometown and none of them had heard of Pembroke, though one responded, “my mom says ‘he’s not traveling there is he?’”
I’m fast approaching forty and I’ve long thought certain things could no longer surprise me, my hometown being high on that list. But here is a township founded by a man who escaped slavery not 30 miles from where I grew up. There are no historical markers, no mentions of it on the Illinois Historical Society website, nothing.
In 2023, that is shameful.
A town founded by an escaped slave became a terminal on the Underground Railroad…thirty miles from my hometown. One of the poorest communities in the United States, a town that was once the largest community of black farmers north of the Mason-Dixon Line…is thirty miles from my hometown.
If anything, I’m embarrassed that I too have fallen into the trap of thinking 1) that area has no surprises left, and 2) that the racial history of the United States isn’t this alive and well.
But I’m suddenly filled with pride knowing that I grew up just a few miles from a town founded by a man who escaped slavery with his family, a town founded as a haven for people escaping some of the worst cruelty imaginable. That history should be known, and it’s a damn shame it isn’t.