Benld, IL
The best way to enter Benld is through the back door, from the North. Take Lake Ka Ho Road (also spelled Ka-Ho and Kaho) past big old oak trees, down hills, over creek bridges, through fields that suffuse the air with corn dust, like blonde hair streaming sunlight and diffuse notions of "America."
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| Raptors! People in Argentina will pay over 50k for a dinosaur from Benld, made by Charlie McGrady. |
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| Granpa Ruffato's happy home. |
Drive through the two houses of Eagerville down the Benld Road, which turns into North Main Street. The first house you’ll really notice within town limits belongs to Grandpa Ruffato (who passed away last September, after these photos were shot). It’s not the first house, just the most distinctive one: a neat brown bungalow with well-trimmed bushes, hanging baskets of red petunias, flags both large and small, and most particularly, a huge wooden jig-sawed cut-out of a mustachioed Italian in full bocce ball crouch.
Inside the cramped Fema's, which is an Italian deli, not a disaster agency, a bunch of locals are either sitting down and eating their lunch, or waiting at the counter for carry-outs. St. Louis's Hill stocks this outpost: bread from Fazio’s and salami from Volpi. Three well-fed women wait on the customers, and boss around a slim boy with dark brown eyes in a navy t-shirt sporting the eatery's logo: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A blue-eyed, white-tufted old guy with an egg-shaped head and body notes my straw cowboy hat, then asks me where I tied up my horse. A very tall and lanky silver-haired man with an unlined, high cheek-boned Slavic face in extra-long jeans and a Corvette t-shirt looms over everyone else.
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| The next thing you may notice is the onion-domed Holy Dormition Russian Orthodox church, which is now a monastery. |
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| Roll away the stone. |
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| All the Saints in Heaven. |
Across the street from the deli gleams a storefront that has seen better days, yet now bears its own forsaken beauty, with pale minty green vitrolite on top, one white plywood-framed pane of glass in the middle, and glossy dark green vitrolite beneath. When you look through that lone window, you'll see that behind the facade, the roof has caved in. The top half of one wall is painted the same minty green as the vitrolite outside. It’s impossible to tell what kind of store this was at one time. Now the floor is covered with wood, gypsum, tires, weeds, and water. Was it a jewelry store? It has that jewel box feel. Way back when, it probably had a floor of mint green and dark green linoleum, set out in a diamond pattern, and long glass cases full of gold watches and high school insignias and cameo sets and engagement rings of negligible carat. Maybe the man who owned it also shot yearbook pictures. He was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and wore a coat and tie to work every day.
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| Coal = Dead Dinosaurs |
The interior is a microcosm of the rot at the heart of America’s mainstreet. Like the mouth of a meth head, it’s full of decay, and the overgrowth of green things. But although they've adapted, these green things are not in any ecosystem they can understand. What kind of bugs and other creatures live with the plants? Just silverfish and cockroaches and mice? Do spring peepers sing in the pool that once was a floor?
The jeweler's clientele were the miners, of course, the Italians and Russians who came late to populate this chunk of Illinois farmland, and stood out from the other American — i.e. Scotch-Irish and German — immigrants in the area.
These wrecked walls are shared on one side by a space full of Catholic statuary, which bears the sign Country Treasures Antique Mall. Are these statues being restored, or sold as is? No one is around to ask. The Blessed Virgin Mary stands on a celestial blue orb of heaven, and a golden snake, her arms open in calm blessing to reveal the pink lining of her azure robes. Behind her another BVM stands barefoot on a cloud, atop a pale blue flower. Her robes are white, and trimmed in a band of golden diamonds. Next to her on the left, the Madonna, wearing a crown and a red robe under her dark blue cloak, snuggles her Child, and blesses some unseen flock. To the right of her, yet another BVM with downcast eyes raises her hand to point to the Sacred Heart which burns through her white shift. These variations of Mary, Queen of Heaven, are endless and beautiful and detailed.
There are crucifixes everywhere, and a large plaster grotto showing the tomb of Christ, before the stone has been rolled into place. Jesus just lies there, broken and dead, for He has not yet rolled away the stone and risen. It's a lesson in grey scale, darker in the distance, paler in the foreground, and the limestone blocks of the tomb opening are enlivened by living vines, the green of rebirth and regeneration.
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| No more hairdos served here. |
Will Benld itself ever regenerate? Right now the viable businesses on mainstreet consist of the Italian deli and government workplaces, such as the Coal Country Chamber of Commerce, and the Senior Nutrition Center. Mary Beth’s Beauty salon lies vacant, the hair dryers full of ghost gossip from days gone by: who died, who cheated, who drank himself to death.
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| Very appetizing pea-soup exterior. |
It’s a town full of haunting presences. Something about coal mining, digging down into the dirt to dredge up the carboniferous fossils of so long ago, must leave a lasting psychic imprint on a place.
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| Vitrolite, glass block, and plywood on Main Street. |
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| I'm seeing double! |
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| The end result of a leaky roof. |