On rainy days my mom would take us to the Museum of Natural History. At that time, there were only permanent exhibits. Still, every time it felt new.
Across from the information desk and next to the big stairway, a small glass case much like this one, full of passenger pigeons. The rest of the museum was down the stairs. Musty halls of mystery, all winding their way back to now.
I grew up in an old city. I grew up in an old house. The paper mill had long been closing; it would be a decade still til the valves were shut. Years, ten more, until the smokestacks scrapped. But even then, what is a shadow?
The chain link stayed around the site. But I believed I could see through it. The curtains had opened a hundred year dark. Gray waves lapped a mile of shoreline. Young trees breathed their first light of the low orange western sun.
At what age do we begin to learn that time and space are functions? Parabolas were paths I knew first by walking slowly. “Travel through the Depths of Time and see the plants and animals!” Cambrian. Devonian. Permian. Triassic. An ice age melts into itself and becomes a shallow sea. Miocene. Pliocene. Pleistocene. Holo. Dense tropics dry to desert.
Was it when I turned around to look for mom? Three epochs away and around the bend, yet somehow straight behind me? Or was it in Habitats re-learning “what calls them home,” transfixed by the epoxy?
2. Exhibit Materials
Tire tube
Plastic water bottles
Plastic scraps of unknown objects
Pill bottle
Plush
Budlight can
Budweiser can
Dr. Pepper can
Smirnoff can, Strawberry Lemon
Light beer can of unknown origins
Aluminum scraps
Unlabeled tin cans
blue plastic plate from a child’s toy dish set
Sunglass lens
Safety goggle lens
Pair of sunglasses
Nike shoe
Horseshoe
Men’s work glove
Women’s work glove
Blue jean pocket
Flannel shirt cuff
Collared infant sweater
Wire fragments
Iron fragments
Kitchen trash bag
Plush
Land survey stake
Blue surgical mask
Blue plastic straws
Cotton strips with faded geometric patterns
Coca-cola glass shards
Unidentifiable glass shards
Ceramic fragments
Silk flower petals
Giant Express Rewards key tag
Plastic human figurine
Black spiral bound notebook cover
Bouquet of brittle brush flowers
Butterfly wings, Sleepy Orange Sulphur
3. Old News
The fact that the Santa Cruz River is dry most of the year is nothing new. Two small blue pills are nothing new. Then four. Then five aren’t either. The fact that the river was not always like this is not something new.
Trash in the Santa Cruz River is nothing new. When it rains and every wash in town drains its contents there, the trash heaps are, at first, alarming. Not the usual highway heaps. But entire streets that appear to have been swallowed, churned up, spewed out. Couches, mattresses, car doors, 2x4s. Not long after though, nothing new.
The fact that ads are fucked is nothing new. You are just so used to scrolling over on your phone or passing them on the highway that turning the pages of a magazine one morning has you lingering. Objects connect. Hermes. Welcome to the road to happiness. Illy Coffee. For people who could use a triple lift. Neutrogena. What if your phone learned, adapted, evolved, and became a reflection of you? Google Pixel.
Monsoon rains are nothing new. But 2020 was my first year in Tucson and that summer it never rained. This year when the monsoons came and the rivers swelled and the hills turned green, everything once again felt like magic.
Sometimes being reminded of what you think you already know is annoying. Like when you’re a kid being told and then retold: before you go outside to play you have to wash the dishes. Or when you’re feeling pulled down an unpaid road, but your phone dings ten til meeting. Other times the reminder leaves you weeping, amazed that nearing 30 years old, you still don’t know how to listen. Grateful, though, something deep is still there to remind you.
4. Collecting Notes
I found myself most afraid to reach for the things I was afraid to find. The fear: that each battered shoe might contain a foot Or that each cotton strip unearth a whole garment. Sand has a weight that provokes every question.
Eyes cast down roving rock studded sand, I slipped into the waters of a long forgotten joy. Evening beach comb, Childhood, Lake Michigan.
Here was another return address: I reached for most quickly anything small and blue.
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