What did we just run over?
Yesterday it was half a dozen tumbleweeds. This morning, a black sack. What was in it? Eight pounds of saffron? Powdered iridium? The mileposts clicked by. Perhaps a small man from Oregon? . . . 292 severed dolls’ heads . . . dried pinto beans . . . or letters from a geisha to a married man in Wichita, scented and bound with ribbon with postmarks from 1946. Of course, that’s what it was.
On a lonely, 2-mile stretch of highway somewhere between Savannah and Atlanta I counted eight deer, deceased, lying in the ditch and median. Some had antlers, some not. Some lay with hooves raised like hands in a classroom. There have been many raccoons of course and possums too. As for the coyotes, I look away. They run though our campsites at night. Wild rumpuses of heckling and yaps, yip-yips and howls. Give us your chicken bones! And your little dog too! In the morning all that’s left are droppings, paw marks, a scattered heap of feathers. The party-goers vanished, back to their dens to nurse their aching heads.
In Arizona we glimpsed a jack rabbit, it hopped down a ravine into a thicket of cactus. I head-lamped it with our van lights. It kept its back to us, balancing its ears on its head as if to say, silly tourists.
In Georgia, there are signs along the road that say “200-dollar fine for throwing trash on the highway.” Does that mean if you can make it to the ditch it’s free?
Wham bam!
The top of a crate or a flattened stepladder. It hit the tires and rattled our teeth in our mouths. The van rolled on, back to Minneapolis. A fifteen-hour day, 785 miles into the wind.
Imagine a rotund metal cloud – pulling a runaway freight car. This is the Dollop. A marginally-powered Ford Van packed with 1500 lbs of art gear, two shepherds and aging tires pulling a 4600 lb. camper. If you’ve seen The Grinch’s dog, you know what I’m talking about. Why Dollop? Look for yourself. Notice the giant serving of whipped cream on top? The only thing missing is a cherry.
The Dollop has a gas tank the size of a small swimming pool. Which is good because it distracts us from the speed of which it drains and if it weren’t for the low price of gas we’d have run dry just south of Burnsville, MN, months ago.
I’ll tell you right now that ethanol is a scam. The more they lace into our fuel the worse our mileage. Sure it’s cheaper, but the inefficiency it creates costs more. It hikes the retail price of corn and that’s all that matters to the corporate interests that jam it down our proverbial gullets. Industrial corn farmers and lobbyists send their kids to college while the hungriest on earth skip a meal. All true. I got a friend who’s an environmental scientist. His name is Luke. Luke says that your typical large-scale ethanol distillery employs 15 people. Jobs my ass. We got hoodwinked.
But the Dollop is a champ. It complains not. It trundles and pulls, floats and jousts with Chevys. So far the truckers are gentlemen, save one or two. They hurtle across the horizon, logging quotidian miles pulling humanity’s un-bought stuff like boxes of screws and plastic christmas trees, bales of diapers and the blades of wind turbines.
First Was Kansas City
Kansas City was good to us, the people light-hearted and likably imbibed. They appreciated art and were not afraid to buy it. My wife was happy because they bought it from her. And lots of it. Perhaps they bought it because it radiated color and smart design and appealed to their intellect. Or maybe they bought it because their Boys of Summer had just annihilated most of the American League including our Twins. Whatever reason we cared not – they bought it, and liked what they bought.
When my wife sells her art, I roam the plains. Me and the dogs in the Dollop, rolling through disheveled grids and the smudged and rusty ends of town. “Slice of Life” my dad would say. Shuttered packing plants and repo-ed real estate or Bar-B-Que shacks with people lined into the street. I always eventually drift toward the countryside, snapping photos of lifestyles either neatly baled or tarped with blue vinyl, stacked on chocks or picketed with white fences.
Note the art at the top of the page. I snapped that shot northwest of KC. The iconic CoOp logo tagged atop a grain elevator on a bend of the Kansas City Southern railway. The CoOp logo is a testament to our times. Farmland Industries. Conceived by a determined Missouri farmer and birthed in Kansas City, it ruled the world in its day. The logo was an emblem for hard work and the cooperative spirit, lower costs and power to the farmer. But what was once a world-wide bastion of common-wealth America, is now a ghost. In 2013, a Chinese investment group calved off the pork plants and soon afterward the fertilizer division disappeared into the lower intestines of the Koch brothers. They chipped and sawed and gnawed away and finally they got it all, except for the beef division, which Kansas City refused to hand over. Rightfully and proudly theirs, I say.
The elephants in my art, well, I first threw those in there because it looked cool but now it seems appropriate. Ranging fabulous beasts on the verge of, well, you get my point. I got the shot from the Minnesota Historical Society’s website – and now I’ll probably have to pay for it. It was of a Shriners parade down Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, in the 1920s.