Land O' The Lost

Here is a post from a good friend of mine who goes by Patty...

Land O' The Lost

I grew up in Batavia, Illinois. Batville, ill, we used to call it. Now I come back a few times a year to overeat and visit my family in "Bat Country." (Yes, that's stolen from Hunter S. Thompson. Sue me. No, on second thought, don't.) My folks live on Deerpath Road, which used to be out in the middle of nowhere, but is now, well, out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by giant box stores. Randall Road has turned into an endless strip mall, but Deerpath Road stays the same. Ish. A Batavia landmark is missing from my old street, almost an urban legend among my friends. Land O' Lorin was an old farm on the corner of Deerpath and Main Street, (nothing Main about it that far out of town,) where convicted felon Lorin Womack used to run a funky, suburban zoo.

When Womack bought the farm, the first sign of imminent weirdness was a llama spotted on the screened-in porch for many days in a row. On our way to school, my sister and I would press our faces to the car window to stare at the improbable llama, wondering who in the hell lived in that house. At night, with the porch lights on, the house took on an Edward Hopper feel: an eerily lit scene, with a full-grown and furry llama in the long row of windows. A cinder block fence went up around the pasture, and buffalo were soon spotted grazing within, though no one could remember just when they arrived. It wasn't until the sign, "Land O' Lorin" went up that the neighbors took notice: there was a collective shrug that seemed to pulse up and down Deerpath Road, and no more. Imagine that today, with Homeowners' Associations and Beautification programs. This guy opened a cracker petting zoo on the street and no one threw a fit. I loved Batavia, and I still do.

Although this farm was about a mile, or "block" from my parents' home, no one in my family ever walked through the gate, plunked their money down and toured the sad carnival except me. That still amazes me, I have to say. Land O' Lorin was open to the public on Sundays, and for a small fee you could take your friends to see the yak, the Brahma bull, the lions, tigers and bears. That's right. There in the yard, Womack installed iron cages, much like the ones on Animal Cracker boxes, inhabited by scruffy bears and tigers pacing or spacing out, inches from your outstretched hands. Once in awhile the big cats would swat at a half-inflated basketball tossed into their enclosure, but they were too depressed to do much more. Not a fan of zoos in general, I found these animals to be unutterably sad, yet I went back again and again, as if revisiting Area 51 to prove to myself what I saw once was real.

Now for the part no one ever believes. Lorin Womack owned a liger. The mythical animal made famous in the movie Napoleon Dynamite was actually a sideshow freak sleeping it off at Land O' Lorin. It was a striped cat with a short, stubby mane, and not particularly intriguing, except for the Island of Doctor Moreau aspect of cross-breeding. In those pre-Internet search days, we would debate the possibility of a thing we were actually looking upon. Weird feeling. Some claimed the beast had been spray-painted, though it looked real enough to me, and in truth, I didn't care. I was just happy (and sad) to be there. To me, this is the elemental combination of emotions that make childhood memories last forever.

My oldest sister remembers Womack bringing a leashed tiger to a barn party, and I imagined the stressed out horses getting a whiff of exotic predator among the scent of teenagers and Old Milwaukee, but I never went to one of these parties; I was too young. By the time I was drinking, snowmobiling and cruising parties, the truly epic ones were long over. Isn't that always the way? Lorin Womack is long gone as well. He went to jail on a murder-for-hire charge a decade ago, after putting some kind of hit out on a woman's husband. (Of course he did. Could he have just retired, someone like that? He was a bit of an exotic predator himself. ) This was the real story, I suppose, this scandal on my street, but it wasn't part of my childhood in Batavia, and I had moved on to new, grown-up drama of my own by then. Want the details? I'm sure you can Google them. Like the truth about the liger, I don't really care. I just miss Land O' Lorin.

Here is a link to Mr. Lorin's prison art.