The Desert Growing On Me

I began scoping out good locations for a new colony of stray dogs, and accidentally ended up seeing people.



Each plain of these dimensions can hold exactly one quart of water, to be consumed over the period of seven decades.



A common mistake in seeking out woodpeckers is to head out into thin air and disappear forever.

Ruffled Mouse Escape

Suddenly I woke up on the shore of a shallow fake lake, its water piddling and rippling and pissing in a fountain in the far middle, and I realized that for the first time in years I was looking at the condominium colony on Brown Deer Road, and the name of the lake was given to me for the first time in my life: Northridge Lake. Probably dug out in the late 1980s, just in time for me to drive past in a minivan in the early 1990s, across the road from the small strip mall where my father had purchased our first PC-compatible computer as an assembly kit. The lake rippled from the fountain in its middle, I was once told fake lakes need that fountain to bubble up in the middle because otherwise there's no oxygen and the lake will suffocate. Suffocate, and bloom full of green algae so thick that we'd all think we could walk across it. Or at least I, waking up vagrant beside Northridge Lake, would have tried in my first groggy minutes of consciousness.

My face was soiled with the small amount of mud that seeped up between aggressively dense grass. Northridge Lake took in gust of wind, transposing it into parallel lines of waves. Nobody stepped onto their wooden balconies to see who I was, the cars kept rushing by. I stood up and did the instinctual thing: I followed Brown Deer Road west and crossed under the 76th Street overpass, looking right to the massive M&I bank facility with its blind black windows, and past the Toys R Us to the defunct Best Buy location. Here I was. Formerly one small building on the left had been a sales point for Gateway 2000, and further onward and to the right there had been an Egghead Software, where my sibling and I had purchased violent and rudimentary reenactments of World War II to play on the family computer. My eyes leaped towards all these focal points--to the Fuddrucker's, to the ghostly gaping hole where Mars Music used to be--and found only the same blind black glass that I'd seen in the nearly windowless M&I headquarters. So you're all gone. Well, I guess you've been gone a long time. I felt I'd seen some smoke rising out of some of the low shopping centers--which I now realized were just meager sheds, not even warehouses or hangers or something you could put an airplane in. Sheds.

I walked west on Brown Deer Road and tried to recall the image of family life that all the old corporate stores around here had planted into me back during the age of the CD-ROM. What will you have, great family man? Unfortunately I could not get the images from the old catalogues stuffed between the ink-scented Sunday issues of the Journal, but I could get the voice to answer my question: What will you have, great family man? The answer came as follows:

You will have a round red metal grill on your wooden porch, and you'll be able to drive your car over to the mall to buy a heavy ski jacket and a rainfly for summer cookouts in the woods. You will get a candle with shells molded into it, and it will be accompanied by brown and orange and red flannel shirts, and bath robes that you will wear into the kitchen, where you will have a special indoor grill for the meat, and you will also have a telescope on the balcony of your condominium that looks across Northridge Lake, so that you can see the one small fleeing insect in Northridge Lake more clearly. You wont get bitten by insects because of the repellant, you will go onto your computer and you will be able to type up a plan for your getaway weekend, and print it out, so you can put it in a laminating folder you bought at Office Depot. You will have stars above your head and a good collection of personal cooking knives as well as a utility knife and a folding knife and perhaps a hunting knife. You will have large glossy coffee table books with perfect color photographs of military helicopters, so that you are clear about the machines that protect your life at Northridge Lake. You will read small, thick paperback thriller books and you will enjoy running on a treadmill that was bought especially for you. You will have an ice maker in your refrigerator that will crush it into your octagonal cup.

This voice kept going on inside me, when I realized, no, that's all in my imagination. In the meantime, I had reached a stretch of Brown Deer Road that had only vacant parking lots on either side, and unlabeled white boxes I imagined to be "headquarters." And I saw him, walking about as fast as I was, in the same direction (westward), lunging forward step by step on a carved wooden cane. It was him, the Family Man, the one who had been scattered through all the catalogs but managed to get away into his condominium before you could ever have a look at his face--or he would be riding past in his jeep, or on his yellow motor scooter, and it was too fast. But the Family Man, fifteen or twenty years later, after he had watched the movies about dogs on his VCR and projection screen television, had come outside to be in the same place as me. He was probably bleeding in his left hand, because it was loosely bandaged and he kept licking his thumb, which reminded me of the sting that doesn't easily go away after you get yourself near the nail. He turned back to look at me, and coughed like a crow into the glove on his other hand, under which I suppose he might have been bleeding, too.

"Family Man, do you remember me?" I cried out. I realized now that I was wearing a tattered yellow uniform.

"Family Man!" I cried again. "Are you still living by the lake?"

The Family Man coughed again crow-like and froze under my gaze.

"My car drove off last year, maybe the year before," he said. "All by itself. Supposedly the wife was in it, some kids and some animals. The car captured them, raced off. But whatever's been unleashed against me," he said, "it's gonna come back to them a thousand times heavier."

"Are you so sure, Family Man?"

"If I could trample on you, if I still had my jeep, I would tell it to trample you, young man. It looks like you should go back to work. I hate to think you're being paid to walk out here and chase me."

And of course, now I remembered, I have a plan somewhere in my pocket, a small blinking plan that will take me back in and set up a structure out of nowhere, install it right into this cracking lot and this dried grass, anywhere I go, anywhere I go.

Headache Path

Last time I posted here was in a May snowfall, forgive the personal address, this is coming together against the odds tonight. I will revisit the same locale where that last post dwelled.

At an unlikely high elevation above a sleeping town made of wood and mostly surrounded by woods, there is a dreadful intersection known for its expensive parking spots and its doomed business slots: one small restaurant comes in, and after a year and much spent on the remodeling of its space, it is ordered to close and vanishes forever. Here, young people mill around screaming about drinks and pretend they are in New York City without knowing why. This is the rotten spot high above Ithaca, and it was a place to cross early-early in the morning, at 7 AM when the wooden interior of the halfway home-feeling coffee shop opened, and they let you in to buy. It was a cold place, that street, where nobody would live for more than four years, and the people who worked there did not even climb up the hill from the small town below, but drove in from miles away. The only answer was to take a walk that could be difficult for the ankles, down the steepest street nearby, named after the buffalo, and so it was called Buffalo. Buffalo inserted you into the low-low and better part of town, the flats where somehow contented people with cold weather marking their faces had managed to secure houses and households and had settled forever. How can you settle forever in this world? The highway thundering just a short walk away, west towards the lake, reminds you that it is always time to get going again, but this river of cars almost does not wash into some back streets, where we could take a Saturday night and calm it down totally. Maybe on a thousand-mile walk someday we will be able to rest there, and someone will build a memorial bench that won't be taken, and we can fall asleep there.

Us Geographic Tough Guys

Keep in mind that cicadas & crickets keep rasping summer counsel on shadowed twigs in the trees lining on-ramps & business-park lakes. Also, here's an observation from the Northwest: It is possible--perhaps likely--to have a fistfight at certain bars situated in the Sprawl, that are mainly 'sports bars' but in the most sterile, modern, remote, lonely, manufactured sense. And, thus, the fistfight is the best thing to do: so do it up quick & don't regret it.

What does all this mean? This talk of exoskeletons & brawling in these particular landscapes? I guess that authentic experience becomes anonymous & especially powerful here.

I remember years ago being shown by someone dear to me the special vantage on an upper floor of the technically awful Van Hise building in Madison--you know, the fortress of language. The night view cast southwestward: There were the chaotic streets, the ugliness of the buildings illuminated in the cold yellow lights--not, on one level, the prettiest aspect of what can be an immensely pretty town. (Is it true? Better than 300,000 now?) But a real, hard, cold view. From that height--hundreds of feet off the ground--you could imagine what this mosaic of University, business district, municipal & county buildings, residences, lakes, isthmus, greenspace, withered swamp, strip-mall, industrial zone looks like to a nighttime thunderstorm (at the center of which is the Eye of God).

I am convinced that these spaces need their mega-transects. They need long-distance, intrepid walkers with canteens strapped to their belts & maps in their back-pockets to scout them. Places of such epic, chaotic development have, in fact, not truly been mapped--not in the 'deep-map' sense that William Least Heat-Moon proposes. The walker in these ravaged zones can surely find the romance in layers of vertical time & history: this once a Ho-Chunk camp, there a homestead child's grave, here where drunk-driven Pontiac spun off road on anonymous 1973 dawn.

But what is equally important is that real-time, veritable exploration on foot: risking life & limb on the road-shoulders & the parking lots, mapping studiously where the sidewalks begin & end, where the swinging traffic-lights denote lonesome commercial intersections...etc.etc. Probably you end up mapping a piece of terrifying human anatomy.

**Note: The picture is of SE Wisconsin Lake Michigan coastal country in winter 2009. A moment in time never to be recaptured again.**

Flurry Scale

Let it be reported that the twisting tongue of asphalt, which is what counts as a sidewalk on the east side of Ithaca, was peppered with dense, recalcitrant snowflakes this morning, as the buzzing, steam-coughing Burger King prepared its oilcakes for the shivering drivers. The tumbling meadows between East Hill Plaza and the start of the cinder block student housing looked as tempting as ever for an arms-in-the-air glide and fall, a leap into the bugs and long green grass, but today was flurried. And you had to notice the cemetery on the left side, behind the two convenience parking spots where a pair of lucky cars can stay for free, one hour at a time (?). Inside of the enclosed city street that began ten minutes later (where Dryden becomes inhabitable and overpriced) I turned right and found a long line inside Stella's cafe, with a barista wearing a 'People's Republic of Portland' t-shirt, and apologizing that I could not take the miniature Buddha statue, or the rubber triceratops or the Star Wars toy (and none of these three things was bigger than a thumb) they'd put on display on the countertop near the tip jar. And so I came here with a cup of doubled-over coffee with everything in it, and find distracting the Starlings freezing in the grass just outside the library window.

Bull Treatise

So it becomes apparent that there is a fixation not just with place -- the proud anonymity of southeastern Wisconsin -- but also time. There is a fierce and impenetrable temporal fascination: the pre-Internet era, yes, but specifically this strange portion of it: maybe 1968 to 1995. (The Internet around, certainly, but not a world-force player.) And then...here is the spatiality again, but to a different bent: Imagine backpacking into the Wind River Range in west-central Wyoming (a wild and ferocious country, then and now) in 1982, when the most relevant topographic map still dated from the 19th century, and when you probably ate at some lonesome crossroads Mexican joint, made one last intercept through a gleaming black (or maybe blue) payphone; and Orson Welles was still just alive, also Edward Abbey and Townes Van Zandt, when Family Ties and The Cosby Show were flickering domestically well off the highway as you headed toward the great blackness...you get the picture.

(The picture attached here is of Tygh Valley on the east front of the Oregon Cascades in 2008...the beautiful morph from Cascades deep-forest [black and blue wood] to Columbia Plateau scrub steppe. Such a landscape might seem to scream, "1850"...but just as throatily it bellows, "1985.")

Music, too, figures into it...but more in the distorted, blurred tableau (Tom Waits referred to it as the smudging of wallpaper, perceived from a distance) you would pick up at the gas station, blaring from the sound system of a worked-upon car at a Rawlins roadside. And still the outlaw Grizzlies in the high country, with everything bronzed through the Corps of Discovery reaching some kind of elegiac zenith: "This is just before everything ends."

Now, things are beginning again -- and that is surely good -- but the level of scrutiny is, perhaps, too searing, too intense. Before, the catalog was in the brain, the heart, upon teletype paper. And isn't it strange to imagine the 2009 bears roaming down into the Wind Rivers from the Teton country, re-occupying land so recently vacated by progenitors violently removed and of an entirely different era? Sort of like a jazz-obsessive of the 21st century acquiring the meat of a 20th-century obsessive's collection through eBay or some shit, pouring over it maybe two or three decades after its original keeper did, only now with digital camera and euphoric Tweets and Facebook sound-files and anachronistic hipster-exuberance. When did Calvin and Hobbes become martyrs? Was it about the same time that we began applying to college, when we noticed that all our Austrian counterparts -- in addition to being doused in cologne and obsessed with The Phantom Menace -- had insatiable attachment to these witch-doctor placebo-effect terrors called "cell phones"?

Crucially, Son House died in 1988. This conception of "time," certainly of "generations" -- we assembled here are technically Generation Y, which lumps us ludicrously with the Hannah Montana crowd, though I personally remember Ronald Reagan speaking in Port Washington, Wisc., remember also Saturday Night Live hedonism under bedsheet fort-canopies (I saw Dead Poet's Society, Indian Jones & The Last Crusade, The Bear, The Brave Little Toaster -- all in the theater) -- well, I suppose this segmenting fails us, it is woeful and savage.

Washtenaw Magazine Archive

A cold one-way street lit by liquor stores and refracted houselights shining from the windows of parked cars, and not knowing where to turn you spin into a full-to-brimming parking lot that is no wider than a cinema screen. In the cracked pavement you think you can see the tendrils of Detroit reaching up into the air, weak but determined to rise from the dry underground channel and into the fresh air of Ypsilanti. You, the former driver, and current walker, go a short way between bumper-stickered Japanese cars and minivans, and jingle open the door of the former gas station, now a coffee shop operated by bearded men with patches on their sweatshirts. You converse, you purchase and sit with a cup on a low couch, and find a stack of magazines with plastic protective covers clipped over each one.

You find, here, OMNI, a 1988 issue of the science and science fiction magazine discontinued in the mid-1990s. Every other page shakes with the pen-lines and brushstrokes of a determined illustrator, who in pigment and ink imagined how things might be. Things will be, might be, space-bound, extra-planetary, sun-powered. They will be volcanic and star-borne, acrylic as well as watercolor. This was a time when computers--and so, the future--were linked with blocky, ungainly letters and numbers that looked nothing like newsprint or handwriting.

And in the earlier pages of OMNI, a reader writes in to complain about Isaac Asimov's assertion that the struggle between Communism and Capitalism is based on a trifle, a petty difference that can already be seen through.

The magazine, free of stains and oil-splotches, has been entrusted to the proper keepers. You leave it on the table knowing that it will always be archived there, as long as this shed stands and is filled with that coffee smell associated, for so many of us, with thinking and scheming.