I.
Walking down the sloping paved entry into the trailer park on the outskirts of my hometown, I scanned the rugged terrain to my right. Through the trees I glimpsed the silhouette of a large cat, slowly moving toward the road. The topography here is rocky and steep, with a nearly vertical drop of about 30 feet near the direction the big cat walked. I pointed toward the animal, and my friend Annalee said, " That's a cat." It was clearly very large, having the approximate proportions of a house cat, but much bigger, maybe four feet tall, with a big house cat-looking head and a long furry tail.
Unused to having rare sightings such as this, I could not believe my eyes. I immediately started to walk in the animal's direction, moving past the No Trespassing sign and through the brush, scaring up two deer. Having the sudden thought that maybe my eyes had deceived me and perhaps what I saw was a deer and not a cat, I simultaneously reasoned that if what I saw was as large as a deer, the cat must have been a mighty large one. I searched Annalee's face. "It was a cat," she said with finality.
"I'm going up," I stated with determination, studying the vertical drop above me. My fall, should it happen, would be broken by scrubby brush, discarded plastic toys, broken drainage pipes, and large protruding rocks, followed by a climactic blunt-force landing. My last breath would be while lying broken and unconscious in an idyllic-looking stone-lined stream. Starting toward the summit, I gripped one small tree trunk with one hand and steadied myself while reaching for the next branch with the other. The desire to confirm that the cat was indeed what I knew it was... a cougar, motivated my upward climb as I inched up the precipice, suddenly sliding in the mud, narrowly regaining some semblance of balance, lurching toward the next safety hold and above all, not letting go and not looking down.
Relieved to set my foot on flat land at the top of the cliff, I took an initiatory glance around the plateau where we had glimpsed the cat. The place had obviously been used, or should I say misused, probably as a teenage hangout, judging from what seemed to be some sort of makeshift clubhouse, collapsed into a pile of rubble some time ago. I made my way across this flat land and its evidence of past life to a gentle slope leading back toward the entry to the park, crossed back over the NO TRESPASSING sign, and entered the road beyond. The cougar was nowhere to be seen.
Descending on the road to the location where I had begun climbing the cliff, I looked up to see Annalee gripping a tree at an elevation of approximately 15 feet above me. Alarmed, I yelled, "Annalee! NO!" Ignoring me, she kept on. To my horror I watched her slip and slide, slow going, while I braced myself for her inevitable and tragic fall, which would include grisly images of her head bouncing from rock to rock, her neatly-cared-for-clothing encrusted in blood and black mud, and ultimately a heap of unrecognizable human remains with a visibly cracked skull lying in the once clear-running brook at the bottom. Vague and troubling thoughts ensued, of 911 calls, police interrogations, accusations, guilt, funerals, and an opaque dread of future repercussions.
Having dropped to her belly at a slightly less-dizzyingly angle of incline about a foot from the summit, Annalee painstakingly pushed herself into a semi-standing suspended state, teetering momentarily without handhold (a bad idea while climbing a cliff, I thought to myself) and I screamed, "Grab a tree!" She seemed at once to summon all of her super-Annalee strength, got her bearings and dragged both feet onto the safe level ground at the summit. With great relief and I must say respect, I quickly pointed in the direction of the entry road. Annalee gamely and obediently headed slowly down the solid gradual slope, leaving the forbidden zone, passing around the NO TRESPASSING sign, and into safety.
II.
My adventure with Annalee in our home town that day has remained at the forefront of my mind, intense and somehow meaningful. I wonder what wild creatures, like the cougar we had the mad fortune to glimpse, roam the liminal landscapes of our civilized lives, just as they do our minds? Small towns have become shadow worlds, where, in their underfunded and uncared-for nature, we can experience the encroachment of the wild and imagine the future in new ways.
These journeys provide hints of new worlds arising from rubble. While walking toward dilapidated buildings inhabited by ghosts, on a sidewalk we see a cryptic pattern of cigarettes dumped from a car ashtray
that looks strangely like Jesus.
A girlwoman searches for a scrap of cloth to cover her child
amid crumbling infrastructure.
A rusty car spits black exhaust as it jerks onto a crumbling street from the the Consume parking lot.
Past the graffiti under the noisy highway bridge we walk toward the numbly utilitarian carwash facade where
two men, out of their heads with road rage
and without the appetite for "progress"
once shot each other dead.
Under it all lies hopelessness
or hope.
Inside of it all, creatures crawl toward the future
searching out the deserted fringelands, where teenagers' forts fall to the ground
beside a child's plastic truck
with a steering wheel that turns.
A heavy bench, upside down and embedded half-way down a cliff,
This will not move.
Liminal junkyard, beautiful forbidden space
Abandoned borderlands
The real estate of dreams.
There is home in you.
the places teenagers occupy and own
under the highway
dark and muddy, fallen trees
defiled land
Annalee, there is life lived here
where civilization wills itself
Not in the libraries
well-kept-towns
armories of death
or even theaters
Hotel California
beggars and blacks
nowhere to shit
on the shore of the grand river
light fires from a past century
bits of profanity and spray cans
cave-dwellers
carriers of knowledge
the backward innovators, the
troglodytes
my people