@John Gorentz:

If I had a time machine I’d go back and tell Henry VIII and Martin Luther that this is what happens if they’re not careful about taking the church in nationalistic directions.

Well played, sir.

Christiansen’s Grocery, I’d have to guess. We own farmland just a few miles to the southeast, between North Judson and English Lake (but I’m in North Judson proper).

Yes, Christiansen’s Grocery! I found it in my e-mail archives from August 28, 2000. I’d repost the text of that e-mail on my blog, but I can’t seem to find any photos to go with it, and I never post anything there without a photo. So I’ll post here what I wrote back then. I hope it formats OK.

Hey, [name redacted], I just got back from a long weekend circling around South Bend (sort of) on my bicycle, and I was thinking about you, too. I still need to do some work in the Notre Dame archives and in the Northern Indiana Historical Center archives. I always enjoy crossing the border to the state where the roads are poorer and the air is freer. Maybe we should get together for lunch some time and plan a vast right-wing conspiracy. [Note: In 2010 I wouldn't make the same comparison of Michigan and Indiana roads. Michigan's have deteriorated badly.]

This morning I rode down to English Lake on the Kankakee River to look at one of the sites where some Indiana-based people got their start with Indian trading and fur trading in the 1820s. There is no longer a lake there. Nor are there fur traders. The only businessplace left was “Christensen’s grocery,” which is not even a typical run-down, backroads convenience store. You had to go inside to get much of a clue as to what was for sale, and it turned out to be a meager selection of soft drinks and cracker-type junk food. At least that’s all I saw that was of interest to me. The ambience was a little like that of the general store my grandfather operated on the North Dakota prairie in the 1950s, though this place was much cleaner, neater, and furnished with less merchandise. The proprietor was a tall, older man with a bad hip and a big tattoo on his bald pate. I was looking for something to drink, and he showed me a small cooler in back where a half dozen bottles of soft drinks were kept semi-cool. The guy was friendly but not talkative, and I wasn’t able to learn anything about English Lake from him.

So it was back on the road. I like most of the Indiana countryside a lot, but the old Kankakee swamplands are not among my favorite places. Too flat and mosquito-ridden. Lots of cropland and not enough farmsteads.

But I had the revised edition of Norman Cantor’s book about medieval civilization to listen to, which I really like. (I read the original edition maybe 20 years ago.) It was a good followup to Paul Johnson’s book, “A History of Christianity,” which we listened to on a family trip a few weeks ago. Johnson really did a hatchet job on St. Augustine, to the point where I could hardly recognize him. All he could talk about was Augustine’s authoritarian (fascist) streak. Cantor’s treatment of Augustine is much more balanced, and more informative, too. Cantor gives more names, dates, and places on lots of subjects. I.e. he is more interesting. Johnson tends to grab a single hobby-horse and ride it for all it is worth, similar to the way some of the semi-educated people on this list treat historical subjects. (At least that’s the way Johnson was back in the 1970s when he wrote this one.)

Oh, back to those Indian traders and fur traders. They had a way of manipulating the Indians, helping them to hold out for top dollar from the government (in some cases) mainly so they could skim the cream off the top for themselves. Then, when the Indians had most of their heritage taken from them, and were no longer a conduit of government welfare funds, these traders worked hard to evict them from Indiana, hoping to get more government goodies for their services. Remind you of of any welfare-Democrats we know from modern politics? There is an east-west street in South Bend that is named after these guys, and no I don’t mean the French guy with a big gravestone monument visible on the lane into the Notre Dame campus. [I'm a little surprised that I would still have referred to those government payments as "welfare" as late as 2000, by which time I'm sure I knew better. My opinion of welfare-Democrats has not improved since then, though.]

Thanks for the invitation to ride some more in your part of Indiana. I believe I’ll do so. I’m not a big fan of special bicycle trails, though. I don’t like the idea of putting bicyclers in a bicycle ghetto. I prefer to ride on the roads where I can look in peoples’ yards and farmsteads as I ride by, and where sometimes there are people to stop and talk to. I happened upon a trail yesterday between Kokomo and Peru, and rode it for a ways, but soon got off of it on account of boredom and resumed travel on the roads. I’d use those trails if I was on an outing with small children, or in an urban area where there are no roads suitable for riding, but generally I wish the money to build and maintain them was instead spent on making roads better for both bicycles and cars. I’m far from the only rider who has that opinion, but a lot of people like them, too.

I rode to Winamac on a different ride four years ago, back when Indiana was Indiana and the people couldn’t agree on time zones. My wife found there were some public clocks in Winimac with DST, and some without. You could pick whichever you preferred. Alas, that has all given way to heavy-handed compulsion from the center.

@John

Lots of cropland and not enough farmsteads.

That, sir, is one sadly accurate portrayal.

Frankly, farmboy (of sorts) though I be (at least at heart), I’d like to see pretty sizable swaths of cropland on the southern/eastern side of the Kankakee returned to its once-vast marshy state. I reckon that we could do better for ourselves with even the potential for “ecotourism”, along with preserving/returning natural environments, than we are with a relatively small number of fairly large farms.

(Hearteningly enough, Starke County has, in recent years, seen a modest increase in the number of farms and a modest decrease in average farm size. Of course, this has, no doubt, as much to do with sons’ inheriting parts of their fathers’ lands as much as anything else.

And I’ve really taken the conversation off-track. But Peters deserves it.

Nathan, don’t I get some of the credit for driving the discussion off-track?

As to converting some of the Kankakee farms back to marshlands, I suppose it might have the advantage of lowering the nation’s supply of high-fructose corn syrup and bringing malaria back to the Great Lakes region.