As a man walks away from you he becomes smaller than your outstretched hand. If you look around, there are a lot of things that were very big that have become small for one reason or another. Like Y2K. Atom-bomb shelters. Prohibition. Fur trade. Knee screws. So it is a little unsettling to think that I am shrinking in the distance myself, that is, according to people who see me getting smaller and had the notion to tell me before I disappeared altogether, sort of like the last, desperate protestation of love between a man and a woman at a train station in the few seconds before the conductor says "all aboard". The hands break apart and the fingers reach out to touch but the distance grows until the hand disappears and all that remains is the plume of coal smoke on the horizon.
You wait long enough and the memory disappears too.
It can feel like fatality, this departure, or maybe it's the other way around. The difference is the reason for the disappearance. When one disappears without warning, as might happen when abducted by anthropologists or duped at a card game into taking a monastic vow of silence or when becoming too absorbed in doing the math in one's head or when falling into severe and prolonged existentialism, it feels the same. I had a friend who disappeared that way once. I saw her reflection in a storefront window and I turned to look at her and a bus passed between us and she was gone. I think that is what happened. Her name escapes me. She had blonde, no red hair.
You wait long enough and the memory disappears too.
It can feel like fatality, this departure, or maybe it's the other way around. The difference is the reason for the disappearance. When one disappears without warning, as might happen when abducted by anthropologists or duped at a card game into taking a monastic vow of silence or when becoming too absorbed in doing the math in one's head or when falling into severe and prolonged existentialism, it feels the same. I had a friend who disappeared that way once. I saw her reflection in a storefront window and I turned to look at her and a bus passed between us and she was gone. I think that is what happened. Her name escapes me. She had blonde, no red hair.
The other day, while in search of vanishing species on the north central grasslands, I came across a cemetery. It was a quaint prairie cemetery guarded by wrought iron fences on the south and a depression-era windbreak of Siberian elm and Black Hills spruce on the north, east. In the European custom, the graves all lay feet facing east, luxury suites with a fabulous view of the early morning sky to the east, so it is said. The oldest graves had fallen into disrepair, no flowers to be seen, the names and dates were weathered, and many were toppled. Someone had taken the time to recast the names on little iron plates staked in the grass, but that person did their work decades ago and, I suppose, they lay amongst the headstones somewhere, rubbing elbows with old friends. Today, their names escape us, faint etchings mottled with lichen and moss.
As I walked away, I turned to look and it got smaller and smaller until it disappeared from view. Now I can't even remember where the place was.
So ends another summer. Oak savannas, black ash swamps, sagebrush and badlands, lodgepole pine and Douglas fir. Ponderosa pine, thick red trunks and deep, almost black boughs. Sturdy grasses and sagebrush so tall that it imagines itself a tree, so long as it doesn't get near one, which isn't likely, seeing that most trees in North Dakota are in museums. And sandstone caprocks huddled over strata like a child over a cereal bowl; don't touch what's underneath. And we wouldn't for a long time.
Well, the long time came to an end. We exited the age of Enlightenment, enthralled with our own wisdom and might, and took the new found liberty and knowledge and created the Industrial Age, which continues to this day. Now some may say, No, it ended when we entered the Technological Age or the Information Age or the New Age or the Styrofoam Age or the Corn Syrup Age or Sectional Couch Age or whatever it is now, but half the globe has yet to see an industry in their backyard yet. Untapped resources and new markets, my boy. This has to change and change it will.
Sometimes we go to the store and the sign says, "New and Improved", and we put it in the washing machine and the clothes still come out with grass stains and ring-around-the-collar and the mothers look cross and the kids look downcast. All that was new and improved was the lettering on the box, those words New and Improved. So it is with the Industrial Age: We have taken the old machinery from the Dark Ages, the knee screw, the iron collar, the rack, the branks, the garotte, and put a label "New and Improved" and hawked it to nuclear families around the western world. Only this time, we wouldn't dare use them on the heretical masses; they learned to read and write. So we applied them to inanimate objects, ones that can't complain or riot or call lawyers or write great declarations of inanimate object rights. And we applied them to unintelligent brutes, from the great apes on down to lobsters.
As I leave, I can see the hills recede from view, hills brushed red with tussocks of little bluestem and moist valleys of ash and elm and wild plum, with flocks of sharptail grouse bursting from buffaloberry thickets and nighthawks sweeping the skies in the late evening and a luscious full moon, tomato-red from forest fires to the west. I am becoming a dot on the horizon, a distant memory, someday forgotten altogether, like the folks in the prairie cemetery. But today, the long time has come: The caprocks and soil mantle and grassland carpet are being pulled away by medieval machines, the modern-day Brodequin, Strappado, Judas Cradle, Heretic's Fork, and Iron Maiden. The riches are exposed and angry, desperate, confused, trembling crowds gather and plunder them. They light fires to burn what remains.
As I disappear, I look back and I see nothing. It occurs to me that we both disappear at the same time and someday, there will be nobody left to remember a thing.
Well, the long time came to an end. We exited the age of Enlightenment, enthralled with our own wisdom and might, and took the new found liberty and knowledge and created the Industrial Age, which continues to this day. Now some may say, No, it ended when we entered the Technological Age or the Information Age or the New Age or the Styrofoam Age or the Corn Syrup Age or Sectional Couch Age or whatever it is now, but half the globe has yet to see an industry in their backyard yet. Untapped resources and new markets, my boy. This has to change and change it will.
Sometimes we go to the store and the sign says, "New and Improved", and we put it in the washing machine and the clothes still come out with grass stains and ring-around-the-collar and the mothers look cross and the kids look downcast. All that was new and improved was the lettering on the box, those words New and Improved. So it is with the Industrial Age: We have taken the old machinery from the Dark Ages, the knee screw, the iron collar, the rack, the branks, the garotte, and put a label "New and Improved" and hawked it to nuclear families around the western world. Only this time, we wouldn't dare use them on the heretical masses; they learned to read and write. So we applied them to inanimate objects, ones that can't complain or riot or call lawyers or write great declarations of inanimate object rights. And we applied them to unintelligent brutes, from the great apes on down to lobsters.
As I leave, I can see the hills recede from view, hills brushed red with tussocks of little bluestem and moist valleys of ash and elm and wild plum, with flocks of sharptail grouse bursting from buffaloberry thickets and nighthawks sweeping the skies in the late evening and a luscious full moon, tomato-red from forest fires to the west. I am becoming a dot on the horizon, a distant memory, someday forgotten altogether, like the folks in the prairie cemetery. But today, the long time has come: The caprocks and soil mantle and grassland carpet are being pulled away by medieval machines, the modern-day Brodequin, Strappado, Judas Cradle, Heretic's Fork, and Iron Maiden. The riches are exposed and angry, desperate, confused, trembling crowds gather and plunder them. They light fires to burn what remains.
As I disappear, I look back and I see nothing. It occurs to me that we both disappear at the same time and someday, there will be nobody left to remember a thing.
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