Capitol Park: Tuscaloosa

It was on a bluff, a bluff. Alabama’s state capitol building for twenty years. There was a dome. And then it became a “Female College” until it burned to the ground in 1923. The debris dispersed, massed into a low mound of rubble. And then the grass. In 1988, people here wanted themselves a ruin. And they made one out of this ruin. Big blocks of worried stones. Worried walls as well. An archway. Drums of a column. A whole column. Plaster sloughing off worried walls. For some reason today, brides and their wedding parties pose for pictures on the sandstone slabs, white frosting, fanned, slumped in the ancient hot heat.

The Rest Stop Rocket: I-65, Alabama

Nothing but gravity. I sank in my seat, craned my neck to see solid gravity. Ten stories of gravity. Suspended. “A heavy lift vehicle!” I sank in my seat, always falling, seconds squared. It is all about perspective as well. Pointing to a vanishing point. Vanishing. And it grew as I was on a glide path to Athens. It lifted itself. Shrugged. The painted shadows gave it depth, girth. For forty-four years it loomed like that. It hovered like that until. Until it didn’t. Time in space ran in reverse. Cranes craned. Lowered expectations in sections. A surplus of gravity. Time in space ran out. And there was plenty of falling. Coming apart. Until one day. Vanished. Gone for good.

Binoculars Building: Venice, California

The best way to see the Binoculars Building is with binoculars. I have a pair—Zeiss 10×50. Are they, “binoculars,” called a “pair?” Two tubes, yes, but “bi” already lurks within the architecture of the name. Forty-four feet high, the Binoculars look bigger with binoculars or smaller captured within my binoculars. Inside the binoculars, there are baffles baffled with mirrors that focus the seeing, bouncing light back and forth through the lenses. The inside of the Binoculars Building, I am told, contains empty spaces, places for reflection. But I can’t see them. I do see the convection of heat distort the depths of field all around. It is funny in some way that Google now owns the Binoculars Building.

Battleship South Dakota Memorial in Winter: Sioux Falls, South Dakota

So far from the sea. I saw it in winter. The snow capping the tops of the concrete outline of the fast battleship stuck fast. To scale, this stretch of snow. Broken up. Broken up in 1952, they salvaged one big gun, a propellor, the mast. The anchor, four hundred feet that way, a lump under the snow. In the end, Odysseus was told to ship an oar over his shoulder and walk with it inland until a native there mistook it for a winnowing flail and then to plant it in the earth at his feet, an offering. The turned fields under the dust of snow could be waves breaking as they drift, sunk in the seas of simile.

Franklin School Park: Fort Wayne, Indiana

I went there. That is to say, I went to school there when it was a school. My mother, too. Went there. Then we left. Then the building went. All that’s left: three archways, brick and limestone, the front doors. There is a splash pad out back. A parking lot where, over fifty years ago, I was knocked unconscious in football practice. A pavilion sits where my homeroom (the shop) sat. About there would have been my locker. In the gym, we lined up for the sugar cube vaccine. When I came to, the first thing I remember everyone asking: Do you know where you are?

Presidents’ Heads: Houston, Texas

The forty-four concrete heads, massive, two stories, have to be moved. The sculptor’s studio is about to be razed for a highway. The giant heads seem to bob in the backyard. Their heads and shoulders bobbing in the overgrown grass. Their bodies could be buried, I guess, but they’re not. What to do with them? His wish is to move the lot of them to Huntsville where there is a seventy-foot statue he’s already done of Sam Houston, head and body, already standing. Huntsville, the artist’s hometown. The home of “Ol’ Sparky,” as well, the state’s electric chair. Killed near four hundred. The prison graveyard is the largest prison graveyard in Texas. Most graves are marked only with the prisoner’s number, a choice, as that was how they were known when they went to their graves.

Googly Eyes: Bend, Oregon

One day or one night, big plastic eye-like eyes, the dilated pupils floating inside the clear plastic lenses, appeared on the sculptures in the roundabouts. I went to see them. I went to see them before the city took care of them, took them down. They were something. Most people (not the city) found them funny, liked how they lightened the mood. These things you were meant to look at, the sculptures, were now looking back at you. The googly eyes let the citizens see seeing as they circled and circled the roundabouts looking, thinking (I thought) about art that has eyes that seem to follow you as you move, art that, as you look at it, sees you seeing, art that keeps an eye on you always.

Thread City Crossing Bridge: Winham, Connecticut

At one time here, the largest textile mill in the world. The mill made thread. Now all in ruins. All in ruins for forty years. Such a huge factory for all those timely stitches. I would think there would be spiders not bullfrogs stationed on each corner of the bridge perched atop plinths carved to look like spools. The frogs refer to another ruin—a dried up pond outside of town. Its muddy exposed bottom once witnessed a battle? An orgy? At least it didn’t rain frogs in Winham. It must have been something to see. And the fallen-in maze of the mill? It is still looking for a way out.

Roundabout City: Carmel, Indiana

We went to the same college together. The man became the mayor of Carmel. Jim. He was a year or two ahead of me. I always saw him in the distance. There are over one hundred fifty roundabouts in the city now. It took forty years. It is the most roundabouts for a city anywhere in North America. There are no traffic lights! Traffic is never supposed to stop but to slow. It is all theoretical, this design, but not in Carmel. I drive around and around around the city. Around and around the roundabouts. Each center of a roundabout comes with its own decoration at its hub—a fountain, flowers or trees or bushes, a folly, a clock. The city sits on a great flat glacial plain. Very flat. I skim along. Wheels always turning, wheels wheeling. Whirl. Gyre. Grinding in gear.

The Teapot Dome Service Station: Zillah, Washington

They moved this gas station, shaped like a giant teapot (it has a handle, a top, a spout), two or three times as old highways closed and new ones opened. The building was built to advertise the product it sold (tea!), like other such literal buildings being built as highways were being built. No! The giant teapot was an editorial meant to remind the motoring public of the famous Teapot Dome Scandal of 1922 during President Harding’s administration. Secret bribes! Secret leases! The whole affair about oil. So, I guess, a gas station in the shape of a teapot could signify something other than tea. What is hidden in plain sight!

Albacore Park: Portsmouth, New Hampshire

There is a stone bench under a tree next to the USS Albacore, a submarine that seems to have just surfaced in a grassy field. On this side, you cannot see that doorways have been cut into the hull. You can tour. You can go inside. Before the USS Albacore, submarines were really surface ships that could submerge for a bit. USS Albacore was the first submarine to be a true submarine. It looks like a big teardrop. The first boat to be sleek and fast beneath the waves. USS Albacore was an experimental platform washed up for now. The US Navy did want one last test. How would the USS Albacore sink, sink for good? A final test. She was saved instead, this first submarine that looked like a submarine, floating now twenty-seven feet above mean high tide.

Cursed Pyramid and Ruined Great Wall: Needmore, Indiana

After the limestone boom (think the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, state capitols, and post offices), the quarries closed, filled with water, became trash pits like the one in Oolitic filled with electrical transformers leaking PCBs. They still had the stone. All this stone. Blocks, huge and beautiful, if you liked the beauty of limestone. Some carved already, corners and cornices. Some imprinted with fossils and shells. What are we to with it all? Why not build the wonders of the world. The Great Pyramid! The Great Wall! People would come to see these new wonders being built, see the completed wonders for sure, they thought. The first courses of stone were set out, limestone blocks as big as buses, but the real buses never came to see the construction of a pyramid or a wall when you can go to see the real pyramid, the actual way. Work stopped. The stones still and still there.

Shell-Shaped Shell Gas Station: Winston-Salem North Carolina

The last of seven such shell-shaped, two-story, Shell Oil service stations in the Twin City. Built in the 1930s, saved when a small engine repair shop took it over, restored, preserved. The yellow isn’t so much a safety yellow. More a butter yellow. A yellow that still looks good when the sunlight lights it up. Funny, the oil company first wanted their signs to indicate that their oil was extracted from fossil beds, but the dinosaur was taken, I guess. They went with the empty scallop shell, which also turns out to be the mark of the pilgrim as well as a fossil. Did they think of that, The Shell Oil Company? Did they think of the Camino? Marking the way to the cathedral and the cathedral itself.

The Ruins of Holliday Park: Indianapolis, Indiana

It was a long time coming, these ruins. And they came from everywhere. A local church. The old courthouse. Leftover slabs of limestone from the Bicentennial. The centerpiece is the freestanding façade of one of the earliest New York City skyscrapers, the St. Paul Building, that features “The Races of Man,” sculptures above the old arches. The squatting figures support nothing now on their shoulders, nothing but air. For a long time, these ruins fell into ruin. The Ruins were fenced off, abandoned, closed. We went there to pilfer a stone or a brick as a souvenir, thinking we were still a part of the old important empire.

The Twisted House: Indianapolis, Indiana

I like the house. It’s clad in cedar shakes (weathered now), arching over oddly as it does, its pointed roof pointing into the ground. It has four windows all distorted by the torque, twisting, growing smaller as the whole thing goes up and bends over and then back down. Nothing seems square. Nothing plumb. Looking at it all, all distorted, distorted by the four forces of physics—strong, weak, gravity, and magnetism. The House is a horseshoe of magnetism. The House limbos. Cedar-clad calypso. It is a Fibonacci two-step, four-step. It is chiropractic. Scoliosis, you hiss, as you seek to see out of one of its twisted windows.

Vermonica: Los Angeles, California

There is the smog. There is the smog of smog, the soup of smoke and fog, that was trapped inversely in L.A. And there is the smog of all that light, of all the lights, as well at night like the light in the movies, a half-light, that pretends it is night. You get used to the light, all the light, in L.A. Look! See! Twenty-five lights and light poles on Santa Monica, on the verge on Santa Monica. All different styles of lamps. A sample of the four hundred styles of lamps in use in L.A. And suddenly you see, see through the utility of seeing, the beauty of being: Lit! No longer pollution. Your seeing is scrubbed. These out-of-place lights light up the mind.

Cairo Skywatch Tower: Tippecanoe County, Indiana

The first tower of the Civilian Ground Observer Corps. 1952. And the last one standing. Still there. Still falling apart slowly. My uncle, a teenage boy back then, climbed up it, phoned in every aerial sighting, the contrails of the new jets overhead, the airliners flying high. Back then, they still didn’t trust radar fully or they didn’t have it yet or they were overly cautious. And there were birds, millions of birds, on the wing, north to south, south to north, on those flyways spring and fall, fall and spring. Perhaps a Soviet bomber screened between the Vs of Canada geese? In the heart of the country and the middle of nowhere, the Ground Observers felt vital and forgotten at the same time. The tower was abandoned in 1959. An end, I imagine, no one saw coming. The enemies seemed like they were all from within. No one could spot the real American in a crowd of pretenders. Who was who? Who was your partner, really, sitting next to you in the tower? The tower’s wood rotted and splintered. There is an Historical Marker, but it is now impossible to read.

Belvedere Castle: Central Park, New York City

Built to be ruined already in 1867, the “castle” has been renovated several times to return it to its previous state of ruin. From its tower, you can see all other towers of Manhattan. It is, perhaps, the only way to truly see the skyscrapers and glass boxes of the city. You can’t really see them when you are walking within the blocks and blocks of buildings. It is a way to get some distance from within. Forest and the trees. And you can’t help but think what will the skyline look like when the whole city is in ruin. Already, the city’s buildings wear exoskeletons of scaffolding, plywood, orange plastic netting—construction material of deconstruction. Are these buildings going up? Are they being taken apart, coming down? Behind it all is a memory of an instant when time holds still. There, an instability in holding back time. There, the renovation of empty empty space to its previous state of ruin.

The Boneyard: Tucson, Arizona

Every year now, there is a 10K run through the vast storage facility, through the remains of over four thousand parked aircraft, stored or being broken up for parts or in the process of being scrapped. Every day, overhead somewhere, satellites verify via flybys, the dismantling of seventy-year-old B-52s. They use huge steel guillotine wenches and Jaws of Life hydraulic saws to take the planes apart. The desert floor is hard-packed earth. They saved on having to pave it. The desert air is so dry. There is no rust. No corrosion of any kind. Little rain, and when it rains it mostly evaporates before it hits the alkaline not acidic ground. As a kid, I built model airplanes, kits of these planes, snapping out the plastic parts from the plastic sprues. The model plane parts came in boxes wrapped in plastic to keep out the dust. I loved the box art. The planes all alive and flying through a severely clear sky, dodging tracers, avoiding flak. I think about this as I jog from one shadow of an airframe to the next. I remember building that jet there now being taken apart, rivet by rivet under the sun beating down.

Chaos l by Jean Tinguely: Columbus, Indiana

The seven ton, thirty-foot-tall Sculpture (?), Machine (?), Scrap Heap (?) moves! Moves in many ways, many directions. There are twelve electric motors! It looks as if, as it moves, it is being sketched as it stretches, contracts, twists, returns, and turns. All the simple tools—screw, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge—turn into turning from nouns to verbs. It is designed to start out slow, waking up, as it were, escalate and elaborate, unhinge and hook, roll and yawn. Steel balls enclosed in their mesh shoots shoot, scoot clanking down down down. All these different metals—magnetic, conductive, glossy, dull, reflective, concentrated, wired and died. I had heard that Tinguely’s other kinetic works work only to tear themselves apart once they are set in motion. I sit on the floor at the steel feet of the folly and wait, holding my

b  r  e  a  t  h.

Mid-America Windmill Museum: Kendallville, Indiana

Not that far away, there are huge windfarms of giant wind turbines, their massive blades turning slowly, generating electricity and sending it to a regional power grid. It is a funny thing that electricity put these windmills out of business. There are over fifty in the field, water-lifting windmills, now disconnected from their pumps, only milling wind. All these different types, different manufacturers. So strange to see them in a herd like this when we remember them as solidary, silhouettes on the horizon. Aermotor, Wind Engine, Samson, Elgin, Goodhue, Fairbanks Morse, several Flint & Wallings. I love to watch them sniff out a wind, any little freshet, the clank of their gears, their slow but deliberate turn into the breeze all on their own. No wires anywhere. The invisible made visible right before my eyes.

Melon Cellar: Hillforest, Aurora, Indiana

They hollowed out a glacial boulder to make this “melon” cellar, the whiskey barons of Aurora. Not a “root” cellar. Melon cellar, the first time I have heard of such a thing. On top of the rock, and the rock is as big as a bus, are seats carved into the stone. Sitting up there in the rock seats, you can see the lazy Ohio river, drunk and meandering, off in the distance. Sipping whiskey, I imagine riding the rock I am sitting on top of sipping whiskey, sliding down from the north, nudged by the glacier, a big broom of ice. It took a very long time, the trip. I toast everything. Nothing is solid. Nothing stays still. The river meanders but moves. No melons, I can see, in the cellar.

Gibeau Orange Julep: Montreal, Quebec

It is open late, three a.m. It is orange, this Orange, and big, two stories, a sphere, a giant orange Orange. They serve food, sure, but it is the orange drink that still drives the drive-in. It is something to see at night. The neon, that excited orange neon color, pictures a slice of an orange with its segmented segments. Its seed lit up like jewels. It is like the moon. Not when the moon is fully full but slightly gibbous. Jaw breaking. A lolly licked a bit. An eternal ping, a call-and-response of light, this radar dome radiating on that wavelength that does not rhyme.

Stupa, Indiana Buddhist Temple: Hoagland, Indiana

My father, a telephone company switchman, once tended analog switches near here, near where this only stone stupa in the United States would be constructed. He’d parse wires within a small cinder block shed about the size of the stone stupa. It is Amish country, Poe-Hoagland, not that many numbers running through the exchange. At the stupa, one walks around the dome in a clockwise manner, a devotional practice, a closed pilgrimage, a drilled meditation. The stupa contains sacred relics, sometimes even sarira, remains of monks and/or nuns. Inside the exchange building, the analog switches tsk and click as the numbers from afar pulse through the wires of that wired building.

The Roofless Church: New Harmony, Indiana

There are walls, twelve feet high, with gilded gates, enclosing ten thousand square feet of mostly grass, a rectangle park. There are some paved paths and plantings. Roofless, yes, but there is, in one corner, a shingled baldachin, a kind of canopy, a dome-like structure that is, it is said, like an inverted rosebud. Covered in cedar shakes, the canopy covers a sculpture called The Descent of the Holy Spirit. Philip Johnson—whose famous house in Connecticut is made of nothing but glass— designed it.

Pensacola Pavillion: Seaside, Florida

Postmodern Quotations quoting the quotation of follies quoting temples quoting temples. It is not that we have run out of ideas but that the ideals we have should not be undone. Paint the wood marble. Make the marble look like tree trunks. Not the material but the form, the order of the content. And context. The frame reframed. The Pantheon here now a changing room on a beach. That pelican wind vane looks like a scare quote spinning.