What will Salina township be like in 20 years? How many more people will live in these 36 square miles? How many of the gravel roads will be paved? How many of the fields will have been sold off and turned into housing developments? Will Warner Bridge road be an interstate bypass lined with gas stations, shopping centers, and fast food restaurants?
If so, all those things will only be the continuation of the prairie's “development,” a process that started in this area in the 1830s. More layers of laws and ordinances. The expansion of habitation onto new ground, creating new pockets of producers and consumers that further link the land itself to a complex economy.
For example, the place where I'm trespassing (I mean sitting) right now—some acreage with woods, field, and old farm buildings whose owner lives in the Chicago suburbs. Part of this land is farmed, the produce sold to the food industry and the profits split between the farmers and the owner. The wooded grove where the farmhouse used to be, all this land does is sit here. The owner pays property taxes on it. Grass and trees and flowers grow on it. Deer and squirrels and raccoons and birds live on it. A farmer stores some equipment in the old shed. That's it.
If someday they turn it into another wooded rural subdivision, like Timberline a mile to the southeast, there will be x number of lots on which people will build homes. The homes will be connected to Exelon through power lines. They will have gas tanks filled by Kinder Morgan or Nicor or whoever. They will be filled with people whose income comes from some professional field or industry and who live off of commodities purchased from giant companies. They will use fossil fuels to work and go to school and go to church and mow their yards. They will form a home-owners association that says the grass cannot be over a certain length. They will expand the duties of their educational and postal district. And so on, and so on.
All of those things are true of my own home and family, more or less. We settled down on the corner of 4000 and 8000 roads in 1987 and starting doing all of those things. And we were only following my great great grandparents, Abraham and Amelia, who brought their own share of progress to Kankakee County from Pennsylvania in the 1850s. The place, and the forces which guide the patterns of life for those living here, have changed loads since the days when they passed Sunday afternoons sitting on the porch, like my folks and I did today. And it will change, I think, with frightening rapidity in the coming generation.
The sights and sounds and smells that I have enjoyed growing up here are changing and will continue to change. Another bridge will span the river. Bourbonnais, Limestone, Manteno, and Kankakee will expand and join together (Just like Kanakakee, Bourbonnais, and Bradley, first called North Kankakee, used to be geographically separate.) The sound of cars will come closer, drowning out the birdsongs. Aging farmers and property owners will die and their children will sell the land to developers. None of that is new; it's been happening my whole lifetime and my parent's whole lifetimes, at least.
All of this is not necessarily bad, either. To a degree, it's just that: necessary. Population is growing, and people have to live somewhere. But with the coming of new things, old things are lost. That's the story of the Midwest, and it is of course how history in general works. One tribe makes war on another and then occupies their land. Indians are removed, and the land that once was hunted is cultivated by new animals and new people planting new crops. Those people die or sell their land because they cannot keep up with the demands of the changing market, and it is farmed by new people with new machines and new methods. Next it passes to the hands of developers and then is lived upon by people whose means of living lies elsewhere—commuters.
The hope should be that people move this whole process forward in a way that somehow recognizes and values the things that are lost. In so doing, we can ensure that those things are not completely lost. And this is important because it reminds us that creation (including people themselves) has value beyond the monetary value ascribed to it by the modern economy. It has value because people and creatures have lived upon it and called it home. People call this nostalgia, but hopefully I've made a case that there is more to it than that.
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