Wind Farm

Driving I-65 south from Chicago to Indianapolis, one encounters: 1) corn 2) billboards for "adult" stores 3) the dairy-farm equivalent of South of the Border ("We double dairy you to exit #220!") and 4) A wind farm.

In daylight, in a light breeze, the farm seems to creep up on the highway. One turbine quickly gives way to a horizon-full, their three-pronged heads spinning like oversized lawn decorations. Taken in the aggregate, the spinning becomes unpredictable: one turbine's blade will jump up out of the field, followed by twenty others almost (but not quite) in unison. 

Hundreds of these towers redefine the cornfields, reminding the passing driver of the flatness of the earth, of the lowness of the ground. The tall white structures act as the scrapers of a downtown, calling the gaze upwards, reminding the hinterland and the suburbs of their dependence. Here, however, there are no suburbs. Stretching almost to the horizon in one direction and past it in the other, the towers call the eye up as quickly as it has dropped. The spacing between them is just enough to create this oscillation in the eye. 

Driving I-65 north from Indianapolis to Chicago, one encounters the wind farm first. In darkness, in almost no wind, they disappear. The cornfields, the darkness, the lack of head- and tail-lights stretches away. Then, in perfect concert, a hundred red lights appear, like the eyes of a spider reflected in a flashlight, like an invading army, like a grid superimposed scores of feet above the ground.

Unlike the uncoordinated, wind-driven turbine blades, reaching up one or twenty or three at a time, all of the lights behave as one. They are timed at intervals longer than a high-tension tower or a skyscraper. For three or four seconds, the prairie is empty. For three or four seconds, it is occupied. Then the grid disappears for three or four seconds. Et cetera, et cetera.

It is just long enough for a passing glance, just long enough to look away and look back and say "I need to get some sleep." 

But like so many unbelievable things, this flashing red grid, this false downtown of monstrous do-gooders is real. Even coming around the sharp corner of a mountain pass in West Virginia, driving just-too-close to the blades of one of these turbines that rose out of the valley did not have this effect. Their sheer numbers, the way that they spread across the corn and hijack the eye, their eerie coordination, are unsettling. Even as I understand and wholeheartedly encourage the planting of these odd trees, the meta-perception of them--their combined affect--makes me long for the hidden coal and nuclear plants, spewing invisible pollution, setting no blinking red grids over the cornfields. Their grids are more dangerous, but (and because) they are imperceptible.