Green Mountains

"Green Mountains" by Georgia O'Keefe, Art Institute of Chicago

Beautiful Landscape

Not quite a mile from the back of house where I grew up, down toward Crenshaw Crossing just East of our little town of Energy, Illinois was an abandoned coal mine. It wasn't the kind that was a deep tunnel in the ground. It was more like a "coal extraction excavation site". In days long gone, with large machines, the mine workers would scrape the earth and pile up the ground and sift the low-grade coal out of its hiding places under the soil. This process was called Strip Mining.

Years before we had moved to Energy, the coal company had left behind their gashes and mounds. Water filled the strip pits and plants grew all over the man-made hills so that when my brothers, our friends and I were looking for adventure there was no better place to visit. It was a fantasy landscape with water holes for swimming and grassy summits for climbing. There were small concrete structures --old storage huts, most likely-- that were perfect hideouts. We gave them names like "Fort with a door" and "Fort without a door". Real imaginative, I know.

To walk along the trail that snaked it's way through the little valley made by the mounds, was a past-time that was truly worthy of Huck Finn. A boy could find a nice stick to beat down the tall, unmoved grass and imagine he was trekking through a lost, uncharted world. In the winter, we would find large frogs hibernating under some of the shallower frozen ponds.

I have especially fond memories of the view from my bedroom window of my parent's house. It was a second story room and that faced East toward the Strip Pits. From that height, I could see the closest hills in the distance. Verdant in the Spring and Summer, rising from the flat surroundings. They were higher than the tops of the trees. I could watch kids on motorized dirt bikes speed up and down those trail-etched junior peaks.

That childhood landscape, the setting of a life-impacting experiences, both happy and tragic (I lost high-school classmates to drownings in the watery pits), was "reclaimed" years ago. It was flattened, leveled and fenced. But, as an adult, and visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw the painting, "Green Mountains", by Georgia O'Keefe. It captures the feeling of my idyllic memories of those gentle hills.