Notes from my Knapsack 12-1-22

Notes from my Knapsack 12-1-22
Jeff Gill

History doesn't repeat, but rhyme?
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There's a patch of Indiana I've had a chance to watch for the last forty years, as it transitioned from farmland to fully developed exurb.

My wife's family moved to a location on the fringe of Indianapolis as she finished high school; I met her at Purdue, and my first visit to her parents' home was right on forty years back. Her father told me, pointing out the patio doors, that across the way was a dirt airstrip and how they saw pheasants and wild turkeys their first few years at the house.

Driving in, I could trace the clumps of trees that marked homesteads now gone, and over the years we dated and then were first married I watched subdivisions pop up around that one. Our shopping for them slowly shifted from one direction to the west around and along the interstate heading northeast; the route I tended to drive back to Ohio once we moved here took us up through rural Indiana, but year by year it took longer to reach the rural portion of the trip, that used to start just north of their home.

Now, as we care for my father-in-law, still in that house, the "new" shopping stretch is getting worn and tired, and you can tell in the selection and stocking of goods is getting demoted in favor of more upscale outlets now another exit further down the highway. Strip malls have empty storefronts and long frequented stops have memories associated with now vacant stretches which I suspect will be torn down shortly.

There's a church whose groundbreaking, and later new sanctuary dedication I attended with my late father, a pioneering church plant for my denomination not quite forty years ago; it's just a mile east of my father-in-law's home, and I go there when I'm around over a Sunday. The minister is a seminary classmate, and we chuckle ruefully over how this "new start" now is mostly made up of members older than we are, as the suburb itself has aged.

As we've been debating and discussing the implications of what's going on in western Licking County, I think about Marion and Hamilton Counties in Indiana; what I've seen, and what can be learned from their development. Castleton Square Mall was and still is the largest mall in Indiana when it opened in 1972; Easton Town Center opened in 1999, as the Route 161 bypass was completed around New Albany, where the Wexner development opened the door for the 2004 to 2008 expressway which literally paved the way for Intel's arrival.

There's an inevitability to development when you look backwards at it. Dominos falling, framing going up, pavement replacing crops. Or as Terence Mann says in "Field of Dreams": "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again." We have our moments when we want to reach back and undo the erasing, but we really never can. We mark the time, as Terence says about baseball, and claim parts of the past, of "all that once was good, and it could be again." But it gets harder.

What would we, could we preserve, if we can't stop those steamrollers and bulldozers? I'm going to keep thinking about that this winter.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen quite a few homes built in cornfields, fewer fields of dreams. Tell him what you'd like to see saved at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.