Colgate Clock
Clarksville, Indiana
For a long time, Indiana didn’t allow Daylight Saving Time. Its clocks did not need to fall back or spring forward. No one needed to tune the nation’s second largest clock twice a year. Across the Ohio River in Louisville where they could see the giant hands sweeping (in Indiana you couldn’t even see the clock), you had to remember in what season you were seeing it. The clock traveled in time. Daily the citizens of Louisville brushed their teeth with toothpaste made in the factory across the Ohio River, at the Falls of the Ohio, the river always running, always falling. The clock now is very old. And teeth, of all our bones, will last the longest.
The Enchanted Forest
Ellicott City, Maryland
It’s all gone now. The attractions—cement and fiberglass concoctions of copyright free fairytales, nursery rhymes, half-baked Alice in Wonderland extras. “The Guard Cards!” For a while there, we stayed across the road, Route 40, in the Forest Motel. This was after the park closed. The motel was an old-style motor court ranch-like affair with pinewood paneling and linoleum floors. Forty acres of ruins now consumed by an ordinary indifferent forest. I’d look for something to pilfer, a talisman maybe, but could not find one charming morsel or scrap of magic. The motel is gone now too. The Forest Diner with its amusement park menu as well, gone. Crabcakes in an estuary of decay. Route 40 is still busy, of course, and where the Enchanted Forest once was is a new U Storage store, an oasis of cinder block hovels.
Ruins of Gary
Gary, Indiana
An imaginary city from the start, a swamp turned into steel mills and stone store fronts, school facades, church steeples. It was all done in secret to squash speculation, squeeze out stake holders, steal the land right out from under them. Who knew? Shell companies. Fronts and false filings. The first real city of the 20th Century springs up overnight. It lasted just that long—a century. “It’s not safe,” I was told, “to go there.” Dangers! Murders! Death sentences! I went and no. Nothing! No one about at all. Only fragments. Brick on the ground. Exposed basements. Quarried stone. Copper wire and pipe deveined behind the stained plaster. No one else was there. No one waiting for nobody. Nobody to kill, rob, maim, rape. The building shells left over were too expensive to demolish. The real time of time catching up with Gary. Gary, a swamp again of vines and ivies, trash trees, volunteer grasses, invasive species. Cicada shells and cicada singing in the stripped choir of the gutted Methodist church.