Driving through central Illinois, we passed through a stretch of farmland that looked like countless others — flat fields, long roads, and small towns appearing suddenly on the horizon. We weren’t in a hurry, so when one of those towns came into view, we pulled over and decided to walk.

At first glance, the place felt quiet and domestic in a way that seemed almost staged.
Toys left out on driveways.
Small white fences enclosing tidy lawns.
Porches where long summer evenings were spent.

It was the kind of scenery that connects easily to your own memories — of a time when life felt unrushed. But that surface impression didn’t tell the whole story.

At the center of the town, towering over its quiet streets, were enormous grain silos — industrial, rust-stained, and impossible to ignore.  They loomed over every street, a reminder of the factory that employed much of the town.  No matter where you stood, they were there, watching over the town with a kind of quiet authority.

Some places have that effect. They make you feel small — not in a way that threatens, but in a way that quietly reorders the landscape around you. It’s a reminder that atmosphere isn’t just light or weather, but the weight of work, history, and memory settling gently into the air.

There are certain winter days when the landscape feels unfamiliar, even if you’ve walked through it many times. During a rare weeklong thaw in 2022, the air turned heavy with fog, and the ice covering the lagoon began to soften around the edges. The season wasn’t changing — just relaxing its grip for a moment.

Earlier that winter, a storm had uprooted a tree and thrown it onto the frozen surface of the lagoon. When I first saw it, the branch was locked in place by snow and ice, pale and motionless — a shape caught mid-impact.

The days of heavy fog and unseasonably warm weather lasted through the week. When I returned, I found the same tree again — but now transformed. The bark, once pale and dry, had absorbed the color and texture of its surroundings: mossy greens, brown sludge, and traces of thawed ice.

All of a sudden, it had this beautiful, haunting appearance as if it was emerging from the floor of the lagoon - taking on the shade of mossy green mixed in with dirt and sludge from it's new environment. It was completely flexible, adaptable to change.

In winter, the beach becomes stripped down to form.  The color drains out of the shoreline long before the first snow settles, leaving only the grey sky, the frozen sand, and the lake moving in slow, heavy motions. The whole place feels muted .
Overturned canoes are half-buried in frost.
Beachside cafés stand empty for the season.
The playground sits frozen in place, its metal bars too cold to touch.
Every detail points toward a story — a beach stalled by winter, paused between seasons, empty except for the sound of wind and water.
I stayed a little longer, watching the waves collapse onto the frozen sand.  Until, from a distance, a woman appeared - walking alone along the frozen shoreline.  Steady, unhurried, habitual.  I figured she must have lived in a beach house nearby and was out for an early morning walk.

There was nothing dramatic about her arrival, but it shifted the scene.
The place I assumed had emptied out wasn't empty at all.
Even when everything looked frozen in place, a routine carried on — unchanged.

Through the summer, this forest lagoon feels like a pastoral retreat.  The air is filled with the rhythm of oars slicing through the water, birds circling above, deer stepping carefully through the trees.  It’s sealed off from the rest of the neighborhood - a cocoon of sound and foliage.

In the winter, the place transforms.  At the border of the forest, a highway runs - a steady roar that never disappears.  During the warmer months, the leaves and tall grass are able to soften its impact, creating the illusion of quiet.  Once the winter arrives, the illusion collapses.  The traffic’s hum cuts through the stillness, filling the forest with restless, relentless noise.

Each winter begins the same way.  The lagoon freezes over and all of the forest's residents -  deer, foxes, coyotes, racoons -  cross over the ice, venturing into backyards and quiet residential streets throughout the town.   As the winter drags on, the lagoon becomes a slowly shrinking boundary.

The thaw begins at its center - a pool of black water forming, ringed by pale ice. Day by day, the ring widens, measuring the slow passage of winter until it reaches the forest’s edge.

If you were to sail directly towards this lighthouse, you would find another smaller beacon flickering into view as you approached the shoreline.  This is not a place to dock any ships.

Protected behind this rustic network of walls, pipes and wheels is a water filtration system. Seen from the shoreline, you can read the difference immediately: on one side, the water pools in stillness; on the other, it is pulled downward and filtered.

It’s an invisible, continuous process that never stops.  Even when the harsh cold covers its wheels and gears in ice, the system continues to work beneath the surface.

Through thin cracks in the metal, you can see threads of light slipping into the rougher water outside the barrier.  The lake churns unencumbered there, racing directly into the icy wind towards the shoreline.

There’s no sense of pressure pulling it downward.  Behind the wall, that pressure is what gives the water its glassy, static calm - a stillness that doesn’t reflect the silence or decay of winter, but the mechanics below.

You can sometimes, especially in the calmer moments of winter, hear echoes of late nights after the beach has closed - of boys trying to impress their friends, daring each other to walk along the barrier’s edge like a tightrope, hoping they don’t fall onto the wrong side.