As a young boy I knew the suburbs. There were farms and houses, small compact downtowns and shopping malls. I lived within earshot of the railroad tracks on a summer night, where trains barreled through the sounds of crickets and cicadas. It was Northern Illinois, 40 minutes from Wisconsin, but that train connected our network of suburbs to Chicago. When I discovered this, my world suddenly became much larger, the possibilities greater and the conservatism of the suburbs less over-bearing. It is hard to perceive when in the thick of it, but that suburban world was trapped in a bubble. Group think on a city-scale. As a kid there is nothing really wrong with that – the trees are just as climbable, summers just as hot, snow just as epic. At some point though, politics became a daily exercise, as there was little leeway for individual expression in the structures of our institutional lives. In those rare circumstances that expression and creativity were supported, one was expected to be constantly currying the good graces of those in charge. I hate politics because of it. I want to be able to speak my mind, freedom of expression and all.

The car was a means to that freedom of expression. It was necessarily so because there were no sidewalks, there was no public transit and everything of interest was separated by huge swaths of land and people. This land that housed the people, it was parsed into lollipop neighborhood developments named for what they razed to make room for the houses – “Fern View”, “Fox Point”, “Tall Grass”. I did not live in one of those neighborhoods. My father designed and built my house. We raised a garden, removed invasive buck-thorn trees, and had perfectly green fertilizer-free grass. I worked construction in my school vacations once I was big enough, remodeling kitchens and making people’s houses bigger. My hands have been callused ever since.