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

[This is a three-part series. Click here for parts I and II.]

After disassembling my tent, stuffing gear into my pack, and wolfing down a dozen store-brand Oreos, I continued my march west across Wheatfield.

As I walked over lumps of earth in farm fields that were hard and sparkling in frost, I kept close to the edge of the woods to reduce my chances of being spotted. After skirting around a pond, where an alarmed long-legged Great Blue Heron launched from an icy pond, I found train tracks that I stumbled along en route to Walmore Road. Once I hit the road, I’d change direction to the south, back toward my parents’ home, the old Summit Mall, and my recently discovered Wheatfield Lakes.

On Walmore, I strolled by quaint, ranch-style homes, St Peter’s Cemetery, the old Military Road School, and Guy’s Lumber—old sights on a road I’d driven over in buses and parents’ vehicles hundreds of times to attend school or football practice. Then a blue collar bar, Talarico’s pizza, and the giant, sprawling Air Force base, which had “no photography” signs posted on a cage link fence. Tiring of the road, I climbed a small, manmade ridgeline to walk along more railroad tracks so I could see things from both a novel pace and perspective.

To my left were more giant rectangles of fallow fields with cut cornstalks, hewn by tractors to a rough and jagged stubble, the abrasive texture of a woman’s prickly leg hairs. To my right was the military base connected to almost two miles of runway (9,130 feet)—the longest in New York State and the only strip in the area where large cargo planes had enough room to land.

In between Williams and the railroad were a series of parking lots overgrown with weeds and full of derelict cars, along with some sort of “war games” enclosure where I’m guessing the military practices strategic maneuvers. A “No Trespassing” sign warned that “Deadly Force is Authorized.” After walking over a railroad bridge that hangs over the Niagara Falls Boulevard, I made my way down to Jagow Road, near a small neighborhood mall called Summit Park.

When I was a boy, going to the Summit was a big deal. All the cool kids went there after school, alone, without their parents, which made going with your parents about as embarrassing as crapping your pants in class. Getting caught with your mom was an embarrassment of apocalyptic proportions that made you wish, if just for that fleeting moment, that the gods grant you a swift and merciful death. But parent or no parent, I delighted in surveying the Sega titles in Toys “R” Us, the feeling the rush of juvenile glee in Spencer's, or spending hours in the “trading card” shop, scanning over coveted hockey cards, wondering what gems I might discover in a sealed pack of “Upper Deck,” and fantasizing about owning Mario Lemieux’s rookie card encased in its own special glass display.

I knew the adjacent Summit Park Six Theater had been shut down and destroyed long ago, and that the 800,000 square foot mall had become mostly abandoned, but I'd hoped to at least walk inside and view the deserted shops in a hazy daze of nostalgia. Instead, I was disappointed to learn that the whole mall—except for a Bon Ton on one end and a Sears on the other—had been boarded up.

Railroad between Ward and Walmore.

Mountain of concrete and rebar near rail road tracks on Williams Road.

Military land, I believe.

Cornfields by Cayuga Drive Extension.

Forest recently cleared for home on Jagow.

Summit Park subdivision.

Summit Mall

This is Love Canal. It's now just a big plot of grass enclosed by a tall fence.

Fuzzy burrs

Wheatfield Lakes again, circled by ATV trail.

Wheatfield Lakes. You can see lakeside homes on left side. 

Wheatfield Lakes Subdivision

The Summit Mall is less than a mile from historic Love Canal—a community where, in the 1950’s, a corporation buried 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals. People young and old near the site were stricken with epilepsy, cancers, nervous disorders, and miscarriages. Between 1974 and 1978, 56% of children in the neighborhood exhibited at least one birth defect, often in the form of enlarged heads, hands, and feet, among more serious illnesses. One child had a second row of teeth. This is how one EPA administrator described it:

“Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.”

It was one of the worst manmade environmental catastrophes the country had ever seen. This occurred less than four miles from my home.

You’d think that—because of Love Canal—the townspeople and politicians of Wheatfield and Niagara Falls would have decided to usher in a new period of environmental awareness. Not only would we clean up Love Canal, but perhaps we’d also preserve some of the undeveloped land—not for future development or industrial exploitation—but as a nature sanctuary: a small square of land set aside to remind people that, oh yeah, places can exist without pipes and roads and cancerous chemicals.

Instead, we got this: dead malls, suburban sprawl, industrial squalor; our natural wonder surrounded by power lines and towering casinos.

Then again, is this place all that bad? 

I was walking past a line of apartments on Plaza Drive, near a subdivision where my first girlfriend used to live. Here’s a neighborhood much like my own, where kids can ride their bikes, enjoy their own aboveground pools, and play videogames all night long at their best friend’s house. Parents can leave their doors unlocked. Dogs can catch an occasional rabbit in the backyard.

These parents aren’t bad people. They didn’t chop down the trees or drain the wetlands. They just wanted the best possible life for their kids.

Wasn’t I happy as a child? Didn’t I have a good childhood?

Have I just become cynical over the years? Am I bound to become some old, cranky curmudgeon who complains about everything that isn’t the way it was or should be? The creation of all towns and homes and cities entails some environmental destruction, doesn’t it? Is suburbia that bad?

Why do I even care? Why do I hate it so much? Why do I hate anything at all? Do I really even hate it, or am I forcing myself to hate it to legitimate an identity I've adopted?

Not sure what to think, I decided to head back into the woods south of the subdivision to explore new territory. Better yet, I’d head back to the lakes—where I had "a moment" two days before.

After walking over a log that had fallen over Black Creek, wading my way, ankle-deep, through a farm field (that had become wet and muddy upon thawing in the afternoon sun), crashing through a dense stand of bushy tailed reeds, and accumulating a shirt full of fuzzy burrs, I made it to the secret lakes of Wheatfield.

Except this time they didn’t seem so secret or majestic. Hiding in the reeds, I watched three expensive looking and slightly muddy jeeps depart on a gravel road. On all sides of the lakes was swampy diarrhea-colored water, where ATVs had grinded their tires into the ground over and over again. A box of Labatt Blue Light sat next to a tree overlooking the lakes. The sky wasn’t so clear and celestial as it was two days ago; rather, it was a bland, slightly hazy blue-gray that made you think something was stuck in your eyes.

I quickly left and made my way back to Ferchen Road, slightly unsettled, knowing these lakes weren’t as pristine as I’d originally perceived them to be. Not only that, but I began to wonder how I could possibly have gone twenty years without ever noticing them, just a mile from my house. How is that even possible? Have I really been that out of touch with my surroundings? Am I really that oblivious? Or is it suburbia’s fault? Has the landscape and lifestyle done irreparable damage to my finer senses, the same way working in a factory can impair our hearing?

On my way to my subdivision, I came across an old man wearing a navy blue veteran’s cap who was on the other side of the road having just gathered his mail, waiting for the traffic to go by so he could cross again. When he did, I asked, “Excuse me sir, do you know if those lakes back there are… real?”

“Well, I think they’re manmade, if that’s what you mean. Are you from around here?”

“Yeah, I live in Country Meadows.”

“I can’t tell you much more. I’ve only been living here seven years.”

He was new to the neighborhood. But wasn’t I, as well? Aren’t we all? As far as I know, no one has lived in a suburb like Wheatfield for more than a generation or two. We’re all strangers—strangers who don’t really understand the land, its cycles, its history. And because we’ve all just moved here, our roots haven’t had a chance to sink into the soil, so our understanding of this place is partial at best. We are here for a decade or two, and then we're off to some slightly more prosperous locale or some southern state for the warm winters, leaving the decay and decrepitude in our catastrophic wakes.

We have no clue what this place is. Hardly anyone cares that we’re building more and more subdivisions because our relationship with the place is incipient at best. The rocks, the trees, the ponds—they mean nothing to us symbolically. They are segregated from our values, our religions, our society, our lives; the only relationship we have with them has been exploitative.

Later on, not only did I verify that the lakes were in fact constructed a few years ago (presumably built to give homeowners a “lakeside” view), but I learned that the beavers that live there—that I was so pleased to discover—are commonly harassed because their dams, allegedly, cause floods.

Thinking about the mall, the lakes, and the suburbs that I'd traveled through the past three days, I couldn’t say I felt hatred. This lake discovery was too predictable a conclusion to my journey. Hatred requires some element of surprise. Hatred occurs when something is seized from your grip. Thing is, I didn’t have much that could be stolen in the first place.

Plus, I can't feel hatred for such a simple way of living, for people so kind and caring. So, I guess it isn’t so much the individual suburb or the individual homeowner or the individual house that upsets me, but the broad, overarching trend of what’s happening to the land across America. If a family member is dying of cancer, we do not get angry with a mere cell of the cancer, or even the cancer as a whole, for these aren't things that can absorb anger or change as a result of our anger. Rather, we lament the loss of what was and grieve what could have been.

So I guess now—as I think about what's happened to this place—I don’t feel anger or sadness; just frustration and a sense of powerlessness. I think about my time in the woods as a boy: building forts with friends, catching frogs in the pond, befriending my old duck, Howard (who was run over by a garbage truck), and I think about how I can never reenter the scenes of these memories, just as I can no longer enter a decaying, boarded-up mall.

Yes, I have the memories themselves, but so long as I have them all to myself, not to be enjoyed or shared by others, these memories will forever be tainted, as they’re no longer the sweet memories of a “loved one,” but that of a loved one having been taken away.

Wild ideas

1. Summit Park Bird Preserve. Once Bon-Ton and Sears go out of business, we’ll have almost—by my calculations—one hundred acres between the abandoned mall, the bulldozed theatre, and ghost town parking lots. Additionally, there are another 500 acres nearby that can be bought (which I know because the Wizard of Oz people had considered buying it years ago). This could make almost one square mile of nearly contiguous protected land for birds and small animals. Where will we get the money to buy the land (most of which costs $7,500/acre)? I have no idea. But its location directly across from Love Canal might attract national attention, possibly enabling a nationwide fundraising campaign.

2. Ban ATVs and Jeeps around Wheatfield Lakes. If we’re going to create natural spaces, we should treat them as such. Let’s set aside a place that can be peaceful and quiet; where our mode of travel doesn’t scar the land. We Western New Yorkers spend most of our time sitting at desks, on couches, and in cars; it wouldn’t hurt if we used our feet a little bit, too.

3. No new subdivisions. 

4. Twelve-mile Wheatfield Farm-and-Forest Trail. It’s absolutely insane that there’s no wilderness trail anywhere near Wheatfield. If we’re going to get people to care about nature and make them want to preserve it, we first need to give them some place to experience and enjoy it. It’s about six miles from Oppenheim Park north to Bond’s Lake—a route that, except for a few road crossings, goes through almost all forest and field. Create a loop, and we double its size to twelve. (People can park their cars either at Oppenheim or Bond’s Lake.) The trail, like the AT, will be maintained by volunteers.

5. Bring the buffalo back to Buffalo. Yes, I said it. Let’s bring the buffalo—the animal—back to Western New York. Relocate a small population from a national park, assign a few rangers on horseback to protect them, and preserve a network of grasslands all across Western New York to which they may migrate and graze. It’ll be a source of local—hell—national pride, and a message that we’re turning a page and will no longer erect mindless sprawl.

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

[This is Part II of a three-part series. For Part I, click here.]

“The first rule is that pedestrian life cannot exist in the absence of worthwhile destinations that are easily accessible on foot. This is a condition that modern suburbia fails to satisfy, since it strives to keep all commercial activity well separated from housing. As a result, the only pedestrians to be found in a residential subdivision belong to that limited segment of the population which walks for exercise. Otherwise, there is no reason to walk, and the streets are empty.” – Suburban Nation

“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” –Bill Vaughn

Throughout my adulthood I’ve had two recurring dreams.

The first occurs about a half-mile south of my home, near woods I’d never visited, where I happen upon a grizzly bear grazing in an open field. In the dream, I stand still, paralyzed and awestruck and exhilarated.  After the dream, lying in bed—in that half-dreaming, half-awake state—I’ve often wondered if it really happened. Even now, the memory of it feels so real, I only know it isn’t because of its implausibility.

The second occurs a few miles to the north, off of Walmore Road, in Wheatfield’s farm district. In the dream, I’ll sneak into a cobwebbed attic of an old farm house where some foreigners are hiding—like Jewish survivors in the walls of the ghetto—except their situation isn’t so dire, as they’re merely anxious for having trespassed on someone else’s property.

On the second morning of my journey—after a night full of dreams that, upon opening my eyes, are instantly forgotten—I awoke in John’s yard to the sound of sleet gently pelting the roof of my tent. In his kitchen, I ate two slices of white toast that I’d slathered in honey, before heading north on Shawnee Road to Wheatfield’s agricultural district, where my second dream takes place, and where I hoped to explore what woods I could find.

The sleet was more rainy than snowy, so after walking a few miles north—wary of getting soaked in cold weather—I turned into a new suburban development called “The Briars,” where I’d have more privacy to put on my rain gear, away from the hundreds of cars speeding down Shawnee.

Many of the houses had yet to be built, as the street wound around fields of mud where houses would soon be. I was self-conscious carrying a large backpack through a subdivision, aware that any onlookers would be a little unsettled with the presence of a tramp in a neighborhood that never sees homeless people or tramps or probably people of color. (In 2007, Wheatfield residents formed a Residents Action Committee to resist a proposed "low income," 68-unit housing development that resistors claimed—in fliers distributed—that the new neighborhood would bring in people "of all colors.")

The houses were brand new, all probably constructed within the last ten years. They looked fresh and trim and sturdy, placed squarely on simple, smoothly-shaven monocultured lawns, though the neighborhood, as a whole, was spookily—eerily—quiet.

I wondered: Are there people even living in these homes? Where was everyone? While I acknowledged that it was cold and wet and that I was hiking on a Friday afternoon—when parents were at their jobs and their kids, at school—I was still struck that I hadn’t seen one person grabbing their mail, putting up Christmas lights, or walking around the the cul-de-sac for a little exercise. After several hours walking through various suburbs, I didn’t see one person outside of their homes or cars.

But is it that strange? I’m hardly any different when I stay at my parents’ home. I’ve literally gone several days in a row without leaving the house. Here, I gradually metamorphose into highschool-Ken: wallowing in self-pity, eating five meals a day, indulging in an endless combination of napping, videogames, and sleeping in until two in the afternoon.

There are no fences to repair, no bean fields to hoe, no water to fetch from the stream. Apart from washing a few dishes and carrying the groceries inside, there’s really nothing to do. So, unless I can conjure the necessary self-discipline to write or go for a run, I do nothing. Life is so easy: when I’m hungry, I grab food from the well-stocked pantry or fridge. My water comes from magical sinks and my heat comes from magical vents. Because I am not needed for anything, I spend my time fulfilling desires: watching TV in the family room, reading books in my old room, and playing videogames on the computer.

Of course things would be slightly different if I had bills to pay and a job to go to. But would it? I’ve worked and gone to school full-time in the past while living at home, and I’m not sure—even then—if I felt needed.

In suburbia, we work our forty hours a week and then spend the rest of our time on automatic pilot. We drive to work, work, and then come home to a nearly fully-automated comfort box that—except for a little energy burned when mowing the lawn or building a deck—only costs money, and little sweat, energy, or ingenuity to maintain.

I can’t help but think that we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. We need to be forced to sacrifice, forced to grow a garden, forced to fix a roof, forced to interact with neighbors. Rather, we strive to gain the comforts and conveniences to be enjoyed privately without realizing that such gains often come with the cost of social isolation, of purposelessness, of spiritual deflation.

While nature all around us continues to do it's thing: unleashing terrifying storms, spinning circular cycles, inflicting bone-chilling colds, and renewing with springy revivifications, in a neighborhood like mine, we are almost completely oblivious to it all, for we have little meaningful connection to nature, and no true practical purpose to actually go outside.

I wonder, might it do us good to have more toil, more hardship, more pain, more suffering? To actually be at the mercy of the weather? Might we be better off with a little wildness in our lives?

***

I continued my march up Shawnee, seeking some empty fields or shrouded forests. Instead, I found little more than one subdivision after another.

Shawnee Road has scores of brand new subdivisions like mine and "The Briars," each more absurdly named than the previous. Here’s a list of most of the subdivisions in Wheatfield. (See if you note any similarities.)

Woodstream Landing

Lakes of Wheatfield

Woodstream Meadows

Country Meadows

Witmer Shores

Settler’s Run

Alder Creek

Willow Lake

Dreamhaven Estates

Spice Creek

Woodland Estates

Wheatfield Heights

Ashwood

Timber Lakes

Eagle Lake Patio Homes

Stone Ridge

Meadowwood Estates

Eaglechase

No trespassing signs everywhere.

Subdivisions.

Lots for sale everywhere.

Almost all of the subdivisions I saw were named to evoke some image of pristine natural beauty. And while I understand that it would be poor marketing to accurately name the neighborhood you’re trying to sell as “big, bland, ugly box lot,” I find something absurd about naming your community after something that was destroyed so it could be erected. It’s like naming a football team after Native Americans who'd been run out of the region a century before. It’s like promoting some super fat, sugary, chocolaty, diabetes-coated cereal as “part of a balanced breakfast” to make us feel better about eating it. We name our suburbs after some fake manmade pond or a few artfully planted trees to kid ourselves about what this place really is and what suburbia really does.

Easily the most ridiculous of the subdivisions was “Wildwing Preserve,” the name of which caused me to scoff aloud. The houses were huge, bland-colored monstrosities commonly referred to as "McMansions," some with column-like structures probably made out of plastic descending from the roof to the porch. The houses curled around a pond that was most likely dug out so people could brag to other people that their homes have “waterfront” views.

Why do we need homes so big?! I thought this was the big, bad Great Recession? Where's all this so-called middleclass suffering? Does it really make our lives that much better, that much happier when we have decked-out basements, never-used living rooms, and six television sets? Why are people flooding into and fighting over the latest shade of pastel purple bedspreads at my local “Bed, Bath, and Beyond!?” Why are we calling this fucking Hiroshima a “bird preserve” when the housecats more than likely devour hatchlings and the dogs shoe off whatever blackbirds have descended to rest their wings?! Get me out of here! Burn the whole fucking place down! We've gang-raped, bombed Dresden-style, and shit on the land, only to name it “Happy, Beautiful estates,” hoping that no one will notice what we've done.

More unsettling was that all the vacant, yet-to-be-developed land along the road was for sale (11 acres here, 13.3 acres there), or had signs denoting where a new development will one day be. And the fields that were still okay being fields had “No Trespassing” signs spaced every three feet apart.

So between the suburbs, the lack of wildland, and the property owners’ disinclination to allow other people on their land, where’s a young boy or girl to go for adventure? From my home, I can literally see suburbs in all directions. When I was a boy, at least there were pockets of woods here and there to stoke my imagination. A distant forest is a generator of wild dreams. But now, all a child sees here are endless rows of cookie-cutter homes, bland corporate parks, vast retirement complexes, separated by a gridwork of loud, fast, angry roads—the most unenchanting, uninviting, uninteresting landscape ever made by man, glacier or god.

***

I took a left on Lockport Road, walked up Ward—another busy street like Shawnee—and stopped to have lunch at a diner called Hoover’s for lunch: a basket of crinkle cut French fries artfully drizzled in a checkerboard of cheese and mayonnaise with bacon sprinkled on top.

The sun, thankfully, came out, so I took off my rain suit and set out to find a suitable forest for exploration. All along the road, behind vast fields, I could see plenty of forest in the distance, but I was thwarted from advancing forth because I knew I’d either have to sneak past homes or cross large fields with the “No Trespassing” signs.

I walked past several homes and fields and then finally decided to head for the woods—a quarter-mile walk through someone's backyard.

I walked under electrical lines held in place by giant metallic robot-looking structures, over clumpy, swampy, fallow cornfields, and finally into the woods.

It was only 5 p.m. but it was getting dark so I needed to find a spot to camp. I walked the perimeter of the forest—a decent square-mile-sized stand of hardwoods that was bordered by wide, empty, roadless farm fields on all sides, so I thought I had a good chance of going undetected for the night.

After setting up my tent, I wanted to build a fire, but had trouble finding dry wood since it’d rained/snowed all morning. There was a giant tree that must have toppled years ago, so I grabbed what dry wood I could find under it before starting a small fire, no more than a foot in diameter with some twigs and notebook paper.

I stepped out of the woods and onto the field to watch what was left of the sunset.

There was herd of dark blue clouds in a peach sky floating to the south, a relaxed and self-assured migration that followed a trail of a trillion years. The sun, behind one of these dark clouds, lit up its center, the beating, beaming heart of a blue whale.

Birds were atwitter, falling and beating wings, falling and beating wings, a northward undulation of skyward crests and earthward troughs. A plane rumbled across the sky, a train tooted, a scurry of ATVs growled belligerently, the electric lines, just a little ways away, discharged their steady metallic buzz, and I could hear cars all around me, but far enough away that I couldn’t hear honks, or tires, or engines, but a steady, uninvasive dial tone of activity.

This was something close to a happy compromise: almost a sweet spot between civilization and nature. It was a bit too small, the trees a bit too young, the forest a bit too littered with farmers’ industrial trash, and camping here, probably a bit too abnormal for the townsfolk, which made me feel paranoid about the possibility of getting caught and upsetting somebody. Still, though, for good and evil, looking at everything going on, I couldn’t help but think: What an incredible world.

At midnight, lying in my tent, I was startled awake by the hideous chatter of cackles and squeals from a pack of coyotes. It sounded like there were 30 or 40 of them (even if was just six) maybe a hundred feet from my tent. I'm not sure if I was dreaming, but I suppose it's plausible I wasn't.

***

Electrical lines everywhere.

This is the forest I escaped to.

Hoover's Dairy. 

Hoover fries.



My forest for the night.

Nearby pond.

Fallen tree. I harvested the only dry wood in the forest underneath it for firewood.

Farmer's garbage.

Sunset from the edge of forest overlooking fallow field.

My small fire.

Trail riding in Texas

 For the past week I've been working on a article for "GO," Airtran Airline's travel magazine. I flew down to Danciger, Texas (an hour south of Houston) to participate in a "trail ride" which is a cultural event common across the south, but is particularly popular in the African American communities in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. Here are some pics taken by photographer Chris Curry; our article will appear in the February issue.