Mid-week Assignment

It would be something else, right, to discover some old print-out depicting the Doppler track of a tornado across southern Wisconsin from, say, 1990? It could be included in a time-capsule shoebox with a faded Polaroid -- a true relic -- of a ribbon-cutting ceremony at some Brookfield Circuit City, I'd imagine. Also, naturally, the distribution of Mound-builder effigies (Thunderbird, Bear, Turtle, etc.) and perhaps lines tracing presumed trading routes between Aztalan and Cahokia. Don't forget that the Crawfish River runs under I-94 (see field notes, below). Don't forget that, starting around the turn of this century, young Gray Wolves began following the Rock River southward from established packs in the Central Forest and died on the Interstate near Johnson Creek -- which is where the Rock crosses that great new barrier.

Using GIS software, using Photoshop -- hell, using transparencies, you could overlay a hundred of these schematics and create a bewildering, chaotic, frightening geography, attaching the relevant photographs, documents, and graffiti transcriptions to the appropriate points. Red dots for the Blockbusters, green dots for the Thunderbird mounds, yellow dots for traditional Great Blue Heron rookeries, purple stipples for the tracks of 500 representative funnel-clouds, neon-green hashes for the routes of Homecoming parades in all encompassed towns, proportional circles depicting respective annual earnings at each 7-Eleven and total monthly sales of Willie Nelson Super Hits CDs at each Wal-Mart. Let's say for the period 1984-1999.

I'm not going to do this; one of you can do it and display the results here, exclusively. Be sure to include a scale bar, compass arrow, hexagram, Che Guevara stencil image, and other necessary cartographic references.

Perspective via the Florida Keys

An appropriate quote from Thomas McGuane, in his Ninety-two in the Shade (1972); here neophyte fishing-guide Thomas Skelton and his girlfriend, Miranda, observe the Key West mainland as they return from blissful night angling in the mangroves:

Twenty minutes of this night running and they were close enough to home that they could see a Greyhound bus cross the Stock Island bridge and penetrate the zygote of Cayo Hueso. Just beyond, the drive-in theater screen loomed among the trailers. Skelton stared: Appomattox Courthouse, Yankees and Rebels stately in the Key West sky. From the seaward vantage, it was the America you weep for. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee knee-deep in mobile homes surrounded by the vacant sea. Lee's horse, Traveller, materialized and vanished in the Atlantic skyway. Then Grant took Lee's hand and it was one nation indivisible, horses, heroes, tents, and munitions sunk among the mobile homes: THE END.

The Life Suspected But Never Followed At Night

The consistent streak, the one that crosses every basement where kids spend a few hours unsupervised, is (as you well know) the desire to believe in the ghost. The ghost is down here, not hard to believe it. Proof: that you can't hear anything, see anything, this means that there is something down here with me. These urges, it turns out, are bound to a love of wood: of dead, dry wood in boards, the wish that there would be more wood everywhere, that the moon would be made of wood, the sidewalk of birch planks, the ceiling of creaking boards. We all wanted there to be more wood everywhere, not as a structural element of the house, but as the surface and the core of everything. The cup, even, would be made of wood. And the ghosts of the trees would be everywhere, angry as hell. This is the time of year, at least, that wood became important. And there were the conventional, commercial things too, the stinking rubber masks on sale at the pharmacy, but these toys stuck around for too long after the season passed. The important thing was the dread embraced for a matter of days, which is probably the flipside of some uptopian urge to remake the world around you fundamentally, to introduce a cold wind into the air that necessitate a thicker coat and a hot cup in the hand.
This hot cup in the hand in a world made entirely out of wood, with people of wood as well, is the only thing that needs to be written about, sometimes.