A Walk Across Suburbia: One Man's Journey Through His Neighborhood

A Walk across Suburbia

By Ken Ilgunas

Smashwords Edition

“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

Day 1: Home 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.”

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 about to fornicate with a month-old pumpkin in the front yard, but not for going on a short, three-day (albeit eccentric) walk.

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

“The lakes.”

“What lakes?”

“Exactly.”

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

I walked past two-story homes, barn-styled mailboxes, and overturned blue recycling bins that I’d jogged, biked, and driven past a thousand times before. On Kenneth Court, two boys were playing roller hockey with an empty net. A middle-age man and woman strolled down the road with a laggard lab on its leash. It was an uncommonly warm winter’s day.

I could have driven, biked, or even roller-bladed across town, but I wanted to slow myself to a steady march—a pace ideal for seeing old things in new ways; for discovering new wonders in old settings. What the walker lacks in speed, he makes up for in powers of observation. The walker – a sort of locomotive idler – is able to, unlike the cyclist, motorist, and aviator, stop and examine, mull and ponder, photograph and reflect—all at the slightest provocation.

I’d decided that I’d explore the region at whim, for the next three days, with no real route or destination in mind, advancing to whatever field or forest, suburb or street piqued my immediate interest. I’d determined to travel freely, no matter how strange a “journey through suburbia,” let alone my hometown, was. I would not be held back from exploring terrain because of “No Trespassing” signs, invisible property borders, the disapproving glowers from passing drivers, and certainly not my mother’s sensible reservations. No, I wanted to explore, and I saw it as my right as a free human being of this planet to harmlessly walk through my neighboring woods and fields. My only rule was to stay within the borders of Wheatfield. And to walk every step of the way.

I’d long wanted to go on such a journey, but school, and work, and procrastination had long kept me indoors. I was in town visiting my family for Thanksgiving, having just returned from a seasonal job in Alaska. Except for the fact that it was winter and that the unseasonably warmth could at any point turn into a lethal cold, now was the perfect time.

Why hadn’t I traveled through my hometown before? There was something silly, I thought, about how we travel thousands of miles to see something exotic and new, while leaving our own backyards unexplored. And I was no better, taking off to Alaska every summer for work and play, leaving behind my familiar, though ultimately uncharted, home state. Isn’t traveling more about perspective than distance, more about thought than sight, more about reflection than experience? Thoreau, a Concord, Massachusetts native, and one of history’s great travel writers, infrequently strayed from the borders of his town. “I have traveled a great deal,” he said, “in Concord.” Theoretically, a palmful of soil and a microscope would give us enough terrain to explore for months. And so: I wanted to see, for the first time, my hometown of Wheatfield—the place I spent the bulk of the first twenty-eight years of my life, but a place I felt I’d never really seen.

***

Let me tell you a little bit about Wheatfield.

Wheatfield is a mostly flat, 28-square-mile, rural-turned-suburban community in Western New York, home to 18,000 residents (95 percent of which are white), situated between the bone yard industrial cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo.

Before it was settled by whites, it was forest, and probably sparsely populated except for members of the Iroquois tribes that were likely to have frequented the shores of the nearby Niagara River. The first white settler, it is said, wandered into the area in the early 1800s. Wheatfield became a town in 1836, named after the area’s staple crop – wheat – which was one of the few crops that performed well in the clay soil.

Nowadays, Wheatfield is suburban in character, with no true center to town: no central square, no quaint Main Street, no sharp-tipped church signifying the focal point. There are, however, plenty of churches, gas stations, shops, and countless pizzerias scattered across town, always a drive, albeit a short drive, away.

For such a small space, Wheatfield does, however, offer a great deal of geographic variety. Wheatfield’s southern section is mostly suburban, the housing developments pushing all the way south to the mighty Niagara River. To the north, toward Lake Ontario, the suburbs grow thin and the land assumes a more agrarian character, with cornfields in the summer and pumpkin patches in the fall. To the east, the town rubs against 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 mixed anti-freeze into a can of tuna to kill a skunk (but ended up killing two of his neighbor’s dogs). Eyebrows were momentarily raised when a corporate 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 never quite got off the ground. Wheatfield again fell under the national spotlight when John Wayne Bobbitt, now my high school’s most recognizable graduate, had his penis cut off and thrown into the field by his wife, Lorena, in the early 1990’s.

When my family moved from Hamilton, Ontario to Wheatfield in 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.

Wheatfield was, by all means, just a pleasant, quiet scattering of subdivisions surrounded by fields—the character far more rural than suburban. But over the past couple of decades, Wheatfield has changed. Fields have been smothered with asphalt; forests yanked out to make way for new subdivisions. Between 1990 and 2000, 1,318 housing units were added, and since 2000, the town’s population increased 28 percent (or 4,000 people). It’s one of the fastest growing towns in all of New York State.

I wanted to see all this “progress” up close. Better yet, I wanted to see if there was any wildness left in Wheatfield; to see if there was something more to it than rows and rows of houses, retirement homes, and corporate parks. So, on this mild afternoon of December 1, 2011, I set off to explore my hometown anew.

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

I walked through the new, loopy, cul-de-sac suburb called “Wheatfield Lakes.” There was a muddy, undeveloped lot where a house had yet to be built, beyond which was a stand of trees that surrounded the lakes. I walked across the unoccupied lot, and then elbowed my way through thorny brush and ten-foot-tall reeds. I’d gotten off to a late start, so the sun was already sinking below the horizon, casting a rosy autumnal hue on the bare upper branches of the trees I walked beneath.

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

Why had I never come to see these before!? A light breeze made the reeds’ bushy tops wag like dog tales. The water lapped innocently against the shore. A family of ducks or geese swam leisurely in the distance. Except for a faraway onion-shaped water tower on the horizon, 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, a plump mastodon grazing a wheat field. 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 lakes to admire the water, laughing ecstatically, helplessly prefacing my outpourings with expletives: “Fucking beautiful.” “Fucking amazing.” “Fucking incredible.”

Off to the left, my attention was drawn to a fenced-in rectangle of rolling green grass, perhaps stretching a mile or two in the distance. I thought it was extremely unusual for so much land to be unused, not to mention protected by a mysterious cage fence. I left the lakes, hopped the fence, and walked over the grass, wondering why this land wasn’t being farmed, or used as soccer or football fields. Every few hundred feet, there was a four-foot-tall black pipe that poked out of the ground and curled downwards like a candy cane. I figured the pipes were some sort of irrigation mechanism, but determined they were for something else when I put my nose to one of them and inhaled a whiff of something so foul it resided somewhere inside the continuum of sewage and rotting plant matter.

When I found a sign that said “Niagara County Landfill,” I realized what I’d been walking over. My steamy affair with nature had abruptly and awkwardly ended—learning of the landfill, which was directly next to my old neighborhood, was news that would remind me to practice more restraint if I caught myself again surrendering to any more of the suburbs’ rustic charms. How could I go my whole life not knowing I lived next to these lakes? This landfill?

I walked to the Niagara River, a wide channel of water separating the town from Grand Island. Far off to the west, I could see the towering casinos of Niagara Falls lit up.

With daylight waning, and nowhere to set up camp, I set out from the Niagara River up Witmer Road so I could camp in my friend John’s backyard—my base camp for tomorrow’s exploratory campaign into Wheatfield’s slightly wilder, northern agricultural district. But first, I wanted to visit with my friend Quaz, who’d grown up in my subdivision and who had become a successful mechanical engineer, but has since moved 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 in between bites of the turkey and mustard sandwich he’d handed me. “This is why I’m on this journey. 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 drive to his bowling match, so I walked east along the Niagara Falls Boulevard—a busy, four lane, fifty-mile-per-hour, pedestrian-unfriendly road on which you can find cheap $30-a-night hotels, ATV dealerships, gas stations, and pizzerias. 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 – was trying to become a law enforcement officer, and would have easily gotten a job if he elected to accept a post in more prosperous areas of the state, but he refused to leave Western New York so he could be close to his family.

“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…” I said. “There are hardly any woods, hardly any farms down here. There’s no wild 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...”

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. Every day.” 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 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 game play had come. In Skyrim, a PlayStation 3 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 a mountain range in the distance that wasn’t just a paper backdrop, but a geographical feature you could literally explore.

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, our refuges of virtual wilderness, protected plots of pixilated land that must exist in fake worlds because we’ve denuded and defanged so much wilderness in the real one. (Currently, in the lower-48, only 2.7% of our land (the size of Minnesota) is protected wilderness.)

In film, the suburbs, known for their immaculate order, the nine-to-five routine, the well-groomed lawns and meticulously managed flower beds, are very rarely a setting for adventure. Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) is a glaring exception, in which Elliot, his brother, and his brother’s friends perform dazzling bike stunts on hilly suburban streets as they outrun their adult pursuers. But even in E.T., most of the adventure unfolds on the outskirts of the suburb: in an old barn, in the high grass, or in the nearby forest where E.T.’s journey begins and ends. Stand by Me (1986) and The Goonies (1985) similarly feature pre-teen suburbanite adventurers, but again, their adventures are more of an escape from the suburbs than an adventure within them. It must be noted, though, that in these 1980’s films, the directors, Spielberg in particular, seem to cast the suburbs in a sentimental light, perhaps for harboring tender feelings for the suburbs and the “crass innocence” of its misbehaved but well-meaning boy heroes. In The Goonies (written by Spielberg), a group of boys and two teenage girls embark on a quest to find an ancient treasure. Their call to adventure was not to escape from, but to save, their Oregonian town, which a country club developer threatened to take over. The suburbs, to these directors, seem okay, good, something worth protecting and fighting over, so long as there are caves, forests, and oceans along the suburb’s perimeter, where we can get our fill of mystery and adventure before coming home to a noisy dinner table.

The suburban adventure story has become rare, if non-existent, in recent years. Super 8, a 2011 Goonies-like movie (on which Spielberg worked as a producer), about a group of six kids who endeavor to solve a mystery after witnessing a catastrophic train wreck, takes place in a small Ohio town. Curiously, the filmmakers decided to set it in 1979, as if today’s suburbs aren’t good enough. And perhaps, for a suburban adventure movie, they’re not. The suburban landscape has undergone radical changes over the past twenty-five years, and the filmmakers may have determined that a modern-day adventure in suburbia (where there are far fewer surrounding wildernesses) is just too implausible for moviegoers to suspend disbelief. According to a 2010 report by the American Farmland Trust, over the past twenty-five years, 41 million acres of arable land (the size of Wisconsin) has been turned into roads, malls, and sprawl. The U.S. Forest Service predicts that the developed area in the United States will increase 41 percent by 2060, which means that 16 to 34 million acres of additional forest (between the size of West Virginia and North Carolina) could be torn down.

Nowadays, we see suburban films more like The Graduate, in which its characters, dwelling in sterile, monotonous, boring landscapes, where community connections are weak and spiritual lives barren, struggle to find outlets for squelched desires and meaning in unfulfilling existences. The suburban setting has become the archetypical setting, like the Southern Bible Belt, for a story of repression. We see such stories played out, almost all with tragic ends, in The Ice Storm (1997), The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998), American Beauty (1999), Far from Heaven (2002), Little Children (2006), A Serious Man (2009), and Gus Van Sant’s Columbine-like teenage high school massacre, Elephant (2003).

But is it impossible to live an adventurous life in suburbia? Is there any hope for the coexistence of wilderness and suburbia? More specifically—is there any wheat, let alone wilderness, left in Wheatfield?

After hours of gaming, I felt vaguely guilty, as I always did after a videogame binge. The enjoyment was of the cheap kind: addictive and immediately gratifying, but fleeting and hollow; an enjoyment that vanishes as soon as you turn the console off. I suppose it was odd to feel guilty after hours of genuine fun, but no matter how absorbing the gaming experience was, I was always aware, in the back of my mind, that I was exploring a fake world on a chair in front of a television screen, when I could have been on my feet outside exploring the real one.

John offered his couch, but I wanted to camp, so I put on all my layers and set up my tent in his backyard.

(The author embarks.)

(The author’s boyhood neighborhood.)

(Evidence of beaver.)

(Wheatfield Lakes.)

(Mysterious heap of seats.)

(Niagara County Landfill.)

(Subdivison en route to Quaz’s.)

(Camping in John’s backyard.)

Day 2: John’s house north to the agricultural district

Throughout my young adulthood I’ve had two recurring dreams.

The first occurs about a half-mile south of my home. I’d never actually walked the grounds, but there used to be a field and forest there. In the real world, there’s a new subdivision, but in my dreams the area’s still wild, as it was when I was a boy. There, in my dream, I would happen upon a grizzly bear grazing in an open field. Upon seeing the bear, I’d stand still, paralyzed, awestruck, exhilarated. After the dream, laying 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 simply because of its implausibility.

The second dream 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 a ghetto – except the foreigners’ 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, were 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 such 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. The street wound around fields of mud, where houses would soon be. I felt self-conscious carrying a large backpack through a subdivision, aware that onlookers would likely feel a little unsettled with the presence of a tramp in a neighborhood that never sees homeless people, tramps, or 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 smoothly-shaven monoculture lawns, though the neighborhood, as a whole, was spookily – eerily – quiet.

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 cul-de-sac for a little exercise. After walking through various suburbs for several hours, I hadn’t seen one person outside of their homes.

But is it that strange? I’m hardly any different when I stay at my parents’ home. In the past, I’d literally gone days in a row without leaving the house. When visiting my family, I find that I gradually change from responsible, independent Ken back into lazy, slothful, high school-Ken: eating five meals a day, sleeping in until two in the afternoon, and indulging in an endless combination of naps, movies, and videogames.

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 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, children to raise, 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 ever felt needed.

In suburbia, most of us work our forty hours and then spend the rest of our time on automatic pilot, coming home to a nearly fully-automated comfort box that – except for a little energy burned when making a meal, mowing the lawn, or building a deck – only costs money, and very little sweat, energy, or ingenuity to maintain.

I can’t help but think that a young person needs 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. We have the comforts and conveniences of a private suburban life, but we also have social isolation, purposelessness, and spiritual emptiness.

While nature all around us continues to do its thing: unleashing terrifying storms, spinning seasonal cycles, inflicting bone-chilling colds, and renewing with springy revivifications, in a neighborhood like mine, we are almost completely oblivious to it all.
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 more wildness in our lives?

***

I continued my march up Shawnee, seeking 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

Almost all of the subdivisions I saw were named to evoke some image of pristine natural beauty. And while I understood that it would be poor marketing to accurately name the neighborhood you’re trying to sell as “big, bland, ugly box lot,” I found something arrogantly deceptive about naming a suburb after that which was destroyed. It’s sort of like naming a football team “out of respect” for the Native Americans who’d been slaughtered and eradicated from the region two centuries before. It’s like promoting some fat, sugary, chocolaty, diabetes-coated cereal as “part of a balanced breakfast” to give us an excuse to feel okay about eating it. It’s nothing but shrewd propaganda—propaganda of the most effective kind because the consumers are more than willful corroborators of their own deceit. We name our suburbs after some fake manmade pond or a few sawed-down trees to kid ourselves into believing that this place is something other than what it really is. We’ve destroyed the land only to name it “Happy, Beautiful Estates” to forget about what this place was and what we’ve done to it.

Easily the most ridiculous of the subdivisions was “Wildwing Preserve,” the name of which caused me to scoff aloud as I sauntered past. The houses were huge, bland-colored monstrosities—the sort 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 likely dug out so people could brag that their homes have “waterfront” views.

Why do we need homes so big?! I thought this was the 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 the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond!? Why are we calling this place a “bird preserve” when the housecats more than likely devour hatchlings and the dogs shoe off whatever blackbirds have descended to rest their wings?!

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. The town name of “Wheatfield,” like the suburbs inside it, was becoming a mockery to the productive and scenic farmland it once was.

What few fields there were, and that hadn’t been sold or were for sale, had “No Trespassing” signs on most every telephone post.

Between the suburbs, the lack of wildland, and the property owners’ aversion to allowing other people on their land, there is essentially nowhere for young people to explore. Where’s a young boy or girl to go for adventure? I could 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 are endless rows of cookie-cutter homes, bland corporate parks, vast retirement complexes, separated by a grid of loud, fast, angry roads—the most unenchanting, uninviting, uninteresting landscape made by man, glacier, or god.

***

I took a left on Lockport Road, walked up Ward – another busy street like Shawnee – and stopped 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 large fields, I could see plenty of trees in the distance, but I was reluctant to venture out to explore them because I knew I’d either have to sneak past homes or cross property that was clearly unwelcoming to trespassers.

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. So as to remain concealed, I walked the forest’s perimeter from within—a decent square-mile-sized stand of hardwoods that was bordered by wide, empty, roadless farm fields on all sides. 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 had rained and snowed all morning. I found a giant tree that must have toppled years ago. It was wide enough that the leaves and twigs beneath it remained dry. I grabbed what dry wood I could find under it before starting the fire, no more than a foot in diameter.

I stepped out of the woods and onto the field to watch what was left of the sunset. There was a convoy of dark blue clouds in a peach sky floating to the south, a relaxed and self-assured migration that followed a trail of a billion years. The sun, behind one of these dark clouds, lit up its center, the beating, beaming heart of a blue whale.

Birds were in the air, not far from the ground, falling and beating wings, falling and beating wings, an 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 feet away, discharged a 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 just a steady, un-invasive 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, but 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 thirty or forty of them (even if was just six), maybe a hundred feet from my tent. In the morning, I wasn’t sure if I’d been dreaming, but I thought it was possible that I hadn’t.

(Wheatfield farm district.)

(Wheatfield farm.)

(Wild Wing Preserve, a new subdivision.)

(Land for sale.)

(Sunset from woods on second night of journey.)

(Farmer’s garbage.)

(Power lines.)

(Suburban house.)

(The author walking train tracks.)

(Summit Park Mall.)

Day 3: South to Wheatfield Lakes and home

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 an icy pond, from which an alarmed long-legged Great Blue Heron launched into the air, 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 ridden 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 and walked along more railroad tracks.

To my left were more giant rectangles of fallow fields with cut cornstalks, hewn by tractors to a jagged stubble, the rough 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.

I was visiting “the places in between”: those places we drive past every day, but never really see, and certainly never explore. We do of course “see” these places in the most literal sense of the word, and we may very well wonder about them, or even feel a desire to explore them and connect with them in some way—but only upon first pass. That curiosity has all but vanished by the tenth. We grow so used to not really seeing the land around us that our commutes no longer take place in a three-dimensional world, but a paper backdrop landscape.

These woods, creeks, rocks and rivers were treated differently by our Iroquois predecessors. According to Morris Wolf, author of Iroquois Religion and its Relation to their Morals, everything to the Iroquois, even the inanimate objects – the rocks, the dawn, the water – beheld a “mystic potency.” The natural world was full of spirits that could either help or do harm. When the Iroquois collected ginseng, it was customary to offer tobacco and leave the first plant untouched. When the Iroquois walked past a few round stones, one Jesuit missionary noted, they offered sticks to the rocks out of respect to the spirit. The stones and creeks that I walked past may have been gods just 300 years before, but today aren’t even known to exist.

Unlike the Iroquois, our lives take place in schools, in offices, in hospitals; almost always indoors. We do not think to fear or revere the woods because the woods are inconsequential to our lives. The Iroquois’s life depended on a merciful natural environment—so much that their culture evolved to assign that “mystical potency” to natural objects. And by making such things “spirits,” their culture required that their treatment of the land be respectful and reverent, and no code of law or environmental policy was necessary; it was self-enforcing; an inescapable way of life.

The suburbanite’s life (not his life exactly but the prosperity of his life) depend, not on the local forest, but on big, amorphous, faraway entities like the housing market, the economy, and the unemployment rate. These things do in fact have some link to the health of the natural world – on crop output, on freshwater aquifers, on bee colonies, on a reasonably stable climate – but the invisible things that keep us healthy, big-bellied, and prosperous are just that: invisible. We have an indirect relationship with the forest from which our paper comes (that’s possibly thousands of miles away), so we have no relationship with the forest at all. Those are other people’s environments; they’re not our maples, wildflowers, and rivers. So while we are all still very much vulnerable to the mood swings of Mother Nature, this volatile, and sometimes sacred, relationship has been outsourced to other, distant peoples.

Our forests and wild places receive no attention ultimately because they simply have no place in our lives. So the places that do not matter (even though they may be our salvation) go unseen. But to change your pace, to venture out into the places in between, to live out those dramas normally played out in the kingdom of dreams, is to finally tear down the paper backdrop and remember what it again feels like to truly see—because that which has become invisible to everyone else still glisters marvelously to the traveler.

***

In between Williams Road 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 figured the military practiced 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, built in 1972, was a big deal. All the cool kids went there after school, alone, without their parents. But parent or no parent, I delighted in surveying the Sega titles in Toys “R” Us, 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,” 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.

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 percent 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. How can I be so cranky about a place that is in so many ways good? There is no poverty here. Little crime. No war. Occasionally, someone is molested or killed by a drunk driver, but no one lives in fear of barbarian hordes, ethnic cleansings, malnutrition, or decimating epidemics. My childhood was so wonderfully idyllic—a life of sports, friends, movies, and videogames, so to express my revulsion to a place of so many warm memories makes me feel dirty, like I just said mean things about a close friend behind his back. But how can we not cast a critical eye on suburbia? Its impact on the environment, its implied class, race, and age segregation, and its isolating effects deserve a cranky treatment. Besides, to be absent of pure evil is not to be absent of all evil.

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 were paths of swampy, diarrhea-colored water, where ATVs had grinded their tires into the ground over and over again. An empty box of Labatt Blue Light sat next to a tree by the lakes. The sky wasn’t so clear as it was two days ago; rather, it was a bland, slightly hazy blue-gray—the sort that make you think something’s stuck in your eye. I quickly left and made my way back to Ferchen Road.

On my way to my subdivision, I came across an old man wearing a navy blue veteran’s cap. He’d just gathered his mail, and was 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, two or three at the very most. 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. We are here for a decade or two – a lifetime at most – 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 would I verify that the lakes were in fact constructed a few years ago (for the gravel deposits and/or for giving homeowners a “lakeside” view), but I learned that the beavers that live there – that I’d been so pleased to discover – are commonly harassed because their dams cause floods.

I couldn’t say I felt anger. This “fake lake” discovery was too predictable a conclusion to my journey. Anger requires some element of surprise. Anger occurs when something is seized from your grasp. It was only natural that the lakes were fake, the beavers harassed, the hills a landfill, and all the property developing or for sale. Anger? No, this was resignation, a grave confirmation of my prejudices. 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 cancer cells are things that cannot absorb our anger or change as a result of it. Rather, we lament the loss of what was and grieve what could have been. The suburbs, too, are poor receptacles of anger.

Plus, how can you feel anger for the suburbs—a place where kids play outside, where neighbors have barbecues, where teens, at their worst, will smash a few pumpkins at night? I guess it isn’t so much the individual suburb or the individual homeowner or the individual house that is deserving of any ire, but the broad trend of what’s happening to land across America.

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 and always will have the memories, but now that the woods and ponds and movie theatres are gone, these memories, which no one else can ever have, are more sad than sweet, no longer the tender memories of a loved one who’s passed, but the tragic memories of one taken away.

All that could be done was to enjoy this place for what it was while it was still there. Fake or real, manmade or natural, polluted or pristine, next time I’d come to the Wheatfield Lakes I’d embrace them for what they were, as if they were always there, laying a couple of sticks on a huddle of stones before heading home.

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.