Carboniferous Country

Last Saturday we visited friends in Grundy County, Ill., just beyond the pale of the human glop of metro Chicago. Recently they had a sizable house built for them on an even larger lot out there in the exurbs. Lovely setting, the kind of place that has a driveway that’s actually a short road, and we arrived just as surrounding trees and flowers were making themselves known.

It’s hilly country, unusual for Illinois, and the house is set on a rise overlooking a small lake. But there’s a reason for the contour. Our friends own a slice of land formerly strip-mined—as long ago as the 1930s, according to John, the husband. No environmental regs in the those days to either follow or at least pay lip service to, so the excavated places gradually became small lakes and the debris mounds became wooded hills. (I don’t take this as proof that strip mining should be unregulated, by the way.)

It was a fine warm day, so we hung out on the deck with John and Emi (the wife) and their tiny twin babies (four months old). Though not in a town, they have an address in Coal City, Illinois, a town few miles west of I-55, the Chicago-St. Louis connector, and not that far from the house. That alone was worth driving an hour or so to see, a place with such a name.

A one point we went down the slope of their back yard, to their as-yet undeveloped dock site, and sure enough among the pebbles and larger rocks were lumps of coal. John told me I’d find them pretty much everywhere in the area, and noted that they contain worrisome radon. Black as, well, coal, flat on two sides and slightly crumbly, they also made good skipping stones.