Unlimited Sprawl Area?
What do we mean when we say U.S.A?
This week, I want to give my grandmother a lot more of the floor. I’m also trying something new with the way I format her parts (within the limited options Substack offers)—feedback on that (or anything) is welcome. By coincidence, divine intervention, or the universe being a smart aleck, the “Rural Reflections” I want to share bears today’s date, August 5, only from 2001. I am struck by the prescience of her words here, and also by how little we seem to have learned in the 22 years since this was written.
Ruth begins:
It was and is an interesting commentary on our landscape, one that I kept considering long after I first read it in “River Horse” by William Heat-Moon, in which he describes his voyage across America from Atlantic to Pacific almost entirely by boat.
As he and his partner are traveling down the Allegheny river, he describes the shorelines as “neither beautiful nor ugly but simply used and in places clogged with discarded factories.” This, he writes, was “typical American resistance to take old industrial land fro new industry so long as fresh woods and farmland are available for the squandering farther away.
The author then quotes an Englishwoman who, on observing similar conditions said, “I realize now that USA stands for Unlimited Sprawl Area.”
How many times have I questioned “urban sprawl” but now I give it a larger connotation—unlimited sprawl.” Traveling interstates with their urban bypasses, we often are spared this all too common view of “unlimited sprawl area.”
[…]
I have thought so many times about how wasteful we as a nation are of our land resources and how careless we are in taking care of them. Reading this book has only renewed these concerns.
Our interstates and city bypasses eliminate many of these sights and so we pay little heed to what we are not seeing.
Laura remembers a road trip
In the summer between my middle daughter’s junior and senior year, we drove 850 miles straight through from Murray State University in Kentucky, where she’d been in the Governor’s Scholars Program, to Saint Petersburg Florida, where we met her soccer team for a pre-season camp at Eckerd College. Somewhere past Nashville, we stopped to get food and maybe switch drivers. A couple years later, I would return to that part of Tennessee on a work trip. I could almost swear my hotel was located off the exact same exit. Almost. They really are indistinguishable.
And Ruth does too
I remember many years ago when I was determined to visit “Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga, Tenn. I convinced my husband on one of our trips north from Florida to include that in our travel plans even if it did mean going many miles out of our way. We got to the top of Lookout Mountain and when we left the car to look over the scenic view, there was a gigantic used car “dump” right below. That was a long time ago and I hope that view has been cleaned up.
Laura briefly responds
Although Chattanooga is only about 3 hours away, I have been up Lookout Mountain only once, for a conference at Covenant College. I cannot say for sure about the dump, but in the era of Yelp and Trip Advisor, I have to believe some “influencer” would have gone viral with their complaints if it were still there. Please feel free to correct me / provide updates in the comments.
Another way
In any column where my grandmother finds things to criticize, she also finds things to praise, things that might point to a way forward in the future. Imagine that! (sarcasm intended).
She writes:
I salute those cities that have taken major steps to clean up and rebuild downtown, riverfront areas, historic settings. There have been positive results such as tourism and business development, the restoration of our history to remind us where we came and where we are.
[…]
I salute those agencies, individuals, states, groups that have preserved scenic rivers and kept the landscape natural, that have set aside swamps and wetlands for wildlife refuges instead of draining them and filling them in for development of another tourist attraction or sub-division.
We need wilderness, wildlife, nature at all climates and conditions. We need a refuge from that “unlimited sprawl area.”
There is only so much land. Nothing grows on concrete. Pollution can fill up the air we breathe and keep us inside our air-conditioned homes and workplaces. But, is that what we want for our future, the future of our children and grandchildren? I am grateful to be reminded of these questions as I read more of “The River Horse” and the author’s adventures from Astoria, N.Y. to Astoria, Wash. Am I willing to ask them of others? What should our answer be if we are asked, “Does USA stand for Unlimited Sprawl Area”?
Response in progress
I’m willing to keep asking, Grandma Ruth, especially when I look at Aspen, my grandson, your great-great-grandson, who will be 2 in November. For his sake and for that of children everywhere, I hope we start coming up with better answers.