A new bridge is being built over the river in Carpentersville
that will connect Longmeadow Parkway on the west bank
with Bolz Road on the east side. It will run through the middle 
of Fox River Shores Forest Preserve, and the fishing hole 
where Johnny Higgee, Mookie Meschevski, and I 
used to catch flathead and channel catfish, blue-gill, and large-mouth bass 
on the afternoons we cut class from the local high-school 
up the hill off Williams Road. 

Kayleigh Wind’s parents used to have an old river house, 
a simple white cottage, just upstream from the new bridge site
where life was lived barefoot, feeling through the sole
the subtle, otherwise imperceptible changes in the ground,
while running around through sacred groves and sleepy hollows, 
searching for golden boughs; perpetual motion until settling down 
on the dock in idol rapture to let toes dangle in the river’s gentle flow, 
while the scent of moonlight and muddy water 
danced upon the cool riparian air to the undulating drone, 
the gradual crescendo and sudden decrescendo of cicadas,
with no bridge around to form an echo.

The last new bridge was built only a couple blocks from there, and
that old white cottage is gone now. Inverse condemnation—
something about economic development and a public benefit—
replaced it with high-rise apartments, townhomes, 
and strip-mall shopping-centers, all built in the traditional, 
gentrified style, with its haunting predictability—
recycled, corrugated aluminum and faux brick exposed behind stucco. 
A clear invitation, like a flashing neon sign, 
that a neighborhood is open for business,
and whatever comes after post-post-modernization.

I remember going to the river before dawn
when they were building that last new bridge,
slipping a canoe into the smooth, autumn waters, 
and watching the ripples expanding outward
before getting in and paddling in a steady, reverential rhythm
to the spot where the pillar rose
from the murky depths through the slate-grey fog
like remnants of one of Astarte’s ancient temples.
Unburdened by the weight of the road they would soon bear,
they appeared to hold up the sky and push back the clouds,
opening up the horizon to make room for the sun to rise,
and for rose-red dawn to spread herself across the morning sky.

Nine bridges between Elgin and Algonquin 
aren’t enough to ease the congestion; 
to keep the city organism growing and the suburban expansion
flowing from rural town to rural town, the continual replacement 
of cornfield after cornfield with strip-mall shopping-center 
after strip-mall shopping-center, the same grocery store 
after the same grocery store, mile after mile—
Campbell’s soup, Ritz crackers, Frito lay and Budweiser beer—
aisle after copasetic aisle.

The new bridge will make the world that much smaller,
it will take less time to cover the same space.
The drive from West Carpentersville to the Art Institute
downtown will be 15 minutes faster, and
that Harold Sohlberg painting of the Fisherman’s Cottage,
with its beckoning white house, situated on the lonely shore,
shining through a foreground of silhouetted pines 
with their cracking black oil paint standing out against
the continual twilight of the midnight sun will be that much closer, 
and the feeling it exudes of tragic Odysseus returning home 
will fade that much further into the brackish morass.

******

Chicago grows outward 
from its lake shore center,
a multi-celled organism 
that feeds
on eukaryotic 
rural towns 
along its border, 
as uniform suburban forms 
expand the urban perimeter 
deeper into the estuary 
where backwards country road
flows suddenly 
into metropolitan thoroughfare,
and homogenized town 
flows into homogenized town, 
all disconnected, 
or actively disconnecting 
from the social histories 
of their separate pasts,
burning the covered bridges
along the path 
from culture
to civilization.

Rudolf Alexander