A Little Art On The Prairie

Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairie roads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There’s no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wild western plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming over spaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
      ~ from Gold Rush Brides by 10,000 Maniacs

The bike ride south of Race Street takes you directly to Meadowbrook Park, which has preserved 60 acres of native Illinois prairie, now all but mowed down and turned into the endless soybean and corn fields of the Midwest. But here, in this oasis of tall grass, turned golden in the dessicated air, one can still get a sense of the “legendary myth of the wild western plains” that Natalie Merchant evoked in the album Out of Eden. This tenacious enclave of rural land serves as an interesting space for the modernist sculptures that are displayed along its pathways. The ample size of the pieces are dwarfed nonetheless by the vast openness of the terrain. The pastoral setting ostensibly serves as counterpoint to the curated artifice, but is itself ironically, ultimately, also contrived. There is a heightened nostalgia for pure, unadulterated Nature by the presence of decadent bourgeois art in this patch of prairie preserve.

 

Everglades Interlude, Part 1

South Beach, Miami

Jane has successfully defended her master’s thesis, reflecting on her experiences as community organizer for the Aetas. She and Bruce finally left for Oregon where they will stay with family until September, when they leave for the Philippines for good. On their last weekend, we went on a road trip to South Florida with Ben, one of my research colleagues; Jane wanted to see the Everglades before she left. It is the largest subtropical wilderness in the US, stretching from Miami in the Atlantic to Naples in the Gulf of Mexico. We drove down I-75 from Gainesville, changed to the Florida Turnpike at Orlando, and stayed there until it merged with I-95 north of Miami. The turnpike and freeways around Orlando are set up like snares with toll roads to bag as much tourist dollars from visitors at Disney, their booths, manned mostly by the elderly with a diligence for doubloons worse than buccaneers in the Pirates of the Caribbean. We stayed in a cheap motel near Biscayne Boulevard, north of town, that reminded me of Timog Avenue in Quezon City. We were right next to Black Gold, an all-black strip club.

 

Biking Gainesville

One of the few amenities of college-town living is the bike-friendly environment, not just on campus, but also around town. I could not imagine investing in a good bicycle in Houston. The city is just too urban and too sprawled; cars and trucks rule the roads over there. Gainesville, however, offers not just paved nature trails, like Hawthorn, which forms part of the Florida State Parks, there are also bike lanes along its main arteries, that, if strung together, provide quite a formidable workout. We did exactly that last Saturday and traced a liver-shaped loop around the city’s periphery, starting from 34th Street and SE Williston, to NE Waldo past the airport, then turning west on 53rd Street, and finally south on 34th Street–all in all a little over 22 miles (35 km). The Waldo leg in particular was pretty with its well-tended plants. It takes, however, a bit of bravado to ride along vehicles gunning at 45-55 mph (70-90 kph), as these are major thoroughfares, and thus busy even on the weekends. What’s more, just for the heck of it, we did the 32-mile (roundtrip) Hawthorn trail the following day, clocking more than 54 miles (86 km) total! We were plodding home, though, at the end of it.

 

Hawthorne Trail

Mile markers along the trail

1. First Trip

The other weekend, we did a roundtrip of the 16-mile Hawthorne bike trail in Gainesville, starting from the trailhead at Boulware Springs. Only the first four miles were hilly with moderate slopes; the rest was all the way flat. Around the 10-mile marker, there was a small grocery store at Grove Park that took credit cards for $5-minimum purchases. It could not have come sooner as we were ready to pass out from hunger and thirst! They also sold pickled eggs, red sausages, and boiled (pronounced booled) peanuts. It doesn’t get more redneck than that!