A Walk across Wheatfield: My Search for Wildness in Suburban America (Part I of III)

Day 1: Country Meadows to Niagara River to Shawnee Road

“You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you?” asked/said my mom as I jammed the last of my gear into my backpack.

“I’m going on a journey across Wheatfield.”

Assailed by a hailstorm of incredulity and irritation, my mother’s panicked response (“Oh my god!”) seemed a bit of an overreaction—appropriate, maybe, if I’d told her I was going to my “boyfriend Ron’s place” or was about to fornicate with a month-old pumpkin in the front yard.

“Okay. Well, where are you going exactly?” she asked, trying to thrust some sense into the senseless.

“The lakes.”

“What lakes?”

“Exactly.”

I hoisted my pack that contained my tent, sleeping bag, an extra coat, and a few power bars, buckled my waist belt, and began strolling down the streets of my old neighborhood.

I walked past the two-story homes, barn-styled mailboxes, and overturned blue recycling bins that I’d jogged, biked, and driven past a thousand times before, slowing my travels to a steady march—an ideal pace for seeing old things in new ways; for discovering new wonders in old settings. I’d decided that I’d explore the town at whim, with no real route or destination in mind: advancing only in the direction of my curiosity to whatever field or forest, suburb or street that piqued my immediate interest.

I was embarking on this little adventure, I suppose, because I’ve always been troubled with how little of my hometown I’ve seen. There was something silly, I thought, about how some travel thousands of miles to view a mountain range while leaving the undiscovered glories of their backyards unexplored.

Father taking picture of me and his finger on our lawn.  

My neighborhood.

Street hockey. 

Let me tell you a little bit about Wheatfield…

Wheatfield is a topographically-challenged, 28-square-mile plot of flatland, home to 14,000 (mostly Caucasian) residents. It’s a rural-turned-suburban community situated between the boneyard industrial cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo of Western New York. More specifically, Wheatfield, to the suburban south, borders the mighty Niagara River, and to the agricultural north—stops a few miles short of Lake Ontario. To the east, the town abuts the slightly older town of North Tonawanda, and to the west is the city of Niagara Falls, where the environmental disaster of Love Canal took place in the mid-20th century, just four miles from my home.

For the most part, the town has stayed off the national radar, except for a brief flare up from PETA a few years ago when an old man here mixed anti-freeze into a can of tuna to kill a skunk (but ended up killing two of his neighbor's dogs), and when a group proposed a “Magical Lands of Oz” theme park a few blocks from my home, complete with a “Munchkinland Waterworks,” “Uncle Henry’s Barnyard Petting Zoo,” and the “Labyrinth of the Nome King,” which, thank god, wasn't taken very seriously.

When my family moved to Wheatfield 1989, I remember a mostly rural landscape: There were vast fields of waving green weeds and rows of papery golden corn. There were adolescent forests, and long, straight-as-a-ruler country roads. In the undeveloped lot next to my family’s home was a pond where my brother and I would skate in the winter and catch frogs in the summer. We built forts in the woods behind our house and played hockey in the streets.

My childhood was an American idyll. But over the past couple decades, Wheatfield has changed. The fields have been smothered with asphalt; the forests yanked out to make way for new subdivisions. Between 1990 and 2000, 1,318 housing units have been added, and since 2000, the town’s population has increased by 21 percent (or 3,000 people). It’s one of the fastest growing towns in all of New York State.

Wheatfield is an exaggerated example of what’s been happening to towns across America for decades. In between 1982 and 2001, 34 million acres (the size of Wisconsin) of forests and farms, wilderness and rangeland, have been disfigured into “developed” land. Wheatfield, I guess you could say, is capitalism run amuck—a libertarian dystopia where the golden gods of the Free Market and Private Property have reigned mostly unchecked for years. My subdivision, once a cozy hamlet surrounded by corn fields, is now just a mere cell of an uncontrollable cancer.

I wanted to see this "progress" up close. Better yet, I wanted to see if there was any wildness left in Wheatfield; to see if this place could still be an arena for adventure; to see if there was something more to it than rows and rows of houses, retirement homes, and corporate parks. So, on this crisp afternoon of December 1st, I set off on a three-day journey to explore my hometown anew.

***

While I didn’t have any specific route in mind, I first wanted to see a scattering of lakes within a mile of my home that—I’m ashamed to confess—I’d never even seen.

I walked through the new loopy, cul-de-sacked suburb of “Wheatfield Lakes,” and elbowed my way through thick thorny brush and ten-foot-tall reeds. I’d gotten off to a late start, so the sun was sinking below the horizon, casting a rosy autumnal hue on the bare upper branches of the trees I walked beneath.

I skirted around forest swamps, broke through some more reeds, and set my eyes for the first time on the secret lakes of Wheatfield.

A light breeze made the reeds’ bushy tops wag like dogs’ tales. The water lapped innocently against the shore. A family of ducks or geese swam leisurely in the distance. Except for an onion-shaped water tower, the scene was probably as wild and serene as it would have been for the Iroquois tribes that resided here centuries before.

The departing sun sank behind a wall of low-lying, horizon-hugging clouds, coloring their crests with a sharp red rim. For this fleeting moment, it appeared as if Western New York was a fertile valley protected behind a snow-topped mountain range of feared and revered puffy peaks.

There have been only a few moments in my life when I’ve been struck silent by the wonders of nature; when I've experienced something people call "the sublime." And when I saw that a tree on the water’s edge had been freshly gnawed by the teeth of a beaver, I came close to tears. I am just a mile south of my boyhood home, in the midst of suburbia, and yet nature, here, lives unperturbed, and has been left, unbelievably, unblemished by the oily touch of man. A beaver… A beaver! I might as well have happened upon some fabled Pleistocene beast like a saber-toothed tiger.

I was only minutes into my trip, not a mile from my home, yet I was prepared to, right then and there, pronounce that wild and suburbia, man and nature, can coexist peacefully after all.

I galloped up a nearby hill in between the peaks to admire the water, laughing ecstatically, helplessly prefacing my exaltations with expletives: “Fucking beautiful.” “Fucking amazing.” “Fucking incredible.”

Off to the left, my attention was drawn to a fenced in rectangle of rolling green hills, perhaps a mile or two in length. (It seemed to me extremely unusual that the land was both “rolling” and fenced in.) So I hopped the fence and walked along the grass, wondering why there was no sign of crops or harvesting. Spread out over the field were large four-foot-tall black pipes that pointed out of the ground and curled downwards like Gonzo’s nose. I figured they were some sort of irrigation mechanism, but determined they were for something else when I put my nose to them and inhaled a whiff of something inside the continuum of sewage and natural gas.

When I found a sign that said “Niagara County Landfill,” I realized just what I'd been walking atop. It was as if my steamy affair with nature had abruptly and awkwardly ended when she confessed that her private parts were grotesquely dappled with the toxic bumps of "syphilization"--news that would make me practice more restraint if I caught myself again ardorously surrendering to her rustic charms.

Evidence of beaver.

Deer hunting encampment in woods.

More evidence of beaver.

Strange collection of car seats by lakes.

Fence I hopped.

With daylight waning, and nowhere to set up camp, I set off from the Niagara River up Witmer Road so I could camp in my friend John’s backyard—my base camp before launching tomorrow’s exploratory campaign into Wheatfield’s slightly wilder, more agricultural district to the north. But first, a visit with my friend Quaz—who’d grown up in my subdivision and has become a successful mechanical engineer—but has since moved out into his own house in the nearby “Greenfield Run” subdivision.

“We’ve lived here for years Quaz, but we don’t know anything about the place,” I said, impassioned, in between bites of a turkey sandwich he’d handed over to me. “This is why I’m on this journey. We’ve lived here for years, but we don’t know anything about the place! Did you know there’s a big landfill behind your old house? Did you know there are lakes out there?”

“Are they real?” Quaz asked.

“Of course they’re real,” I said.

“Well, I think so,” I said on second thought.

He had to run to his bowling match, so I walked the Niagara Falls Boulevard—a busy, four lane, pedestrian-unfriendly road on which you can find cheap $30-a-night hotels, ATV dealerships, gas stations and local restaurants en route to my friend John’s on Shawnee Road. On the Boulevard, the throngs of head-lamped SUVs, like a stampeding cavalcade of angry elephants, zoomed past me, each passing juggernaut whipping gaseous swirls of wind into my face.

John—a cancer survivor—is trying to become a law enforcement officer, and would probably find a job easily in more prosperous locales, but refuses to leave Western New York so he can be close to his family.

We rarely talk about things philosophical, but I couldn’t hold back.

“I’m just so upset that I’m so unaware of my surroundings," I said. "Do you know there’s a huge landfill by my old home? Do you know there are three large lakes behind my house?”

“Really?”

“Yeah… There’s hardly any woods, hardly any farms down here. There’s no wildness left. The suburbs stretch as far as the eye can see. All our adventures must be confined to the borders of football and soccer fields. To escape suburbia we’d literally have to drive hours. I just think this town was so poorly planned...” I said exasperated.

John told me that, when he was a kid, he practically lived in the woods. “I’d wake up, go into the woods behind my home, and come back when it got dark. Everyday.” Those woods, he told me, have since become the 120-acre “Woodlands Corporate Center” filled with big box-like buildings like “Big Bob’s Flooring Outfit.”

We spent the next few hours playing videogames—just like we used to do back in our high school days. It had been years since I’d played a videogame, so I was astonished with how far the graphics and gameplay have come. In Skyrim, a PS3 game in which you slay dragons in a Tolkien-esque world, I could make out the veins in the characters’ muscles. There was an elaborate constellation of stars, intricate detail of individual plants, and mountains in the distance that weren’t just a paper backdrop, but geographical features you could literally explore.

I had a lot of fun playing these sorts of games, yet I also found it strange how I was exploring a fake world on the television screen while sitting on a couch in the real one.

It’s interesting how many games take place in pre-industrialized medieval worlds—Skyrim, World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed—where you puppeteer your hero through wild lands fraught with thrilling vistas and thorny villains.  

It seems like the worlds in videogames have become our new frontier. These are the places where we go to wander and wonder; it's a refuge of virtual wilderness — a protected plot of pixelated land that must exist in fake worlds because we've denuded and defanged the wilderness in the real one.

Currently, in the lower-48, only 2.7% of our land (the size of Minnesota) is protected wilderness. To residents in towns like Wheatfield, it very much seems like the suburbs go on and on and on, perhaps for hundreds of miles in all directions.

But I couldn't make such bold assertions having never fully explored my hometown. I put on all my layers of clothing and camped in John’s backyard, eagerly awaiting the daylight so I could recommence my search for wildness in suburbia.

Niagara River.

Quaz.

John.

Eureka in John's backyard.