Aurora Beacon-News
June 22, 2006
Keith Lawler lives in Big Rock. He can be reached at KML616@excite.com
When I was 12 years old, I lived in the small town of Parkville, Mo.
One lazy summer afternoon, while walking through the hundreds of acres
of woods that surrounded my neighborhood, I came across a line of
wooden stakes with orange flags at the top. Actually, it was two lines,
running in parallel, slicing through the trees. With nothing else to do
that day, I decided to follow them.
It didn't take very long for my nose to find the smell of cut wood, as
I came upon a giant swath that had been cut through the forest. I
followed the path and came upon a scene that, even after more than 20
years, I still remember clearly. Stretching up the hill, the mowed
swath was replaced by freshly cut earth. At the end of the excavated
path, directly in front of me, was a large, muddy, pond basin. The
water was nearly all gone, but the creatures that had lived in it were
still there. I saw hundreds of fish: catfish, crappie, blue gill and
thousands of tadpoles. Not just the pinhead-sized tadpoles, but the
big, quarter-sized, bullfrog tadpoles too. And they were left there,
carelessly, to die by asphyxiation while being burned by the hot sun of
the summer afternoon. It was a sad scene for a boy to find.
By the time I returned home, my sadness had turned to anger. Who had
the right to mow down my woods, drain my pond and kill my fish? Dad
informed me that it was not, in fact, my land, but the state of
Missouri's land. And they had destroyed my little piece of heaven for a
new bypass highway, I-435. I was especially bitter about this, because
the state of Texas had done the same thing to me when I was 7, when
they cut down my woods to build bypass highway 35 around the sleepy
little town of Rockport.
And here I sit, in Big Rock, with the state of Illinois preparing to
cut down my woods, and remove my topsoil to build the Prairie Parkway.
Except I now know that those aren't my woods, and those aren't my
farms. But that doesn't really matter, because the people who do own
that land have as much control over its destiny as I do.
And I also now know why. Proponents call it progress, opponents call it
sprawl, but it's really just growth. More people need more highways,
more homes and more strip malls. So, in one of the fastest growing
areas in the country, a new highway will be built. And in the process
there will be winners and losers, and heroes and villains.
The losers will be the land and those who love it. Deer and turkey
populations will decrease or be displaced. The beauty of the landscape
that stretches to the horizon will be gone forever, scarred by yet
another swath of pavement. The winners will be the lucky lovers of
money who gambled on this highway. Dennis Hastert has already won his.
And there are plenty of others, some with inside information, many
purely staking their claim.
The heroes will be those that sacrifice for the greater good. One hero
is Marvel Davis, who sold land to the forest preserve for far less than
she could have to a developer if she had personal gain in mind. The
villains will be those that lie to us, and tell us that the value of
land that is only 5 miles away from an expressway is not affected by
it. The villains are the politicians who use dirty tactics to try to
grab land for their village, motivated only by their own egos and greed.
We are about to witness a spectacle of humanity. This land that
surrounds us has suddenly become very valuable, thanks in great part to
the Prairie Parkway. Opportunists are descending on this area like
vultures, bringing their wheeling and dealing and talking far faster
than many farmers can listen.
And as these people jockey for position, the land they are fighting over will be trampled.