Death Trace
Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millenium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better change of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six a.m, and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all. Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft-ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running story houses along Country Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might image a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile way.
(TBC)
