There is no polite way to describe Paul Smith`s current physical condition.
He looks like a walking scab.
Make that a limping scab.
One broad but sorry shoulder juts from a corner of his tank top in an angular welt, the aftermath of hard road and soft flesh meeting at velocities and orientations never intended by nature.
”I figure that the bike and I had slowed down to about 50 miles per hour when the shoulder hit,” offers the Off-Road Warrior.
After the shoulder was shredded, there ensued ”a broken collarbone, two broken ribs, a cracked rib, and 83 stitches in the head,” he said.
The accident summary: ”I was just riding into town to get a beer at night. Hit a `coon that came out of a cornfield. The bike flipped. I went with it.”
Why is Smith still alive? ”I crash every weekend. I know how to fall.”
Warning: You are now entering a corner of the world unlike anything outside one of those motor-punk Mad Max movies that career on the screen at 180 miles per hour with intermittent stops for physical mayhem.
Smith`s surname is the only thing commonplace in this forsaken place in which flocks of peacocks strut in front of shooting ranges where bullets zip into toxic-waste dumps that spew pollutant waterfalls on a moonscape populated by a giant water bug, frog, snake, turtle and catfish.
Located only about an hour`s drive southwest of Berwyn, this is the edge of everyday existence. Here, the commonplace drops off into a dark hole of weirdness.
This is the tale of the Shootout at Buffalo Rock. The Off-Road Warrior versus the ”Effigy Tumuli.” It is a modern-day frontier epic set in a no-man`s badland encompassing a toxic-waste dump, acres of desolate strip-mine land and million-dollar piles of state-owned dirt art.
”This is my least favorite topic,” said Carol Knowles, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Conservation in Springfield.
In the beginning, there was the star-crossed Buffalo Rock Shooters Supply Store, an ammo dump and lethal weaponry shop named for a bluff formation and park on the Illinois River across from Starved Rock State Park.
Owned by Smith`s late stepfather, Roger ”Sparky” Fullmer, its features included a machine-gun range and a bring-your-own-target ”plinking range”
where inspired marksmen fire into unprogrammable VCRs (”plink”), photos of unloved ones (”plink”), and dummies dressed as the boss (”plink”).
The Buffalo Rock firing range is a shooter`s paradise. Civil War buffs bring their cannons. SWAT teams of Cook County sheriffs, Tinley Park police and other lawmen come to practice tear-gassing mobs and smithereening suspect vehicles with Uzis.
”It`s hard to find a place to shoot machine guns or use tear gas,”
noted Smith, who said his clientele feels free to fire at will-and even at themselves-in the friendly confines of Buffalo Rock.
When a local magistrate ended his target practice a few years ago by firing his last rounds into himself, Smith`s sister Evelyn took it as a compliment.
”He felt comfortable enough to shoot himself here,” she said.
The perfect location
The Buffalo Rock gun shop was, for many years, the perfect business in the perfect place. Far from residential areas and adjacent to 2,000 acres of abandoned, strip-mined wasteland, its shooting range was situated so that marksmen aimed into an illegal toxic-waste dump. Poetically, they pumped lead into mounds of kindred heavy metals, PCBs and other eco-nightmare gunk.
As teenagers and young adults, Smith and his cronies found the strip-mine land and its treacherous hillocks, gulches, gorges and gullies ideally suited also to their other favorite pastime: death-wish dirt-biking.
The Off-Road Warrior and his friends spent long days and nights squirting across the barren badlands and came to identify with its outlaw terrain.
”It was a great place, but then we lost it,” Smith said. ”It`s ruined.”
No, it`s a park, said Knowles of the Conservation Department. Not much of a park, but a park nonetheless.
”Isn`t there something else you`d like to talk about?” she asked.
Leveling the playground
The Shootout at Buffalo Rock began in summer 1984, when bulldozers roared in and leveled much of Smith`s playground to build an alleged park.
To Smith, it was a boondoggle-”pouring money down a rat hole,” he said. To other, very different segments of La Salle County society, it was earth-moving in the name of art and the environment, a noble experiment that, so far, has failed rather miserably.
”A lot of public and private money went into this, and to have it closed and unavailable I think is a travesty,” said Smith`s nemesis in the Shootout at Buffalo Rock, Edmund B. Thornton of nearby Ottawa.
Heir to a silica sand fortune, pillar of the community, avid conservationist and earth-art patron, Thornton is a high-powered presence in La Salle County.
”Wherever you see split-rail fence in this county, that`s Thornton land,” said Smith. ”And you see a lot of split-rail fence around here.”
Smith`s dirt-bike paradise was on land that Thornton owned, but wished he hadn`t. His family`s former quarry business, Ottawa Silica Co., bought the land as part of a larger package in the 1960s, 30 years after Osage Coal Co. had ravaged it through strip mining.
The conservation-minded quarry company tried to restore vegetation on the barren site over the years but failed because of the highly acidic soil. When it was found that the site on a sandstone bluff 90 feet above the Illinois River was draining pollutants, the state`s Abandoned Mined Lands Reclamation Council targeted it.
Piling up the dirt
Thornton devised what seemed an ingenious plan to transform the acid acreage from a wasteland into a unique artwork and tourist attraction. He donated the 200-acre site to the state (”Tax dodge,” groused Smith).
The state, in turn, agreed to invest $1 million in the land out of taxes paid into a fund by mining companies. While reclamation specialists dumped 40 tons of limestone on each acre in an effort to salvage it, Thornton got a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and went artist shopping.
He eventually brought home New York-Nevada artist Michael Heizer, who caused a stir in Detroit in 1971 by plowing across the lawn of the Detroit Institute of the Arts with a 30-ton granite block. He called his work
”Dragged Mass.”
For a six-figure fee, Heizer dragged into Ottawa in 1984, this time not to shred earth but to pile it up in colossal mound renderings of a water bug, a turtle, a catfish, a frog and a snake.
Heizer called this work ”Effigy Tumuli” and said it was an artistic nod to American Indian mounds. The art world took notice. Models of the earth sculptures were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Highbrows from New York and London came to watch heavy equipment render art.
But local critics were not impressed. ”Standing on top of a dirt catfish doesn`t sound that good to me,” Smith said at the time.
As soon as Heizer began deconstructing Smith`s beloved terrain, hostilities erupted. Dirt-bike tracks climbed works in progress. Equipment on the site was vandalized. Bullet holes were discovered in earthmovers.
Smith`s family denied taking potshots, but paid for the damage. Sore that his stomping grounds had been co-opted, the Off-Road Warrior enjoyed informing visitors that just a half-mile away stood an illegal toxic-waste dump that was closed in 1979 but still oozed a waterfall ”colored like Kool-Aid.”
”Instead of a giant catfish, I think they should put a skull and crossbones with an arrow pointing to the dump across the canal,” he told journalists then.
When the ”Effigy Tumuli” park opened to great fanfare a year and a half after work had begun, Smith crashed the party.
”I came out to the grand opening and roostered them good,” he said. This involved ”making a pass through the crowd on my dirt bike and shooting a 20-foot-high rooster tail of rock, mud and clay on them.”
The assault inspired one official participant to send his state helicopter in brief pursuit of the cyclist as he fled, Smith said. Because this was Smith`s home turf, he had no trouble making a getaway, he said.
”I was a little disappointed when I found out it wasn`t the governor`s chopper,” he said. ”It was just the lieutenant governor`s.”
The Off-Road Warrior`s buzzing of the crowd may have been something of a highlight for many who attended the opening-that is, if the purpose of art is to stimulate the senses.
Trickles of visitors
For all the soil-reclaiming and earth-moving that took place, when all was said and done the ”Effigy Tumuli” park still looked like barren strip-mine land. But not as interesting.
The giant figures, some 18 feet tall and 2,000 feet long, were unrecognizable as anything other than enormous speed bumps.
The artist, put off by the unenthusiastic reaction of the press, defended his works and denied that they were recognizable only from a bird`s-eye view- even as he helped his own guests board a helicopter so they could view it.
According to news accounts, the earthmover driver who did the actual sculpting at Heizer`s direction had this to say at the opening: ”It was strange; I didn`t know where to start and I wasn`t sure when I was finished.” In the months that followed the unveiling of the earth art, visitors trickled into the park, and though many were baffled by the mounds, they were greatly impressed by an unanticipated feature: bullets whizzing around them.
”Mostly it was people saying they heard bullets flying over their heads, but some said they actually saw them hit the ground around them,” said site superintendent Mark McConnaughhay.
Blown to bits
From the start, it was suspected that the gunfire was coming from the gun shop and shooting range to the north of the ”Effigy Tumuli,” but before the matter came to a head, the Buffalo Rock store was blown to bits.
In October 1988, a series of explosions and giant fireballs destroyed the business and also killed Smith`s stepfather, his sister and two employees. Police reports speculated that a spark may have ignited gunpowder dust. Smith, noting that the store had suffered two other serious fires in previous years, suspects arson. ”But that`s another story,” he said.
Neither the family`s house on a pond populated by flocks of geese, ducks and peacocks, nor the shooting range were damaged in the fire. So Smith stayed on to operate the gun range and establish a thriving, off-road cycling park on a nearby abandoned sand quarry.
But shortly after Smith reopened the shooting range, reports of bullets in the park picked up again, and the state closed the park. ”Complaints got heavier until we finally closed it in December of 1990,” said McConnaughhay. Officials of the state attorney general`s office came calling at Buffalo Rock. Smith denied the bullets were coming from his range. Investigators concluded differently.
An injunction was filed ordering Smith to make changes to guarantee that park visitors would not be shot while appreciating art. After a delay due to Smith`s `coon-induced collision, he complied with the court order this month. Land use, or land abuse?
The state now plans to reopen the park by mid-August, and though there may not be any more gunfire, Smith is still taking potshots of other sorts.
”They might reopen it, but nobody is going to come to see it anyway,”
he said bitterly. ”There is still nothing to it but a few dirt hills. You can`t tell what it is unless you read their little signs.
”The conservationists call what we do on our dirt bikes `land abuse` but we call it `land use,` ” proclaimed the Off-Road Warrior. ”We took a wasteland and we used it. They ruined it so nobody uses it.
”And I say if you can`t use the land, it`s abused.”
