I spent about an hour this morning doing what I do almost every morning for at least half of the year – I ride my bike south along rural Sandwald Road as far as Big Timber Road, jingling my bike bell in happy greeting to the growing fields of corn.
I watch the corn spend its entire lifetime from mid-May until late October — from first germination to final harvest — and along the way I reflect upon my own life and the many roads that got me here. For me, it is a kind of church moment to take that bike ride each day.
But, in all honesty, I wasn’t always a “child of the corn.” As an urban teen settling in at Western Illinois University in drowsy rural Macomb, I asked myself: “How do people spend a lifetime in a place like this?”
I was, after all, a kid who had grown up in Elmwood Park, just one block from the Chicago city limits. I couldn’t imagine growing up in a house where a climb to the roof would offer a view only of endless fields of corn punctuated by a lonely grain silo or two, instead of a mountainous vista of skyscrapers.
Within a year, however, I fell in love with Macomb. I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life any farther than a short bike ride from waving fields of corn.
When I graduated from WIU, and then after a year of grad school in North Carolina, I started teaching in Park Ridge, a block from the Chicago city limits — but I made my home in Schaumburg, in a tiny island of condos surrounded by corn. I felt, finally, at home, and I wanted it to stay that way forever.
But you know what happened to corny Schaumburg, don’t you? Urban sprawl took over, and I gritted my teeth to watch it.
I guess everybody wants the door to Paradise slammed shut right after they move in, but it doesn’t work like that, does it? The same progress that gave me a home in the middle of waving fields of corn soon banished the corn altogether and built a bustling suburb around me.
I lived there for 30 years, but most of that time I missed the fields that had been leveled by a glut of houses and asked myself: “How do people spend a lifetime in a place like this?”
As I closed in on retirement, I figured it was near time to find my lifetime home, one somewhere near waving fields of corn. And although I only stumbled into Huntley’s Del Webb while visiting friends and had no intention of actively searching for homes just yet, I fell in love with this little village in the middle of miles of corn.
It was a cold, early-spring day, the trees bare and the ground still frozen. A new Del Webb section had just opened for sale the previous day — vacant lots marked with flags on a short street I called “The cul-de-sac at the end of the world,” because the only thing you could see to the west between the end of the street and the end of the world was bare farm fields.
Fields that within months would be filled with corn.
Miles and miles of corn.
By lunchtime that same day, I signed papers to buy a home on one of those lots.
Oh, I knew it couldn’t stay that way forever, and I was right. Other homes popped up to the west, blocking my view of the corn, including a busy street filled with houses on both sides — a street with the ironic name of “Countryview Boulevard.”
Oh, well. So it goes. As journalist Bill Vaughan once said: “A suburb is a place where they cut down trees and name streets after them.”
But I hoped there would be limits for that kind of growth — at least for the rest of my lifetime. I had faith that urban sprawl wouldn’t happen here, as it had in Schaumburg.
That was in 2003, almost a quarter-century ago, and although Del Webb and Huntley have grown considerably in that time, today I am still just a short bike ride from my front door to endless fields of corn.
And most mornings I do just that — I hop on my bike and pedal south along Sandwald Road, watching the corn grow from lawn-high May greenery to towering oceans of October gold.
Then harvest renders those fields a blank canvas from November through April, quietly awaiting a new living masterpiece to be born on the slumbering soil.
Again.
And again.
And again….
And each day I ask myself: “How do people spend a lifetime anywhere other than in a place like this?”
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
