On places

Ecology, as an American science, is supposed to have been born at the Indiana Dunes, where a man walked inland from the beach and noticed the ground growing older as he went—modern agriculture, then glaciers, then the deep geologic past, the whole sequence laid out as a walk you could take in an afternoon. A discipline started because a landscape happened to be arranged like a timeline. I want to know how much of what a science becomes is set by the accident of where it first stood.

Even small towns in Tunisia mark their roundabouts with symbols of what they are: Tabarka, a mermaid and a saxophone; Testour, pomegranates; Beja, a white stork; and Kram, of all things, a drone strike. Each is a small public argument about what the place is for. Few places in the US are read that way, though the people in my suburb joke, half in earnest, about erecting a statue of the mayor on the new roundabout. The monument is a sentence a town writes about itself, and we have decided ours should say nothing.

The townships of the Midwest are six-mile squares surveyed onto the prairie before any settler arrived. In New England, communities formed first and drew their boundaries afterward; here, the box came first and the people were poured in. Most polities are abstractions drawn around something real. A township is something real that grew inside an abstraction, and I’d like to know what difference that makes.

Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, corn fritters: the unmistakable food of the Midwest, and almost none of it native to the Americas. At some point an assembly of imported ingredients becomes the authentic taste of a place. I would like to know the moment a cuisine stops being a collection of accidents and starts being a tradition, because nobody was there to record it.

Illinois is well-watered, fertile, temperate; by every environmental measure it should be dense with people. Arid Tunisia is not, and yet Tunisia keeps the cultural instruments for living close together that this place seems to lack. The “emptiness” of American land is not a fact of nature. It is the aftermath of a clearing, mistaken for room.

What is a township for? Not rhetorically: actually. Illinois has more units of local government than any state in the country, and the argument about whether to keep them or dissolve them can’t be settled until someone answers that question. Almost nobody arguing about it has tried.

Institutions might have generations the way people do. The local board where I work turns over roughly every sixteen years, in rhythm with national politics. Nobody plans this. It might be a law.