David Hoppe

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:: Farming the wind

A new landscape

By David Hoppe

I can't begin to guess the number of times I've driven the last leg of US Highway 421 between Indianapolis and Michigan City. It's a flat, fatiguing stretch of two-lane blacktop that takes you past vast fields of corn and soybeans and the occasional quarry. Since the land was cleared of forests to make way for farming, there's very little shade - just the occasional stand of trees, like old memories, standing in the distance.

This is not to say that the landscape along 421 is without certain scenic pleasures. In different seasons sunlight and sky can make the ground and what grows there seem charged with the oceanic intensity of dreams.

In fact, there was a moment last week, between Chalmers and Reynolds, which felt a little like a dream. I was headed north and had just passed a bank of silos along a railroad track. The road jogged slightly, momentarily opening a wide, northwestern vista. Usually, cloud formations are all you're likely to see at this point.

No more.

Towering up above the rows of corn were a dozen or more enormous windmills, their long, tapering blades cocked at various angles against the sky.

I had happened on one of the state's first wind farms. If you look at a map, this part of Indiana is considered a Class 3 area - a place, that is, where the wind blows with particular strength and consistency. Someday the turbines that constitute this wind farm will be such a familiar part of the landscape they may seem invisible. For now, though -- and I suspect for some time to come -- they practically hum with the shock of the new.

The scale of these wind turbines is incredible. They stand between 200 and 300 feet high and are so out of keeping with their surroundings they somehow manage to redefine where they are. Most artists can only imagine creating works of such size they change they way we think about the relationship between human beings and nature. The amazing thing is that the wind turbines pull this off. It's hard not to see them as enormous kinetic sculptures. George Rickey, the master artist whose works are currently on view at the Indianapolis Art Center and at a variety of outdoor locations downtown, would surely have appreciated the turbines' seamless blend of formal elegance and enormous power.

Power, of course, is the key to these gargantuan installations. Any aesthetic pay-off these things bring is tangential to their true purpose, which is to transform wind into energy.

Part of what's so arresting about seeing this wind farm for the first time, is the way it asserts a new technology in a familiar landscape. If you could put up a billboard as large as the faces on Mt. Rushmore proclaiming "CHANGE HAS COME!" you wouldn't get half the effect.

And change being what it is, there are probably many people - around here, as well as those who, like me, are just passing through - who see these contraptions as intrusive monsters, like those earth-scorching robots in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

But it's also impossible to see these things and not be struck by what a departure they are from older forms we associate with energy production.

In Michigan City, for example, they built a coal-burning power plant beside the harbor on Lake Michigan. It's a classic of its type, a massive fist of a building that recalls nothing so much as the Victorian notion of a dark, satanic mill. It represents its product, power, with a kind of menace, which is only reinforced by the fact that the local air is seasoned with fly ash. When I worked in the nearby public library, you could run your finger along any given shelf and often come up with a sooty, telltale residue.

Michigan City is also known for its cooling tower. It's not unusual to hear strangers say they didn't know Indiana had a nuclear plant, so synonymous are these towers with a particular type of energy. In this case, though, the cooling tower serves the coal plant.

In Europe, where nuclear power is more prevalent, a few artists have argued that cooling towers should be celebrated as a kind of late modernist architecture - a brick approximation of a mushroom cloud.

Given such hefty forerunners, it's not surprising some people have questioned whether wind farms like the one going up near Chalmers can supply sufficient energy to justify their existence. But research by the National Renewable Energy Lab indicates that wind farms could produce enough electricity to light up every home and business in Indiana - without polluting our air and water, or producing hazardous waste.

That, however, would take a lot more windmills than have been erected here so far. We'd probably get so used to looking at them we'd hardly notice them at all.