long gray blades slowly

long gray blades slowly 

revolving in the sunset,

reaping the wind

East of the Mississippi near Bishop Hill, we pass a huge wind farm, hundreds of giant turbines spread out for miles south of the interstate highway, slowly revolving like a troupe of ballerinas all doing arabesque pirouettes. Like a three-bladed scythe, the long blades reap wind instead of grass. The kinetic energy garnered from the motion of the wind is converted into mechanical energy, which is then used to produce electricity, an alternative to coal-generated electricity. Seeing all these turbines reminds me of the wind farms we saw in many parts of the UK, like this one in Cumbria. Of course, as with anything new, controversy blows hot around wind farms, ranging from spoiling the view to the environmental impact of producing massive amounts of concrete for the footings. As a child, I remember driving from St. Louis to grandma's house in southern Illinois past mile after mile of oil derricks bobbing up and down like demented ducks, and no one objected to spoiling the view in order to suck oil out of the ground, or to the endless lines of railroad cars carrying coal from the mines out west to the cities out east.

ag crash monument

ag crash monument,

smashed and gutted, burrowed nose 

down in a cornfield

Driving home from Chicago on Highway 71, we stop to look at the wreckage of an airplane on the corner of a cornfield just south of Norway, Illinois. The small, 1940s, two-prop passenger Beech Craft C45H N3657G SNAF-461 is burrowed nose down into the ground, smashed and gutted. It's secured to the ground with heavy chains and a coat of bright silver paint covers up the accumulated graffiti of previous years. The green memorial sign in front of the monument does not tell the story of the crash of an airplane, but rather a different kind of crash: "Dedicated to all farmers and ag-related business folks that have lived thru the 'Agricultural Crash' of the 1980s. Mervin & Phyllis Eastwold. Norwegian Implement Co." The corn in the field behind the monument stretches out in tall, green rows, acre upon acre. Ironically, the 1980s crash was likely caused by too many farmers becoming too dependent on the production of too few commodities. Not much has changed. Mile after mile, as we drive through Illinois and Iowa, all we see is corn and soybeans, interrupted from time to time by signs such as this one: "343 acres for sale, will divide." In the middle of what was once nothing but farmland, cornfields are being engulfed by acre upon acre of a new, fast-growing crop, suburban developments of gigantic single-family homes.