Saturday, March 12, 2005
oh how i love the little people
spring break is great.... for a week i splattered my brains out and tested the bounds of true academic masochism... and then suddenly, right around 8 o'clock, POOF! and then i found myself in a magical land free of cares and concerns, ready to do whatever my heart desired... and do it i have... ... now i find myself in the living room, watching willow... i have managed to become the giant glacier of vaseline, flowing freely through a landscape without any topograpical obstacles that might slow its progress... Summer Cometh!!!!
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The Triad Goes Adventuring
I wasn't going to post this because it's ridiculously long, but I decided it is too applicable to the whole theme and purpose of this thing, so here it is. Thanks to Professor Kaufman for allowing me to write about whatever the hell I want.
The best time to experience Forest City, Iowa is after midnight. Everything has stopped by that time, everything that was ever going in the first place. We used to go on endless walks, epic walks across the entirety of the barren city. The silence was gelatinous, like a glacier of vaseline slowly sliding over the town, smothering all life and sound and awareness out of it. Except for us. We were impervious. We were aware.
We would walk down the middle of main street, the street that my house was on. It was a cobblestone remnant of the past before they dug it all up and redid it a few years ago. We would own that street, because there were no cars, and no sentient beings about to challenge our authority.
We’d start at my house, a large gray/blue one. Some argued gray, some blue. We never really knew what color it was until we later painted it white and sold it, and by then who really gave a shit what color it was? It was their color, not ours. It was the color of the past.
It was on a hill though. That whole block was on a hill, like a fortress. It was this huge lump in the middle of main street with access to the driveway through an alley on either side. In the winter you had to stomp on the pedal, close your eyes, and launch your car up the snow and ice covered gravel, praying that you didn’t slide into one of the neighbor’s huge oak trees, or backwards into the road and another vehicle.
We had a raspberry bush in the big backyard where I would always go to trap bumblebees in mason jars as a kid. Then there was the climbing tree. A senior citizen, it was gnarled and rotting. It housed thorns and mushrooms and disease all under one roof. I used to climb it with a seat cushion and read in a crook of its delicate branches. Eventually we had to have one of the larger limbs cut down for fear it would one day come barging uninvited through the bathroom window.
A wall of small trees and hedges formed a kind of border between the end of the yard and the gravel alley. It was a poor man’s forest, my sanctuary. There was a kind of natural opening, a thinning of the vivid foliage, and a hollowed out compartment inside. I would sit on a folding chair there and think about everything there was to think about. It was paradise, marred only by the rusting, gray electric meter towards the back.
In the front yard was the cherry tree, seemingly mounted purposely on a miniature hill like a prop for a model train set. The tree was on the left side of the yard, the smaller side, which was separated from the rest by the serpentine sidewalk that snaked from our front door to the steps that led to the street. On the other side was the buckeye tree. We would collect its beautiful nuts and put them in bowls around the house as decoration. The tree’s branches covered that whole section of yard, and us when we were in it, like a protective father with a thousand arms, guarding his children from the sun and the elements and the world and life.
That’s where we would usually begin the walk from, the buckeye tree. After the town settled in for the night we would venture out of my pea-green carpeted, musty basement which served as our refuge. Out the front door, a pause under the buckeye tree, down the sidewalk, and into the deserted streets.
If it was summer it would be humid. Not “slightly moist humid.” It was “forging through a curtain of weightless, floating gobs of warm, sticky sap with your face humid.” We’d walk side by side, the two or three or four or five of us, as wide as we wanted, presenting the appearance of a force to be reckoned with.
We had a flexible route. We would head towards “town,” which meant the courthouse and the few blocks of small shops and businesses that resided there. In summer we would cut back and forth through alleyways, avoiding the ever-present mosquito spray truck. It stayed a step ahead of us always...our nemesis. It coated the air with chemical, which combined with the humidity to form carcinogenic moisture. That was the smell of summer in that tiny Iowa town - the sickly-sweet yet medicinal odor of the mosquito poison. Mosquito poison with a dash of fresh gorgeous oxygen, claustrophobia with a hint of home.
So we would weave and wind our way towards the epicenter, sweat forging a bond between our clothing and our flesh if it was summer. But sometimes it was winter. If it was winter there was snow, that was one thing you could count on that town to provide. We’d cross country ski over the patches of ice in our shoes. We’d throw clumps of snow or slush or ice at each other as we journeyed. We’d stop by the Lutheran Church to play King of the Hill on the deposit of dirty snow left in the corner of the parking lot by the mammoth snow zambonis that replaced the mosquito trucks when the temperature dropped.
The smell of Iowa winter was pure, unadulterated, natural cold. The cold prickled in your nostrils like menthol, blasting open your sinuses and reddening your nose. It smelled like Christmas and skiing and icicles and boots and frozen ponds and slush-soaked socks.
But regardless of season, regardless of weather, regardless of it all, we would always walk that path towards downtown. We would walk past the tank, a large green war memorial that was fun to climb on because it was a tank, and because the signs said not to. Then past the Victorian Tea House, which used to be the Pizza Ranch. Everything here used to be something else. The shops go out of business eventually, leaving an empty storefront or another business that will mark time until it too runs out of customers and money and life. The movie rental place used to be the Dollar Store, which used to be a store for children’s clothing. The bookstore used to be something else, and at one point there was a bakery, but I’m not sure where that went. Who can keep track?
Later, after the house had been sold, we had to reverse our route. No longer having a central location to base our travels from, we had to park my car in a random lot in the middle of town and make our way back towards my former home. This was after having all gone away to college and learned new things, become new people. We would occasionally share a cigarette between us. None of us really smoked, but it reminded us of college friends, it comforted us, it made us feel important. We found it supremely ironic and amusing to sit on my front steps, the steps where we had played as toddlers, the steps that my family no longer owned, the steps that were now owned by sleeping strangers a few feet away, the steps where we were now doing our adult things. We let the smoke we exhaled mix with the memories that already hung thick and visible in the air.
I had a dream recently about going back there. I was driving into town, through one of the two intersections equipped with a stoplight. I dropped a faceless, nameless person off at the outskirts of town, rolled down the windows, and crawled into the business district as if in slow motion, eager to explore the area and to revel in, roll around in, rub my face in its cozy familiarity. As I turned a corner I saw neon and new. There were twenty new buildings crammed into the same stretch of street, some of them long and large, and yet they still all fit. One was some kind of convention center with a brash marquee on the front. There was the flashing of lights and chaos. All the buildings were at least twice as tall as they had been, blocking out the sky. The initial emotion was excitement at the novelty. Excitement decayed leaving confusion, and after the confusion wore off all that was there was a damp disappointment. I had never had a sharp realization in a dream before. Usually my dreams are vague, slippery creatures that wiggle away from me as I leave unconsciousness. But this was vivid and real. I saw that the town had to be what it was. It had to be small. It had to be lacking in culture and entertainment. It had to be boring. It had to be these ways or it would be other ways, and those other ways wouldn’t be what I remembered and grew up with. If it wasn’t these ways it would be like other places, not like this place. A simple, almost stupid observation, but it wasn’t. It was somehow profound when it came to me.
On one of these walks we came across a squirrel, dead and frozen, its back half dangling loosely from its little tree-hole home. At the time a friend suggested that it was an apt visual symbol for our town - we’re so messed up that even our squirrels are backwards. I found the situation to be more of a microcosm of life in that place - it was as if the creature had been ensnared in the middle of a hasty, frantic attempt to back out of his too-small abode. The squirrel had the same fears, the same restless nature that we had. That place was too small, too Iowa. You had to leave. But you had to come back. You had to come back - you only realized that after you left. You had to come back, if only to go on these late-night walks with this place and the people who hadn’t left it yet.
The best time to experience Forest City, Iowa is after midnight. Everything has stopped by that time, everything that was ever going in the first place. We used to go on endless walks, epic walks across the entirety of the barren city. The silence was gelatinous, like a glacier of vaseline slowly sliding over the town, smothering all life and sound and awareness out of it. Except for us. We were impervious. We were aware.
We would walk down the middle of main street, the street that my house was on. It was a cobblestone remnant of the past before they dug it all up and redid it a few years ago. We would own that street, because there were no cars, and no sentient beings about to challenge our authority.
We’d start at my house, a large gray/blue one. Some argued gray, some blue. We never really knew what color it was until we later painted it white and sold it, and by then who really gave a shit what color it was? It was their color, not ours. It was the color of the past.
It was on a hill though. That whole block was on a hill, like a fortress. It was this huge lump in the middle of main street with access to the driveway through an alley on either side. In the winter you had to stomp on the pedal, close your eyes, and launch your car up the snow and ice covered gravel, praying that you didn’t slide into one of the neighbor’s huge oak trees, or backwards into the road and another vehicle.
We had a raspberry bush in the big backyard where I would always go to trap bumblebees in mason jars as a kid. Then there was the climbing tree. A senior citizen, it was gnarled and rotting. It housed thorns and mushrooms and disease all under one roof. I used to climb it with a seat cushion and read in a crook of its delicate branches. Eventually we had to have one of the larger limbs cut down for fear it would one day come barging uninvited through the bathroom window.
A wall of small trees and hedges formed a kind of border between the end of the yard and the gravel alley. It was a poor man’s forest, my sanctuary. There was a kind of natural opening, a thinning of the vivid foliage, and a hollowed out compartment inside. I would sit on a folding chair there and think about everything there was to think about. It was paradise, marred only by the rusting, gray electric meter towards the back.
In the front yard was the cherry tree, seemingly mounted purposely on a miniature hill like a prop for a model train set. The tree was on the left side of the yard, the smaller side, which was separated from the rest by the serpentine sidewalk that snaked from our front door to the steps that led to the street. On the other side was the buckeye tree. We would collect its beautiful nuts and put them in bowls around the house as decoration. The tree’s branches covered that whole section of yard, and us when we were in it, like a protective father with a thousand arms, guarding his children from the sun and the elements and the world and life.
That’s where we would usually begin the walk from, the buckeye tree. After the town settled in for the night we would venture out of my pea-green carpeted, musty basement which served as our refuge. Out the front door, a pause under the buckeye tree, down the sidewalk, and into the deserted streets.
If it was summer it would be humid. Not “slightly moist humid.” It was “forging through a curtain of weightless, floating gobs of warm, sticky sap with your face humid.” We’d walk side by side, the two or three or four or five of us, as wide as we wanted, presenting the appearance of a force to be reckoned with.
We had a flexible route. We would head towards “town,” which meant the courthouse and the few blocks of small shops and businesses that resided there. In summer we would cut back and forth through alleyways, avoiding the ever-present mosquito spray truck. It stayed a step ahead of us always...our nemesis. It coated the air with chemical, which combined with the humidity to form carcinogenic moisture. That was the smell of summer in that tiny Iowa town - the sickly-sweet yet medicinal odor of the mosquito poison. Mosquito poison with a dash of fresh gorgeous oxygen, claustrophobia with a hint of home.
So we would weave and wind our way towards the epicenter, sweat forging a bond between our clothing and our flesh if it was summer. But sometimes it was winter. If it was winter there was snow, that was one thing you could count on that town to provide. We’d cross country ski over the patches of ice in our shoes. We’d throw clumps of snow or slush or ice at each other as we journeyed. We’d stop by the Lutheran Church to play King of the Hill on the deposit of dirty snow left in the corner of the parking lot by the mammoth snow zambonis that replaced the mosquito trucks when the temperature dropped.
The smell of Iowa winter was pure, unadulterated, natural cold. The cold prickled in your nostrils like menthol, blasting open your sinuses and reddening your nose. It smelled like Christmas and skiing and icicles and boots and frozen ponds and slush-soaked socks.
But regardless of season, regardless of weather, regardless of it all, we would always walk that path towards downtown. We would walk past the tank, a large green war memorial that was fun to climb on because it was a tank, and because the signs said not to. Then past the Victorian Tea House, which used to be the Pizza Ranch. Everything here used to be something else. The shops go out of business eventually, leaving an empty storefront or another business that will mark time until it too runs out of customers and money and life. The movie rental place used to be the Dollar Store, which used to be a store for children’s clothing. The bookstore used to be something else, and at one point there was a bakery, but I’m not sure where that went. Who can keep track?
Later, after the house had been sold, we had to reverse our route. No longer having a central location to base our travels from, we had to park my car in a random lot in the middle of town and make our way back towards my former home. This was after having all gone away to college and learned new things, become new people. We would occasionally share a cigarette between us. None of us really smoked, but it reminded us of college friends, it comforted us, it made us feel important. We found it supremely ironic and amusing to sit on my front steps, the steps where we had played as toddlers, the steps that my family no longer owned, the steps that were now owned by sleeping strangers a few feet away, the steps where we were now doing our adult things. We let the smoke we exhaled mix with the memories that already hung thick and visible in the air.
I had a dream recently about going back there. I was driving into town, through one of the two intersections equipped with a stoplight. I dropped a faceless, nameless person off at the outskirts of town, rolled down the windows, and crawled into the business district as if in slow motion, eager to explore the area and to revel in, roll around in, rub my face in its cozy familiarity. As I turned a corner I saw neon and new. There were twenty new buildings crammed into the same stretch of street, some of them long and large, and yet they still all fit. One was some kind of convention center with a brash marquee on the front. There was the flashing of lights and chaos. All the buildings were at least twice as tall as they had been, blocking out the sky. The initial emotion was excitement at the novelty. Excitement decayed leaving confusion, and after the confusion wore off all that was there was a damp disappointment. I had never had a sharp realization in a dream before. Usually my dreams are vague, slippery creatures that wiggle away from me as I leave unconsciousness. But this was vivid and real. I saw that the town had to be what it was. It had to be small. It had to be lacking in culture and entertainment. It had to be boring. It had to be these ways or it would be other ways, and those other ways wouldn’t be what I remembered and grew up with. If it wasn’t these ways it would be like other places, not like this place. A simple, almost stupid observation, but it wasn’t. It was somehow profound when it came to me.
On one of these walks we came across a squirrel, dead and frozen, its back half dangling loosely from its little tree-hole home. At the time a friend suggested that it was an apt visual symbol for our town - we’re so messed up that even our squirrels are backwards. I found the situation to be more of a microcosm of life in that place - it was as if the creature had been ensnared in the middle of a hasty, frantic attempt to back out of his too-small abode. The squirrel had the same fears, the same restless nature that we had. That place was too small, too Iowa. You had to leave. But you had to come back. You had to come back - you only realized that after you left. You had to come back, if only to go on these late-night walks with this place and the people who hadn’t left it yet.
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