Landscapes

Abstract

Landscapes Molly Mcclennen (bio) About fifteen years before I would move there, I spent a weekend in Aurora, Illinois, staying with a friend's aunt and uncle during a trip to Chicago. I remember only one thing of Aurora from that visit, but that one thing left a strong impression: My hosts lived in a sprawling, new housing development where each house looked identical to every other. The houses radiated in all directions [End Page 32] across the flat land, and, had it not been for a house number displayed on the garage, I would never have been able to find my way back to our host's home. The houses were large enough to contain all the amenities a middle class American would expect—a two-car garage, a laundry room, and a separate bedroom for every family member—but still looked surprisingly ephemeral for a $250,000, 2000-square foot investment. They stood, unrooted and bulky, on their postage-stamp-sized, perfectly square lots, as if they were placed there the way a child places rows of toy houses on his living room carpet, knowing that all of them would be quickly removed when his mother said it was time to stop playing and go to bed. Just as any ethnocentric traveler likes to relay stories of the strange things people do in foreign lands, I returned home to West Virginia with my stories of those houses in Aurora and their endless uniformity, not just within that one neighborhood, but among the many such developments I saw all across the flat land west of Chicago. I always told my listeners about how those rows of houses and the endlessly flat landscape upon which they rested had left me feeling disoriented. I was from the mountains, where the land folds into a complicated series of ridges and hollows, each of them unique in form. These serve as all the landmark we need to find our bearings. In Aurora, I could find no landmarks to reference, only flat land and sky and the sea of houses. I would always finish my stories by saying that the last place I would ever want to live was in one of those housing developments where the landscape was never broken by any discernable deviation in topography or architecture. As I traveled more, I found similar housing developments were common throughout America, but at that time, I had never seen one of that scale in Appalachia, where by necessity our homes have to accommodate the land, acquiescing to the [End Page 33] narrowness of the hollow, the spine of the ridge, the bend in the creek, or the grade of the hill. I once thought about buying a small house out Little Fudges Creek, a hollow a few miles from where I grew up. If you stood on the house's back step and made a great effort to extend your arm, it might have been possible to touch the steep hillside behind the house, so close did house and hill press against each other. To reach the house from the road, you had to cross a rickety wooden bridge over the creek. The realtor could offer no certainty that the hill would not slide someday and said that, yes, the creek did sometimes rise to the porch after a few days' hard rain. But being so tightly pressed between hillside and creek does not make a home unsellable in a place with so much beautiful land, but with so little of it level enough to build upon. The impermanence and uniformity of those newly-formed seas of expensive houses in Aurora stood at the opposite pole from the modest homes I was used to seeing in West Virginia, a place whose residents might be described as "house-poor but land-rich." It seemed to me that for those people living in those houses in Aurora, the house itself was primary: Did it have a dishwasher, finished basement, and walk-in closets? In West Virginia, owning a piece of land often takes precedence over the house on it. It is not unheard of for people there to buy land and live in a temporary...