One day while walking in a farm field in the Great Lakes region, I came across a stone that had been shattered into 97 pieces by the farmer’s plow. It ended up being a stone called Gowganda Tillite, one of the oldest sedimentary stones, from a rock formation on the Northern shore of Lake Huron, 450 miles north of where this stone had been moved by a glacier during the last ice age. It was a glacial erratic buried in glacial sediment clay, and it took hundreds of years of plowing for this piece of stone to make its way to the surface. I started thinking about the ways that agriculture has accelerated the movement of materials across the planet (not unlike a glacier), and how this movement enabled urbanization during westward expansion over the past century. When I started researching the history of plows in America, it didn’t take long for the 1897 Sears Roebuck & Co. mail-order catalog to surface, and so I promptly purchased it on amazon.com with a simple click.

Major advances in warehousing and distribution enabled consumer products to spread out over farm country like glacial erratics. Catalogs began to hook farmers with chapters full of necessary tools, only to tease their wallets open wider with finery on subsequent pages. Sears Roebuck & Co. plowed the way for the modern lifestyle of the middle class, because towns sprouted from farm fields, distances shrank, and eventually cities emerged from the critical mass.

Simultaneous to finding the fractured stone in the farm field, I came across a red oak trunk that had been weakened by steel-mill smog in Cleveland, whose heart had been eaten by ants. Around the same time I also witnessed the felling of a registered 300 year old white oak Moses Cleaveland Tree whose bark had been infested by southern Sawyer beetles that had migrated north in an increasingly warming climate. I knew these two urban trees shared a connection, but it was not until I came across the salvaged warehouse beam that I realized they were connected by consumerism.

By 1906, the trees that were used to build the original 3 million square foot Sears Roebuck & Co. catalog warehouse in Chicago were already old-growth, possibly 200+ years based on the dimensions of this beam. Warehouses paved the way for the instant-gratification we enjoy today and the resulting air pollution that comes with the optimizing of the infrastructural landscapes of supply chain logistics. In a way, these three trees died for our aspirational lifestyles, the disease of the heart, the disease of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life. When I see these trees laid out before me, knowing their entanglement with 2-day shipping and all it entails, I want to piece my scattered self back together, find wholeness, and move slower, slow like the stone I found in the field that a glacier moved hundreds of miles over thousands of years. Amen.

DATE: 2018

MATERIALS: red oak, white oak, lumber beam reclaimed during demolition of the original wood-framed Sears Tower

SCALE: object

DIMENSIONS: 4’x8’x3’

SITE: n/a

STATUS: complete

This Earth: Notes & Observations by Montello Foundation Residents, Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA), (fall 2021), (audio guide: English, Spanish).

This Earth Exhibition Catalog (SUMA/Montello).

Montello Foundation 2019 Catalog.

Sowing Seeds of Discontent, Fawick Gallery, Baldwin Wallace University (2018).