Zinzinnati (Unreal City)

“I would rather write another book than be rich.”
General Lew Wallace

1.
January was lightless.  Sun never pierced the clouds.  Day after day and, then, week after week, heavy clouds blanketed the Midwest.  Sometimes, the clouds scattered snow – flakes filtered down like some precipitate of the gloom sifting earthward.  On occasion, freezing ground fog clutched at the dim grey highways and the naked shelter belts extending in perspective into the colorless mist.  Where I live the snow lay in grey heaps three feet deep.  Statistics provide an accounting: in southern Minnesota, January was 75% sunless with complete cloud cover lasting as long as eleven consecutive days.

Under this grim regimen, the sun never rose – the grey just lightened until things became a bit more visible; if there was fog, even this wasn’t true.  Nor was there anything like sunset – the gloom slowly became more dense until the headlights with their coronas of glare in the mist brightened.   The headlights had been glowing all day long anyway on account of the dismal lightlessness.  In the country, the milky tsunami of snow marking the horizon dissolved into the sky.  Ice painted the roads and sidewalks gun-metal grey and mist froze on windshields and the lakes were capped in white and, where water was moving in the drainage ditches and braided creeks, the fissures in the land were black as ink.
 
Passing through mist, the eye turns inward and visualizes its inner structure and strange shadows are squeezed out into the featureless white like ectoplasm.   Days and nights are full of apparitions and strange black clouds that move as if alive sometimes darken the sky. Without the sun, nothing can cast a shadow and we see by shadows, which give form and dimension to objects, and so, without shadows, everything seems faded, one-dimensional, ephemeral, flat signs marking where things should be.


2.
On the first night, I left Austin at 5:15 and drove four hours to a motel on the barren outskirts of Davenport.  In my headlights, snow flickered with tiny inconsequential tongues just below my fender.  Ice tried to gather on the windshield, but my wipers kept brushing it aside, leaving a wet scum through which the lights of oncoming cars penetrated, although in chastened and distorted form.  It was a four-hour drive through deteriorating conditions.

On I-80, among the moving blockages of huge trucks, the snow began to gather in the freeway surface and was polished down to ice.  The drive became increasingly fearsome, but I reached my destination without anything worse than a few instants of panic on the slippery highways.


3.
On the next day, fog blanketed the freeways.  I drove through Illinois in a featureless white cocoon.  Scuffed-up ice sometimes veined the concrete – it was perilous to drive on those grey-white seams.
North of Indianapolis, the mist subsided and I could see to where the white edge of the earth met the white sky.  We crossed some big rivers flowing through leafless deciduous forests where tree-trunks like stakes stood in a muck of grey leaf-litter.
 
The highway came down long slopes in brown ravines to Cincinnati.  A crash blocked some lanes and we were caught in a tight jam under elevated ramps and overhead lanes.  Some ghosts had been hustling across the road where an old slum had been uprooted to make way for the traffic.  The ghosts had enormous hydrocephalic-shaped heads, elongated skulls and towering frontal bones over the dark sockets of their eyes and their sudden appearance shocked a truck driver into a violent and erratic maneuver that swept several small cars into a abutment the way a broom sweeps dust or broken glass off a floor.
 
It took awhile to clear the traffic jam. Then, the highway hurled us along the river front and up a steep slope to the flanks of Mount Adams where our motel was located between an orthopedic laser surgery clinic and a children’s hospital.

 
4.
We hiked downtown, hoofing it to Fountain Square.  It was a long walk, first passing a piano factory that had been renovated into apartments, then, leading us to the foot of the high bluff of Mount Adams where a medieval castle is shoved back against the hillside, two grim battlement towers at Elsinore Place.  Presumably, this grey hulk represents the fortress walls where Hamlet encountered his father’s ghost.  A quarter-mile closer to the river, we pass a casino and, then, enter a maze of buildings to emerge, at last, under the bronze goddess of the rivers, metal arms outstretched but no longer spewing water from her downturned palms since the plumbing to the fountain has been shut down for the winter.   Little bronze sprites riding sea turtles or mischievous lads or lassies stud the circumference of the fountain’s basin, black metal tumors, at first sight, until seen up close so that their features become visible.
 
The sign at Fountain Square says that the monument and the buildings around it were built on a great ellipse of prehistoric earthworks 800 feet long flanked by arrays of packed dirt pyramids.  In this part of Ohio, everything is built on a graveyard or an Indian ceremonial site.

In the skating rink, girls are gliding through puddles of melt-water on the ice.  It’s 38 degrees.


5.
Night comes early, without warning.  Zaha Hadid’s Center for Contemporary Art is a tower of streaked concrete, ominously cantilevered with a big black balcony that girdles the structure’s face about forty feet above the sidewalk.  The building has the grim aspect of a vast, brutal mallet – some kind of sledge-hammer for knocking things down.  In the entrance-hall, pendulums lit with bright flashlight heads flop back and forth, several hundred of them screwed into a high concrete ledge.  Upstairs, the art is pedantic, lots of script surrounding inconsequential-looking objects.

Most of the museum is closed.  An exhibition of caricatures painted by Robert Colescott has just been taken down – from the evidence of left-over brochures, black-faced minstrel figures (“spooks” to use an ethnic slur) painted at heroic scale and involved in all sorts of puzzling antics.  On this day, empty galleries are locked against the few visitors who have come to the Contemporary Art Center.  The air between the prestressed cement walls is lifeless and the only visitors riding the escalators up into the gloom of the museum’s upper floors are ghosts.


6.
It’s not commonly understood that you don’t have to venture into lonely and deserted houses or dark tangled woods or abandoned insane asylums to encounter ghosts.  Rather, it’s been proven that up to thirty percent of the figures that you encounter in any public place are unreal in the sense that they are apparitions either of the dead or emanations created by your own fantasies.  Ghosts aren’t usually noteworthy – that is, they don’t generally appear as translucent, gliding forms or spectral figures with howling mouths melodramatically clanking chains or dismal icy presences lurking in the shadows.  Ghosts are just as real as you and me, perhaps, more real.  Typically, they are just people who have been cast out of ordinary time and are trapped in dimensions that intersect with our space at odd angles – they are metaphysically homeless and mostly inaccessible, both literally and emotionally, denizens of zones that are without history or commerce.  I have been on certain streets in majestic American cities in which everyone but me was an apparition.

How can you recognize a ghost when you encounter one?  Often, this is simply a matter of determining whether the spectral figure is obedient to the same social or economic rules that govern living people.  If the figure isn’t beholding to such norms, then, more likely or not, the supernatural is involved.  Sometimes, ghosts can only be recognized by their persistence – there is a certain street-corner in Chicago where a gaunt junky stands under a light-pole smeared with decals beside a Palestinian pretzel vendor; behind the junky, a small boy, probably about 5 years old, lurks against a wall dressed in a hooded tee-shirt that is twice his size.  The junky looks like your ordinary urban derelict except that his jaw is extraordinarily long.  The five-year old, who seems to be with the junky, has huge eyes that occupy the child’s entire forehead.  I paid these people no mind when I passed through this intersection a year ago.  But when I walked by this place four months later, the junky and child were still on the scene, the man bellowing out threats intermingled with expostulations: “God bless you, sir!” or “Jesus thanks you!”  The fact that the couple had not moved from this location caused me to conclude that these were not typical beggars but, in fact, ghostly apparitions.

 
7.
“Shanghai Mamas” is a Chinese restaurant at the edge of the skyscrapers, where Cincinnati’s tall buildings give way to barren wet parking lots.  The place is dimly lit, with gilded lion-dogs snarling in corners and the air fragrant with ginger.  We ordered dinner in this place.  The waitress accidentally spilled tea on the floor next to our table and warned us against slipping and falling.  At the table next to us, a young woman with pig tails told the waiter that she planned to bring a party of twenty to the restaurant after a wedding.  Across from her, a piggish-looking youth with a bald-head was simpering and sulking.  The girl asked for samples of the food so that she could taste it before placing an advance reservation and order for her party of twenty.  She pointed to the most expensive entree on the menu and asked if some of that food could be brought to her table – I think the dish was sea-food:  scallops and shrimp in a black-bean sauce served over rice-noodles.  “You have a party of 20?” the waiter said skeptically.  “Twenty,” she said.  “Well that would be terribly expensive,” the waiter said.  “It doesn’t matter,” the young woman with pigtails replied.  “Can you bring us a sample?”  The sulking bald boy was fingering his cell-phone.  “It would be very expensive to have a banquet for 20 people with that dish,” the waiter said.  The entree was priced at 28 dollars a plate.  “I’ll check with the manager,” the waiter said.  “You stay right here.”

But, as soon as he left, the female ghost with pig tails and the male ghost with the bald head and simpering expression rose and glided out of the restaurant.


8.
It surprised me that the archaeological site, Fort Ancient, was said to be open at 9:00 am.   At least, this was the message from Travel Advisor on the Google Maps feature on my smart-phone.  I had visisted Fort Ancient a year earlier immediately after the death of my brother Christopher when I traveled to Cincinnati to take some depositions.  I recalled the site as being particularly fascinating and only a half-hour from downtown.  When visiting a city as a sightseer, the schedules maintained by art museums, in particular, pose problems – nothing much opens before ten in the morning at the earliest and most attractions, at least in the Winter, don’t unlock their doors until an hour later.  Half the day, more or less, is spent waiting for places to open.  But the fact that this important State archaeological site could be visited at 9:00 am lured me out of the city and north to the prehistoric earthworks occupying a promontory point high above the Little Miami River.

On my previous visit, I had been returning to Cincinnati from the northeast and, so, my route of access took me from the freeway across some desolate terrain – hollowed-out ravines with house-trailers lining prone-to-flood creeks, revival churches in tin and lathe shacks, a few pretentious estates dressed-up like antebellum plantations backed up against some low wooded bluffs.  Approaching from the southwest, the narrow blacktop road runs from the freeway exit parallel to the highway for half-mile and, then, suddenly snakes downward, writhing against the side of a steep wooded declivity that drops to a tangle of woods and brush wrapped around a violent-looking little river, churning between squat mud banks and the color of milk-chocolate.  A couple of dilapidated brick houses, the remnants of some early 19th century settlement are collapsing on a wet-looking, low knoll raised a little above the place where the trees are all tattered due to seasonal flooding.  A narrow iron bridge spans the stream and, then, the road begins again to loop through switchbacks up the steep ascent, climbing out of the narrow vee-shaped river gorge.

At the crest of the hill, the two-lane blacktop ramps up through a cut in a 20 foot high earth mound raised as wall atop the promontory and enclosing a cleared space shaped vaguely like fish-hook.  Within the cleared enclosure, you can look across the meadow and see low mounds as well as an ambling one-lane loop road skirting the prehistoric embankments.  The visitor center is an unprepossessing set of aluminum-fronted sheds flying several flags, the only spots of brightness against the otherwise grey day.

It was about 8:50 – the trip from downtown Cincinnati had been swift and easy – and the access lanes into the park were gated-shut.  We drove through the park and emerged in the territory that I had seen a year before: the simulated plantations and sinister-looking trailer parks in the ravines next to nondenominational churches (one of them was called The Well of Mercy).  Returning to the park fifteen minutes later, we found the gate still locked.  I parked my car near an explanatory sign under a little shingled shelter.  In fact, contrary to Trip Advisor, Fort Ancient archaeological park was closed for the season – the hours cited on the Google Maps site (and reflected in the place’s web-site as well) valid only from March through November.

We had time to kill and so I left the car parked in the in-drive in front of the padlocked gate and we walked over the mushy, snow-melt sodden meadows among the little knee-high mounds inside of the high earthen embankments.  Fort Ancient is a Hopewell culture site – the packed clay ramparts were built sometime between about 50 BC and 450 AD, although they may be superimposed upon older mounds heaped up by the so-called Adena people a thousand years earlier.  The big embankment encircles about 126 acres of land overlooking the Little Miami and the earth ramparts are between five and 30 feet high.  Today, the sloping walls are covered with trees, but, nonetheless, remain clearly visible including the 67 gaps or cavities slicing through the embankment at irregular intervals possibly configured for their astronomical significance: alignments with various celestial events.
Borrow pits for the earth used in the embankments shadow the rampart, a sort of negative image of the structure.  Rain and snow-melt have filled the pits brim-full and archaeologists believe that the ponds scattered beneath linear mounds of the embankment are landscaped, that is, intentionally designed water-features.  On the morning of our visits, the borrow pits were caught the murky silver of the sky and reflected it back.  No one knows why the embankments were made or the significance of most of the mounds within the enclosure – it’s clear that fires were built in pits and that wooden posts were hewn and set in calendar circles, but the vast effort required to tote clay in wicker baskets and, then, pack it into mounds that have endured for 2000 years seems disproportionate to any actual function for the strucures; in fact, there is no evidence, no middens or post-holes, to suggest that anyone ever lived within the site.

It’s puzzling and, I suppose, there’s some penalty to be paid for trespassing on these ancient ceremonial grounds although I don’t know what that might be.  A red truck suddenly emerges from a driveway crossing the enclosure laterally.  The caretaker’s house seems to be somewhere at the edge of the bluff, perched over the crypt of the river gorge.  The truck pulls up in front of the museum building about 100 yards away.  No one emerges from the truck.  We start walking back to our car.  I’m apprehensive.  On the road through the gorge, pickups appeared out of nowhere and flashed their lights, riding up close on my rear bumper – the drivers seemed distress that I was navigating too slowly the switchbacks up and down the shadowy, ravine-fissured walls of the river canyon.  Who knows what kind of people inhabit this area?  Come to think of it, I couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel of the red pickup when it suddenly zoomed across the embankment.

The grass is long in the meadows that we cross, but it is all matted-down.  Probably snow fell here a week or so ago and was heavy on the fields.  Now the yellow and brown grass is flattened, disorderly tresses of hair resting flat upon the skull of the hilltop.

   
9.
The condition of winter is the condition of seeing through many layers of blemished and marred lens.  The windshield of my car is crusted with highway grime and the wipers only move this dirt back and forth in a semi-circle.  My glasses are dirty, water-pocked, also grimy with road-salt.   The corneas of my eyes are sooty and the vitreous humor packed in front of my retina is similarly clouded.  The synapses in my brain that convey visual data are dirty like the electrodes on a spark-plug.  It’s an immense and filthy distance from outside to inside and the world’s colors and much of its detail are leached away in making that transit.


10.
In a warehouse district at the end of a long impoverished lane of houses perched on a levee, we find the American Sign Museum.  The museum occupies an old brick warehouse with a roof that tilts up at a sloping angle to create some drafty, long halls with sloping forty-foot high ceilings.  The galleries are congested with commercial signs, many of them made from neon lights, that wink and rotate like carousels.  The displays are roughly chronological - the oldest signs are painted or made from glass adorned with gold-leaf lettering.  Some early signs are made from ranks of small circular light bulbs that can be assembled in various colors and configurations.  A five-hundred pound cast-iron boot hangs from a huge hook – the boot is labeled REGAL and a row of lights bulbs along the instep flash.  The neon signs are brilliant, shedding rainbow radiance down on the museum-goers.  Between neon fixtures that flare and throb like exposed nerves, that blare like trumpet fanfares, or that harry you like a bad conscience in a cheap motel, there’s a picture of the Kentucky Fried Colonel Sanders, Harlan Sanders,resplendent in his vanilla ice-cream colored suit, gazing down impassively through the neon thickets.

Signs of this sort are an exercise in nostalgia.  Both naive and grandiose, they recall to mind businesses that have vanished:   Howard Johnson’s with its orange-tile roofs, vanished ice-cream parlors and gas stations, Burma Shave and the old green and yellow signs for Holiday Inn as big as the front of a barn, a neon fluted column surmounted by a star haloed by radiating lines and a turn marked with an arrowed curve of bright light.  A McDonald’s sign featuring a stylized chef (“Speedee”) is also big as a barn, flashing that over a billion have been served at 15 cents per burger.   The sign inspires a pang of memory in me – I recall riding in my parents’ Rambler from our home in the suburbs to what we would now call a “strip mall”; at one end of the row of storefronts, standing apart from the business facades was a McDonald’s crouched like a panther under its Art Deco golden arches – it was exciting to go to this place to eat the paper-thin burgers pressed between the franchise’s sugary buns.  Life is full of wonderful treats and awful punishments when you are a child.
 
In the parking lot, a slot between warehouses, a half-dozen or more signs are awaiting restoration.  Most of them seem to be old motel signs: El Rancho (a cowboy and lasso among saguaro cactus) and the Elk (with an elk’s head outlined in neon).  The businesses that these signs once advertised are long gone.  Amputated from their original functions, the lightless signs are stacked against old brick walls wet with mist, sensuous curves of neon tube fragile against the hard stone.


11.
Many years ago, I took a deposition near Cincinnati.  For some unclear reason, the lawyers met for the deposition in a river town a dozen miles from the city.  I recall some old houses in a village that seemed to have been all emptied-out.  We deposed the witness in one of those homes, converted to an office occupied by the Court Reporting firm.  There was no traffic on the cobble-stone streets in the town and no pedestrians either.  Beyond the river, the bluffs of Kentucky rose round-topped and leafy green.  After the deposition, I took the freeway, looming overhead on concrete stilts lifting the road above the river-flats, back to Cincinnati.  Exiting into downtown, I was looking for a German restaurant, an establishment somewhere near a neighborhood quixotically named “Over the Rhine.”  In those days, you didn’t have GPS or cell-phones and, so, you pulled curbside, looked at your map, and, then, tried to drive to your destination by memory and instinct.  More likely than not, one way streets diverted you in the wrong direction and you often found yourself going around blocks in loops and circles that generally carried you back to where you had started.

At that time, “Over the Rhine” seemed a single mass of old buildings, dating back to the time of Charles Dickens, tenements all interlocked and leaning against one another with razor-thin alleys.  It was very dark and the neighborhood was a fortress of shadows, here and there sliced open a little by a street-lamp.  The place seemed immemorially old and impoverished.

Some years later, when I returned to Cincinnati in the week following my brother’s death, I followed some street signs to Over the Rhine and found that, by daylight, the place seemed less daunting.  The area appeared to me to be a sort of African-American ghetto that was being gentrified, a mixture of trendy bars and cafes, crammed together with old structures with elaborate terra-cotta cornices and pediments, some of which seemed to have been abandoned or partly burned-out.  On my most recent trip to the city, Over-the-Rhine was even more renovated – the chic nightclubs and eating places set four or five to a block were interspersed among beauty salons and expensive boutiques, although, here and there, dumpsters were shoved out into the narrow streets, half-blocking them, and wrecking crews were hurling 19th century stucco and plaster from upstairs windows in the shells of old houses that had been gutted and were now being entirely rebuilt.  The exteriors of the buildings with their bull’s eye windows and heavily ornamented eaves were ornate, exquisitely detailed with different courses of brick supported by pale yellow slabs of sandstone lintil.  A third of the old structures had been torn down and were now replaced by angular post-modernist towers, everything still built to the neighborhood’s scale – most of the city blocks topped-out at about six to eight stories above the streets teeming now with fashionable young people.

Jack and I parked at a lot two blocks from the Music Hall, a hulking structure comprised of an immense cathedral-like auditorium with the huge piston of a Romanesque tower heaped up over an elaborate rose-window with stained glass suspended in a delicate tracery of mullions.  Adjacent to the Music Hall’s central building are two 19th century exposition halls, also Romanesque with squat heavy walls rising up to steep summits of tile roof pierced by belfries and towers – there is a north and a south exposition hall with the great basilica of the auditorium between them.

We hiked around the neighborhood, inspecting the fine, restored facades of the buildings.  After forty minutes of sightseeing, we found a table for lunch in the corner of a café called Revolution.  The place is basically a waffles and southern-fried chicken joint and it was filled with beautiful people, pretty girls and good-looking twenty-something men, most of them dressed in black and drinking mimosas or bloody mary cocktails.  Revolution is the kind of place that illustrates its walls with canvases of George Washington wearing sunglasses, Einstein with punk tattoos on his throat and forearms, Abraham Lincoln wearing a baseball cap backward.  Service was painfully (fashionably) slow and the waiters were too hip to take much care about getting the orders right.

While we were seated near the window in Revolution, I watched a strange procession marching by outside.  It was a parade of about thirty young men and women wearing what seemed to me to be pajamas of the type in which the child’s head is engulfed in an animal’s hood, face appearing where the beast’s coat was slit apart to simulate jaws.  The people were padding about with mittened hands representing paws and claws and their feet, thrust into boots, also seemingly beastlike: hooves and paws below.

These young people, dressed in this eccentric way, marched with heads thrown back, lustily shouting to one another.  They were on a mission, walking swiftly down the sidewalk,

“What is this?”  I asked Jack.

“Furries,” he said.  “It’s a group of Furries.”


12.
I supposed that the old Germans who once inhabited this neighborhood would be spinning in their graves at the thought of roving mobs of Furries in the streets of Over the Rhine.  But, perhaps, not – most of the Germans who lived in this place had been revolutionaries themselves, young firebrands expelled from Europe in 1848 by the decayed nobility in the innumerable German-speaking duchies and principalities.  Many of these Germans were members of the Turnerverein, that is, gymnast-communists – the same people who left the overcrowded tenements of Over the Rhine just before the Civil War to come west and settle in places on the frontier like Milwaukee and New Ulm.  Perhaps, the presence of Furries would not have seemed so strange to them after all.

In 1827, a 274 mile canal was finished, linking mercantile Cinncinati on the Ohio River with the harbor town of Toledo on Lake Erie.  The canal was a major engineering accomplishment because Ohio is, by no means, level – the water four-foot deep it its channel (40 feet wide) had to carry its floating burdens through 103 canal locks on the way between river and Great Lake.  Over-the-Rhine was built next to the canal and the neighborhood was reached by a several bridges arching up over the groove in the city-scape.  The German emigrants began to refer to the rather humble canal (a tow-path and a slick of water in a brick channel) as the Rhine River and so the village where these people congregated was dubbed “Ueber der Rhein” or “Over the Rhine.”

This wasn’t an upscale address – in fact, to the contrary, an asylum for the poor and dying had been built on a tract of land backed-up against the somewhat noisome canal.  (And, like everything in Cincinnati, Indian mounds were razed on the terrain before the foundations of the asylum could be sunk in the oozy earth.)  The asylum was a poorly built structure and the bases of its walls were unsteady.  After only a few years, the structure was torn down and the site converted to a pauper’s cemetery.  A cholera epidemic swept through the city in 1838.  People died more quickly than they could be decently buried and the corpses were interred in mass graves on the premises of the swampy pauper cemetery.  Barges towed along the canal started their journey laden with goods and passing by the melancholy potters yard where the dead from the cholera epidemic were being buried.
Around the time of the Civil War, the Germans in Over the Rhine began hosting conventions of Saengerbunde (Singing Societies).  An annual competition involving all Midwest German singing societies was convened each May – these festivities involved the consumption of prodigious amounts of beer and required a venue.  After the war, a big tin-shed was built over the defunct pauper’s graveyard.  The singing societies performed in the shed for audiences of several thousand spectators.  The vacant lot in front of the old pauper’s cemetery was transformed into a festival park where beer gardens could host hundreds of participants – some bandshells were built in the park in order serenade the society members during their meals and libations.  The music shed and festival grounds were serviceable but, when a thunderstorm in 1870 cast hail on the tin roof of the concert hall, plans were hatched to construct a much more grand and permanent edifice.  The new structure, finally complete in 1878, was the Music Hall with its mighty tower and rose window flanked on each side by state-of-the-art exposition galleries.


13.
Since the Music Hall is built atop Indian mounds, the grounds of an old insane asylum, and an abandoned pauper’s cemetery, the big auditorium and its backstage practice halls and offices are very heavily haunted.  Even concerts that are not sold-out result in full-houses because unoccupied seats are always taken by the leagues of the dead that frequent the place.  It is not uncommon to look to the gentleman or -woman to your side, detect a faint chill, and notice that the nicely dressed person (although wearing garments that seem just a wee bit archaic) is barefoot, with the clay of the pauper’s cemetery still sticking between bony toes.  Some of the dead love music and haunt the upper reaches of the auditorium, looking eye to eye with the vast crystal chandelier that illumines the place, flitting through corridors with the anxious look that ghosts always display – a ghost is residual energy in the wrong place and most specters are anxious about being observed where they shouldn’t be and so they hustle to and fro, uneasy trespassers among the living.  There are other ghosts who despise music and, therefore, resent the racket of being buried beneath a resounding temple to Apollo with its busts of Beethoven and Bach in the loggia and lyre emblems above the huge, acoustically perfect stage.  These ghosts are angry and knock music off stands, stretch and distory the strings of carefully tuned violins and worm into French Horns to make the high notes that they emit crack and burble.  Ghosts harass the ticket-takers and the ushers and, even, possess computers from time to time.  This is well-known in Cincinnati and mostly accepted for what it is – either harmless ghostly delight in the labors of the world-famous orchestra or (mostly) harmless pranks played on staff at the back of the house.


14.
In the late Victorian era, Cincinnati was one of America’s most populous and prosperous cities.  In 1884, a local newspaper, the Cincinnati Graphic, featured engravings of well-appointed subway cars efficiently whisking passengers from station to station, tracks set in the dry channel of the Miami & Erie waterway.  By that time, barge traffic was obsolete – railroads carried heavy freight – and the old canal had become a toxic embarrassment.  Stagnant water bred mosquitos and some canal locks had been used to impound sewage.  The canal itself was treacherous with reefs and shoals of garbage. 
The City was flush with money and, so, funds were appropriated to build the subway, repurposing the length of the Miami & Erie canal where it passed through the city, forming one edge to the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.  The resolution to build the subway was passed in 1916 and United States involvement in World War One delayed construction.  Not until 1923 did work begin on the subway.  About two-miles of underground passage was completed, mostly in the footprint of the decaying canal.  Worldwide inflation occurring in the mid-twenties, again, halted the project.  The City, then, devoted available funds to its Central Parkway, a surface road running parallel to the proposed path of the subway.  The political will and funding to complete the project withered away although it was until 1948 that plans to construct the subway were finally scrapped.  Some of the underground passage was eradicated by the construction of I-75, a freeway that follows, for the most part, the canal’s path through the urban area.  However, a mile or so of the old project remains buried under the city in the Over the Rhine area.

The subway tunnels were, sometimes, open for tours until 2016 when engineering studies revealed dangerous cracks in the concrete ceilings.  People who have toured the subway say that the dark tunnel and the sepulchral half-built stations are intolerably crowded with pallid ghosts, fetal-shaped apparitions most dating to the era of the insane asylum.  The air resounds with screams, although the worst sound, I’m told, is a kind of hideous grunting and, then, a deep-voiced drone something like a human mooing like a cow.


16.
Across town, under the twin peaks of Mount Adams and Mount Auburn, Cincinnati is more genteel.  The Taft Mansion that once occupied a pleasant terrace overlooking the Ohio river is now hemmed-in by high-rise hotels and complicated traffic interchanges with ramps propped up on stilts ascending to bridges above a wasteland of river-front consisting of abandoned warehouses, shadowy commercial alleys, and old piers and loading docks slumping into the brown water.  Once Charley Taft, the brother to the President William Howard Taft, lived with his family in this big, sprawling house – he was a lawyer and the wealthy brother.  By contrast, the President wasn’t quite as prosperous.
Charley Taft made the obligatory grand tour of Europe sometime in the 1890's.  He was a cultured man, an alumnus of Harvard (like his brother) and came back from the storied capitols of Europe with much grandiose loot, mostly French and English paintings along with much impressive renaissance crockery.  These items were duly installed in the Taft Mansion and form the core of its art collection now on display to visitors.
 
The renaissance ceramics are enamel-work from Limoges. (In fact, this collection of these rare ceramics is one of the largest in the world.)  The enamels are forearm-long platters and serving trays elaborately decorated with mythical or religious imagery – scenes from the Aeneid or Old Testament, for instance, Moses crucifying a serpent while the victims of snake-venom writhe and twitch at the base of the cross.  The effect is something like an exceedingly elaborate engraving by Duerer or Henrick Goltzius transposed into low relief on kitchenware.  The figures sport musculature like armor, ripped pectorals and buttocks like cannon-balls and everyone is entangled with everyone else in some sort of violent scrum.  The things are impressive enough but a bit grotesque – nonetheless, the collection is fascinating, displayed in a few rooms behind glass and under low-light.  (Among those objects, there is also a peculiar work made by potters in Limousin: “The Children of Mars” – a ceramic bas relief that shows farmers under attack by mercenary-looking Landesknecht, the anti-war subject complicated, it seems, by other figures also all involved in fisticuffs: peasant wives beating their yokel husbands, masters beating servants, these affrays taking place in a muddy farmyard where chickens peck at the earth and big sows roll in the mud.)

The paintings on display in the more ostentatious rooms in the house are pretty much what you would expect.  There are about a half- dozen Corot canvases.  (This is not the place to digress about Corot although, it seems, that the artist was the most prodigiously prolific painter of all time – every wealthy tycoon during the gilded age apparently owned two or three Corots, exemplary little paintings with shimmering silvery surfaces showing bucolic scenes, groves of trees shedding their leaves, maidens ambling through handsome, if somewhat monochrome, meadows.  Every museum in the United States displays a few Corot paintings, generally bequests from wealthy donors made around the turn of the 20th century – as Andy Warhol said about Coca-Cola: All Corots are alike and all Corots are good.)  There is a turbulent painting by J.M.W. Turner, also a fantastically prolific artist as well as one of his late works, a pinkish haze with a smear of color representing a figure seen through fog slightly off-center: this is Jove abducing Europa, although you need the label to discern this subject matter since the daub is unfinished. John Singer Sargent is represented by a luminous and very precisely painted portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson.  Several large rooms are decorated with French landscapes featuring cows and shepherds, handsome academic works that are lovely and of no discernible interest whatsoever.

The Taft Museum, undoubtedly erected atop Indian mounds, is haunted, of course, although the specters are decidedly quotidian.  An Irish serving girl sometimes sulks outside the windows squatting on a place in the lawn that was once a privy to which she fled to avoid her chores.  She won’t meet your eyes and looks a bit disheveled.  A party of Indians sometimes camps on the carpet near one of the many cold hearths in the old building.  African-Americans in shabby clothes appear almost daily in the administrative wing of the museum, submitting job application for work in maintenance and gardening.  But they can’t be hired because they have no identification, no social security number, and are obviously ghosts.
 
16.
Robert Duncanson is a local cultural hero.  He was an African-American who began his career as a sign-painter but ended as a master of politely unassuming, if extremely poetic, landscapes.  I have detailed Duncanson’s career in another writing and so won’t elaborate much in this essay.  My initial interest in Duncanson arose from a couple of paintings that I saw shortly after my brother died in the Cincinnati Museum of Art atop Mount Adam and about a mile from the Taft mansion.  One of those paintings shows Minneopa Falls near Mankato, Minnesota, a place with which I am familiar.  The painting was mislabeled as Minnehaha Falls, an error that I noted and that I reported to the curator of American Paintings at that museum by way of a letter and some documentary materials.  Duncanson left the country during the Civil War, apparently because he was resented due to the thousands of White boys dying, at least, in part to end the abomination of slavery.  Duncanson was a free man, living in Ohio, but racism drove him across the sea to Scotland where he painted many charming, if conventional, landscapes featuring moors and lochs and ruined castles.  He returned to Cincinnati after the war, set up an atelier in the fashionable Mount Auburn neighborhood, and, then, while curating a retrospective of his work in 1872, went mad and died.  Before his final illness, the wealthy folks who owned what would later be called the Taft Mansion commissioned him to paint a series of murals for the grand entryway into the big house.  The pictures have been restored and can be seen in the Museum in situ and they are a highlight of the collection.

Duncanson’s murals at the Taft don’t reproduce well in photos in books.  They seem a bit shadowy in pictures and their peculiar shape makes them appear to be poorly composed.  In fact, the murals when seen in the context of the rooms and corridors for which they were made are masterpieces.  They are large, about seven or eight feet high and four feet wide, occupying panels on the wall adjacent to the front door to the mansion-house.  Four panels, two to each side of the door adorn the reception area.  Two more panels occupy walls in the corridor to the right and left of the entrance.  The murals have a hushed, lyrical mood – the light shown in the pictures seems to be indirect, a fading glow in the sky: it’s the magic hour, when the last light recedes and we see things made poetic in the twilight.  Several of the pictures show mountain paths, leading upward next to ravines where silvery waterfalls are rushing.  A traveler bids farewell to his family in front of cottage, something like a Scottish croft.  A mill such as one imagine from the songs of Schubert turns its waterwheel in a shadowy valley.  Something about the murals whispers both a greeting and, yet, also a lyrical parting or farewell – we must venture away from the comforts of home into these vast, glowing landscapes.
 
The Taft family didn’t much like the murals and in the late nineties covered them with floral wallpaper.  Then, the murals were forgotten.  Sometimes, at night, people heard odd sounds in the sitting room behind the front door – water seemed to be flowing and, in fact, on occasion people searched the bathrooms to see if a tap had been left open.  Others thought they heard whispering behind the wall paper or the wind blowing through trees on a mountainside.  When the wallpaper was torn away, the Duncanson landscapes were revealed, bright and not faded because they had been shielded from the sunlight by the protective sheets of paper.

Today, the murals are guarded by security in the form of a wiry man with reddish hair and a heavy Slavic accent.  The guard is garrulous and he will engage you in conversation if you meet his gaze.  There are two things in particular that he wants you to see.  First, there is a painting that shows a shepherd guiding a herd of about 30 sheep across a barren-looking windswept prairie apparently in the French massif centrale.  The picture has a peculiar characteristic that the guard is happy to point out to you.  If you stand to the left of the picture, the sheep appear to turn to the right.  But when you move to the other side of the painting and view it from the right, the sheep and their shepherd now look like they are walking into the picture to the left.  “Now,” the Guard says after having pointed this out to you, “look at the title.”  It’s called “Changing Pastures.”  This a curious optical illusion for which I can’t exactly account, a little like the phenomenon of the portrait whose staring eyes seem to track you as you move from place to place in the gallery.

The Guard will, then, lead you to one of Duncanson’s murals in the corridor.  This is the painting that shows a traveler bidding farewell to his wife and child at the threshold of their humble croft on the heath.  A trail leads into the picture and another traveler already on his way is shown striding away from the cottage.  “Look closely at this man,” the Guard says.  “What do you see?”  Duncanson painted the travelers garments and his top hat but failed to finish his head.  “He has no head,” I said.  “Yes,” the Guard explained in his heavily accented voice: “He is an invisible man.”

The traveler’s hat floats over his shoulders of his black frock coat.  The invisible man that I am thinking about is another African American – the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel of that name. 
“Isn’t it remarkable?” the Guard says.  “Yes, it is remarkable,” I say.


17.
A strange modernist sculpture forms a barrier across the front lawn of the Taft Museum.  It’s a grey wicker-woven structure, about eight feet tall, something like an old basket made from reeds that has been opened up to form a wall.   The artwork is called “Entwined” and it is made by weaving together innumerable grey sticks.  The thing has sinuous qualities and is ingeniously made. 
As we walk toward our car, I hear a fluting bird call.   A sort of pigeon is perched atop the entwined wicker sticks.  In the lightless day, the bird shines.  Its cooing call is melancholy like something embedded in an old memory.  The bird has a protuberant breast of deep brown or russet feathers, but it’s throat is red like a robin.  Folded wings give the pigeon an inert, even lifeless, appearance.  The eyes are bright buttons in a shapely dark-grey head.


18.
Zinzinnati is a beer festival, held in late September each year.  In effect, it is Cincinnati’s Octoberfest, conducted in vast beer-hall tents erected along 3rd Street in Over-the-Rhine.  The center of festivities is the park in front of the red-brick hulk of the Music Hall.

Of course, events of this sort feature regional specialties – in this case, Cincinnati chili, various kinds of wursts, and an odd victual called “Goetta”.  Like many foods featured in ethnic celebrations, Goetta is poverty-food, a congealed mush of ground pork with pin-head oats (hulled, steel cut oat kernels that have been husked but not “rolled”).  The pin-head oats are boiled into a porridge and mixed with the meat.  FDA-approved Goetta has to be 50% meat.  The stuff is produced in loaves and can be sliced.  Ordinarily, it’s a breakfast meat.  (Scrapple and “livermush” are similar concoctions.)  Like lutefisk and lefsa in Minnesota, goetta is more honored than eaten.  I didn’t find any trace of the food at any of the restaurants that I visited and our hotel breakfast buffets didn’t offer goetta, but, I know, the meat-mush is sold at grocery stores and, indeed, commercially produced.


19.
At the hotel breakfast buffet, there is always a fruit basket.  I took a couple bananas each day to eat mid-afternoon.  There is no better snack than a banana.


20.
A word to the wise, traveler’s advice, as it were: a restaurant that advertises itself as a Mediterranean grill will be Lebanese or, possibly, even Palestinian.  The place may smell a bit like a Greek restaurant but the sea-food selections will be scant and the meat roasted until it is as dry and lifeless as the Dead Sea.  Something like bongo drums may be percolating when you enter and a blonde girl wearing a black brassiere with tassels, bare midriff, and harem pants (also tasseled at the hips) will be dancing between the tables, whirling about and raising her bespangled arms to flap diaphanous veils like a crow’s wings.  At least, this was the case at Andy’s Mediterranean Restaurant, a place located on the east-facing slope of Mount Adams in a placid and ill-lit residential neighborhood.

Apparently, the food is authentic.  As the belly-dancer was writhing between tables, about eight or nine young men entered, all of them swarthy with black hair and baseball caps or hoodies over their heads, a group that looked like Hezbollah junior varsity – of course, this is racist and Islamophobic and so I will amend my description: perhaps, the group was a Syrian or Iraqi soccer team.  In any event, the young men were seated against the wall, averting their eyes from the blonde belly-dancer which was really no different from the way that most of the other diners were responding – notwithstanding the very loud clacking noise she made with her castanets.

I had kibbeh, ground lamb meat with spices, cooked for some inexplicable reason inside of a dense shell of bulgar – the kibbeh is pod-shaped and served on a bed of rice and it’s a curious dish, a bit like Indian samosas.  Unfortunately, it’s more or less tasteless, notwithstanding the sage and oregano with a hint of mint and fennel with which the ground lamb is served.  The lentil soup, however, was excellent, the taste not marred at all by the dancer’s veil brushing against my spoon and bowl.
 
On the way out of the restaurant, Jack and I passed the belly-dancer, resting from her labors and wearing a modest dark pants-suit, the sort of earnest-looking garment that Hillary Clinton might wear on the campaign trail.  She was leaning against the bar, drinking mango juice from a glass, and looked a little lonely.


21.
The highest point on Mount Adams is a park with vaguely Japanese characteristics – a pond suitable for koi although frozen over with strangely green ice, some little footbridges and pollarded trees.  A couple of life-size bronzes stand on low pedestals overlooking the pond – one is a kind of witch and the other shows Romulus and Remus sucking at the teats of a snarling she-wolf.  Like Rome, Cincinnati is said to be built on seven hills, although, in fact, there are many more than seven in the Ohio city, and no one can agree which correlate to those in Rome.  The facsimile of the famous Roman statue is a gift to the City of Cincinnati by Mussolini.  

An overlook provides a vantage over the broad expanse of the Ohio River flowing between bluffs that are now sere with winter.  From that height, you can see across to another summit on Mount Adams where the top of the bluff has crescent-shaped horns.  On the other hilltop, there is a building shaped like an ark, resting over Cincinnati as if on Ararat – this is Rookwood, once a famous pottery workshop known for its unique ceramic designs, its architectural tiles, and patented “sea green” and “aerial blue” glazes.  (The building timbered like a Tudor house or a German hunting chalet was most recently converted to a restaurant – patrons dined among the antique kilns.   But the place has now gone out of business.)  On the other horn of the crescent, an old Catholic church pokes its white steeple upward atop a long apron-skirt of steps.  The Immaculata Church, with adjacent, but now defunct, monastery rears its tower up at the very highest point on the bluff.  The faithful ascend the stairs on Good Friday, pausing to say a prayer or Hail Mary on each of the concrete steps – it’s a sort of vertical Rosary looming over the narrow alleys and old houses below on the steep slopes of the high bluff.  The steps are daunting and it takes you a while to climb them, huffing and puffing with exertion, and, at the top, you, suddenly, feel as if you are in the Laurel & Hardy two-reeler, The Music Box, because on the crest of the hill, the church sits among quiet residential streets that you could have driven to reach, thereby avoiding the arduous ascent.  The inside of the church is plain – the stained glass is Tiffany-made and eloquent, but not over-stated and the air smells a little of incense.


22.
On a lower terrace on the bluff, but still above a dam that impounds a small lake in a sort of pocket on the mountain, the Cincinnati Art Museum caps its own wooded knoll.  The museum can’t much expand because it occupies the entire hill top across a ravine-spanning viaduct that leads to the Mount Adams’ village on the higher double summits of the bluff.

The museum is hushed and the galleries are mostly deserted.  There are two notable murals – one by Joan Miro, a group of whimsical animals, including a balloon-like bull, pasted in bright outline over a deep blue background (the blue isn’t the color of the sky or sea or a lake, but rather the hard, mineral tint of lapis lazuli); the other mural is a large horizontal fresco by Steinberg – it was made for the Palm Hotel bar downtown but evacuated up to these heights when the inn was renovated.  Steinberg’s mural is mostly white with the artist’s calligraphic doodles of local landmarks, including the fountain downtown gushing water from outstretched hands.  It’s pleasant enough but doesn’t really cohere – the picture is more like a collection of snapshots, elegantly rendered in Steinberg’s line-drawing style, a system of signs like those in the museum of commercial advertising down on the river-flats.
I’m gratified to see that the Duncanson painting of Minneopa Falls has now been provided with an accurate label the parrots the information that I provided to the curator the previous year.  There is mention of the Dakota Conflict – the painting was made in September while the Indian War was still underway – and the geographic facts all stand corrected.  Duncanson is, also, represented by an exceptionally poetic landscape called “The Blue Hole” in the Cincinnati (or local) wing of the museum where there is also a large display of Rookwood ceramics.  I want to see that picture which is a particular favorite for me, but, inexplicably, the museum has mislaid those galleries – at the end of some rooms studded with tombstone-like white marbles, things chiseled out of the hard sunbaked terrain of Greece and Rome, I come to a corridor that crosses the courtyard and, then, leads me to Steinberg mural in another access hall.  I search around in this area and end up standing in front of the Miro fresco and the gift shop.  A couple of additional transits between the two murals takes me nowhere – I’m going in circles.  I recall last year, when I visited the museum and noticed the errors in the label on the Duncanson picture of Minneopa Falls, that I slipped through a side arcade, looking for a toilet and ended up in a big gloomy wing full of 19th century landscapes showing Ohio woods and rivers, the veil of falling water at Hocking Hills, Luminist sea-scapes (lake-scapes?) on the sandy shores of Lake Erie, portraits of prominent Midwestern politicians and soldiers, even a number of bright Impressionist paintings of Cincinnati neighborhoods, devotional art by Frank Duveneck (proletarian madonnas and Holy Families), Rookwood ceramics, and Duncanson’s mysterious “Blue Hole” with its perturbed stormy sky, it’s ghostly white finger of dead tree pointing at the approaching tempest, and the dark waters of the lagoon on the Miami River.  But this whole gallery is now misplaced and I can’t find it.

In the end, footsore, I’m standing in front of a painting by a 19th French artist, Anton Mauve.  The painting shows me the hindquarters of a flock of sheep walking over a stony meadow.  A black sheepdog harries the white, fluffy animals.  If you stand to the left of the painting, the rear-ends of the sheep seem to point en masse to the right; if you look at the canvas from the right, sheep’s asses are all veering left.  It’s the damndest thing.  

I have to settle for a postcard of “The Blue Hole.”


23.
The boyhood home of President William Taft is planted near the crest of Mount Auburn, another bluff overlooking the Ohio River.  A salubrious hillside, a mile from the waterfront with its stagnant and decaying canal and above the stockyards that earned Cincinnati the sobriquet “Porkopolis”, this airy height was pleasantly rural in the 1850's when the house was built.  Today, the home rests on a relic of its lawn between charter schools, also named after Taft, in a neighborhood of big, old clapboard houses, each of them clinging precariously to precipitous hillside lots.

Entrance to the home is by tour, led by a gawky kid wearing what seems to be a khaki Boy Scout uniform – the mansion is administered by the National Park Service.  Taft was both President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and, although his portly walrus-shaped figure seems redolent of the Edwardian era, in fact, he survived long enough to see the Depression.  Unassuming and kindly, Taft despised politics and seems to have been driven into that profession by the ambitions of his formidable wife, Nell.  In photographs of his inauguration, Taft in his top-hat looks morose and panicked, but Nell grins broadly at camera lens.  A superb athlete when he was young, Taft’s brawn turned to fat by the time he was thirty, but he remained graceful and agile – he is reputed to be the best dancer after George Washington to have ever occupied the White House.  In the film that the Park Service shows about Taft, we seem him walking across the gangplank as he arrives in the Philippines (where he served as territorial governor).  Despite his girth, Taft doesn’t waddle and, in fact, walks faster than anyone else, moving quickly with tiny mincing steps. (One wonders what the heat and humidity of the Philippines did to this enormous fat man during his tenure there – but in photographs, he never looks sweaty when standing among skinny Filipinos about a third his size.)  Taft’s relationship with Teddy Roosevelt affords an element of Shakespearian betrayal and drama to his biography.  Roosevelt, who was his best friend, anointed Taft as his successor in office and, with Teddy’s endorsement, he won the presidency.  Roosevelt, then, decamped for extended safaris in Africa and South America.  When he returned, Roosevelt discovered that the industrious Taft had enacted all sorts of policies that the Great White Hunter disliked.  There was a breach between the two men and Roosevelt formed a third-party to oust his former friend from office – Roosevelt was successful in this effort, but split the Republican vote so that Woodrow Wilson won the election. 
The tour wanders through a few rooms on the first floor of the Italianate mustard-colored home.  The house is large but it’s not particularly ostentatious.  There are whimsical blue and white tiles illustrating Biblical parables and Aesop’s fables around the hearth of one of the downstairs fireplace (ceramics from Rookwood) and, on the wall, dim grey lithographs of Thomas Cole’s allegorical cycle of paintings, “The Journey of Life.”  Much of the house burned down in the late 19th century and the structure was re-built and has now been equipped with furnishings generally consistent with the Reconstruction era when the future President lived in the home as a youth.  (On one of the walls, a note from Taft’s preceptors at Harvard is framed: Taft, a brilliant fellow who finished 2nd in his class, didn’t like attending classes and was often tardy or absent – at least, so it is reported to Taft’s father, the prominent lawyer Alphonso Taft, and, of course, the guarantor of his tuition at the Ivy League school.) The tales that can be told about the house are pretty much what one would expect: childhood diseases, infant mortality, grief, betrothals, weddings, and deaths.

At first, only Jack and I participate in the tour.  It’s early in the morning on a grey day with some mist rising up from ravines slicing down to the city.  After the tour guide’s brief lecture in the home’s atrium and on its ground floor – where the place has been furnished with antiques – we are told that we can go upstairs to view some exhibits in otherwise empty rooms.  The boyish tour guide tells us that Taft was the first president to install a bathtub in the White House.  Jack, who has read up on the subject, interrupts him to say that it is a pernicious myth that Taft got himself stranded in the White House bathtub and couldn’t be extricated except by a team of servants.  The guide agrees and encourages us to look for the photograph upstairs showing Taft’s bathtub in which no fewer than four lean workmen are sitting for their portrait.  He doesn’t come upstairs, but sits on a chair near the steps, playing with his phone.

The rooms upstairs have yellow walls and a few artifacts displayed next to short paragraphs of explanatory prose.  The light is cold and the skies viewed through the windowpanes are grim.  As Jack and I inspect the exhibits, a man joins us.  He’s bald with a big scarred bulb of a head, pale with some pinkish indentations in his bare white scalp.  The man is dressed eccentrically and he mutters something about the Republican party under his breath – he seems the sort of person that you should avoid, possibly deranged, a figure that you keep in the corner of your eye taking care not to meet his eyes – best to know where he is located, but, also, advisable not to look at him directly.  A couple of times, a sort of half-strangled moan emerges from his lips.  There’s something orange tucked away in his pant’s pocket and I wonder if I’m not seeing one of those Trump caps: Make America Great Again.

Jack and I come down the creaking steps.

“Do you have ghosts in the house?” I ask the Boy Scout.

“No,” he says.  “If we did, I wouldn’t dare come in here alone.”

“A lot of these old houses are haunted,” I say.

“Not this one,” the kid replies.

I tell him that we enjoyed our tour and that we are done in the old house and will go to the Visitor Center to see the film about Taft.
 
“Okay,” the Boy Scout says, “I’ll lock up then.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait for the guy upstairs,” I say.
 
“What guy?”

I tell him about the man who joined the tour when Jack and I were upstairs.

The young man is holding his Smoky-the-Bear hat across his chest.  He blinks at me.

“No one joined the tour,” he says.  Then, he blinks at us again.  


24.
In the evening, we drive past the casino in the river bottoms and downtown hotels to cross the metal bridge to Covington, Kentucky.  Beyond the river, we come off a ramp onto a road running parallel to the Ohio where there is an enormous AMC theater and complex of restaurants heaped up atop the levee.  (Who knows what prehistoric embankments and mounds were gouged out of the landscape when the levee against the floodwaters was first built?)  Some sort of emergency is underway – a bunch of police cars are drawn up in front of the theater and restaurants overlooking the Ohio and, in the darkness, their blue lights throb insistently, an anxious message communicated to the watching world by strobe-light.  We have come to Covington to patronize a German restaurant, the Hofbrauhaus across the street from the beleagured theaters and restaurant mall.

When I park, we stroll across the lot, walking toward the flashing lights.  Somewhere a siren sounds.  “You can tell we’re in the South,” I say.  “How is that?” Jack asks.  “You can smell the magnolias, the humid wind over the bayous, the moisture in the leaves of the live oak trees and the ivy.  Listen carefully and you will hear Negro spirituals and the sound of singing in the cotton fields and the splash of the Robert E. Lee as it’s paddlewheels drive the great ship upriver.”

Jack says that he can’t sense any of this.  In fact, there is a biting wind chill and I can imagine ice freezing in the gutters and the lagoons near the river.

The Hofbrauhaus is a big beer hall with German flags unfurled next to the Red, White and Blue and a big portrait of the narrow-browed, dark-eyed mad King of Bavaria, Ludwig, displayed over the bandstand.  The beer hall waitresses are showing lots of cleavage and, since they are big girls, you see big mounds of flesh pressed up under their double-chins.  On the stage, a dour-looking Kraut is spooling up cords and wires from the amplifiers, and putting a big sousaphone in a battered instrument case.  The Kraut is wearing lederhosen and a white shirt and, on his head, he sports a hunting cap adorned with a sprig of pheasant feather.

We order and, as is my custom, I attune my ears to the wavelength that the other nearby customers are using in their conversations.  Beside me, pressed up to the bar, a plump man who looks like a biker is sitting beside a heavy-set blonde woman wearing the kind of glasses that you might imagine on a lady realtor, round goggles slid down on her nose so she can look over them to survey her prey with a mixture of greed and contempt.  The couple are whispering tenderly to one another.  Then, the biker gets up and goes to the rest room.  Immediately, the German tuba-player, who is entirely alone (there is no trace of his band anywhere to be seen), hurries back to stand next to the big blonde, even putting a hand on her spine a little above where her waist would be located if she had a waist.  The blonde says something about driving over 200 miles to see him.  He also whispers something in her ear.  Then, the blonde shrugs and the Kraut goes back to the stage to pick up his instrument and amplifier cords.  The Mad King glares down on all of this.

The biker comes back from the rest room, exchanges a few words with the woman, and, then, beckons to the tuba-player.  The little pheasant feather in his jaunty green Jaeger cap bobbing, the Kraut comes to Biker, shakes his hand, and, then, says something about just learning that couple were married only a few weeks ago.  The Biker says something complimentary about the big blonde and, then, the Kraut agrees with him, speaking with the very slightly accented English that Germans always know how to deploy.  I’m amazed to see that the Biker takes out his wallet, chained to his belt, of course, so that his money will remain with him if he has to put down his scooter to avoid a crash or on a road strewn with gravel.  The Biker finds a five dollar bill and dangles it from his fingers, saying something like “Come on, take it” and “I owe you.”  The German first nods his head “no”, but, as he is making that gesture, he takes the money in his hand and shoves it in his breast pocket.  Then, the two men shake again and the big blonde with her Biker husband are, suddenly, gone and, when I look around, the German has also vanished.

This is how ghosts act.  The Mad King glowers and the air smells of sauerkraut and beer and recorded polkas follow one another, brightly painted, like caged animals and trapeze artists on chariots in an old fashioned circus parade.


25.
Transportation has been a bust in Cincinnati.  The subway never materialized and the train station was also a failure.  The only great infrastructure success that the city boasts is Roebling’s 1866 bridge over the Ohio, a shapely warm-up for the engineer’s Brooklyn Bridge completed a few years later.  Roebling, of course, pioneered the use of iron cable in suspension bridges, a byproduct of his factories producing steel wire-rope.

Although the Union Terminal in Cincinnati was not a commercial success, the building is stunning, probably America’s greatest Art Deco monument.  Before the immense structure was built, seven different train lines passed through (or ended at) Cincinnati.  Some of these rail-lines maintained ostentatious brick stations, shaped a bit like Victorian churches next to their metal-roofed trains sheds.  However, several of the railroads passed travelers through ramshackle wooden stations, decrepit buildings resembling boarding houses on the hill slopes over the city and, all of these stations were neglected and in need of renovation.  These facilities were scattered, more or less, randomly throughout the city. This was inefficient and, of course, travelers had to hire coaches to take them from station to station if they were changing lines in Cincinnati.  (The city is a rail-hub, midway between Chicago and Washington D. C.)  Accordingly, the City Fathers proposed the notion of building a so-called “Union” Terminal to accommodate all trains lines providing service to Cincinnati.  An old park near the junction of the canal and the river stood at the center of a poor immigrant neighborhood.  The park possessed a fountain where people dipped their feet and children bathed during the heat of the summer and there were also picnic bowers in the trees where lovers from the tenements could meet as well as an aviary and a few ice cream concessions.  The City dedicated this land to the Union terminal, entirely uprooting the park to the dismay of the slum-dwellers living on the river flats around that tract of land. (Some fountains were built in front of the huge semi-circular facade of the station as a sop to the people living nearby).   Railroad lines were laid to the terminal, slicing deep steel incisions in the tenement neighborhoods and, further, dismembering the slums – nothing at all remains today of these places.  I have always thought that a “union” terminal was so-named because of the Civil War – this is an idea that I have believed all my life.  But, in fact, a “union” terminal merely signifies a place where a group of train lines serving a city connect with another, that is, form a “union”.

No expense was spared on Cincinnati’s terminal, so that there were enormous cost over-runs and by the late twenties, it was, generally, thought that the project was bankrupt and could not be completed.  Fortunately, for the project, the Depression intervened and labor to finish the terminal could be hired for next to nothing.  Exploiting dirt-cheap wages, the terminal was finished in 1933.  It was the second-to-last great railroad terminal completed in the United States (the last was at Los Angeles).  The place met costs through the end of the fifties but, thereafter, railroad passenger travel diminished to almost nothing.  In 1972, the Union Terminal was abandoned after less than forty years service.  The enormous structure languished for a few years and, then, a mall was erected under the building’s enormous domed ceiling.  The mall, known as the Land of Oz, did alright for a while, but, then, it failed.  There was gang violence at the place and rapes in the parking lot which was immense, as long as three football fields, and so the building was shuttered again.  Later, it was re-opened in its present form as a museum center housing the Museum of Cincinnati, a Children’s Museum, and a Science Museum with some cafeteria and fast food concessions repurposing the dining rooms gracing the original train station.  (In the last couple, years an expensive Holocaust Museum has also been added to this repertory of attractions.)  Amtrak passenger service was restored to the terminal in 2018 – the so-called Cardinal Line stops at the station coming and going daily, but the schedule is not calculated to encourage high usage: the trains pull into the station at 1:17 am and 3:17 am and so the Amtrak facilities are only open from midnight to 4:00 am.  As a consequence, the station is the least frequented of any Amtrak facility in the country.

Originally, traffic approaching the terminal was shunted into separate lanes divided by a long grassy mall studded with fountains and other monuments.  Arrivals approached the station from the right and departures exited to the left (south) – in addition, there were complex systems of viaducts for use by taxis, motor carriages, and street cars.  The terminal’s east facade where passengers enter rises as an immense half-circle of travertine suspended between huge buttress pylons each sculpted in bas relief with a forty-foot tall winged beings, a Zoa rising up into the windswept heavens.   The great arch supported by the buttresses looks like a mighty wheel, the great perfectly curved arc of a railroad locomotive’s iron wheel interlocked with a silver track.  Columnar frosted-glass windows occupy the interior of the wheel and, at the center of these windows, a huge clock tells the time – at night, I’m tole, the hands on clock which are length of a SUV, are neon-lit, red and orange.

Passengers enter the complex of buildings under a sleek aluminum marquee at the base of the great wheeled arc overhead.  Colored marble supports the marquee cantilevered out from the building and the visitor has a sense of great compression, of immense downward forces through which the doors burrow into the building – dense granite pillars stand between the bronze and zinc doors, stone cut from quarries at Cold Spring in Stearns County, Minnesota.  After passing under the downward-pressing platen of the entry, the rotunda of the Terminal expands upward into an enormous perfectly round half-circle dome.  (Until the construction of Jorge Utzen’s Sydney Opera building in 1957, this was the largest concrete dome in the world.)  The dome is comprised of ribbons of concrete forming concentric shells that spin upward to an oculus skylight.  The concentric shells are painted bright yellow and orange and the visitor has the sense of stepping into a radiant space that surges upward almost explosively.  It’s like being in the center of a volcanic eruption, the volume of space enclosed in the dome somehow seeming drawn upward into the sky where vast ribbons of curved concrete whirl in ecstatic orbits.

A frieze at the base of the rotunda’s dome shows a progression from Indian through dauntless pioneers to a modern scientist and aviator, the figures sculpturally molded in brilliant mosaics.  Another frieze opposing the first shows various sorts of laborers – sailors and cowboys and construction workers (Reiss modeled the African-American laborers from workers that he sketched employed in pouring the concrete for the rotunda.)  The figures are each 12 feet high, muscular men towering like colossi over the flat blue and turquoise landscape in which they stand.  The mosaic was made by a German-American artist Winold Reiss and the integrity of every shard of glass embedded in its matrix, every tessera was tested, it is said, by being struck with a tuning fork to ascertain that the setting of the pieces of colored glass was sound.  At one time, the huge concourse – which has now been torn down – was adorned with another 14 murals showing the different industries that had made Cincinnati great.  When the train shed and the concourse leading to it were demolished, these large mosaics (each weighing several tons) were transported to city’s airport, actually located in Covington, Kentucky.

It’s all suitably grandiose down to the smallest details.  A French artist has molded a whimsical African landscape, a subtly colored linoleum jungle in the Cameroons, into the alcove where travelers waited for ladies to emerge from the marble and onyx restrooms.  A tea room (now a Graeter’s Ice Cream parlor) is entirely faced with decorated Rookwood ceramic tiles – even the booths are tiled in pastel ceramic.  The cafeteria and dining room is surmounted by a coffered ceiling forty feet above the baroque terrazzo flooring.  Each panel of the ceiling shows a different stylized sea creature.  The travertine walls encircling the rotunda at eye-level are a jigsaw of fossilized plants and animals embedded in the polished stone.

The great circles and arcs remind us of wheels, the passage of time, the progression of the seasons which is cyclical and the fact that every journey ultimately ends in a return to home – we live within great loops of time and space, great curving arcs inscribed by sun and stars in the sky and mimicked by our passage through lands and time and our lives.  The desolate passageways in airports, somewhat like the pens through which animals are herded to slaughter in a packing plant, remind us of how utterly abject we have become, how much we now accept mere functional convenience and mediocrity and how degraded our experience has beome with regard to one of the great privileges in life, the freedom and ability to travel and see with our own eyes new and strange things.
   
A railroad traveler passed through these vast echoing spaces under artificial concrete heavens arched to simulate the sky and the universe.  The traveler was like a Roman emperor marching through the great vaulted baths at Caracalla.  Now, we scurry through the maze of airports, supervised by officious and rude TSA surveillance, like so many rats in an experiment intended to maximize stress, anxiety, and fear.


26.
Advice to travelers: unless you are very interested in dinosaurs, the museums implanted in the Union Terminal are over-priced, over-run with toddlers with bad coughs and snotty noses, and unimpressive.   They should be avoided.  During the Depression, a model of Cincinnati was built.  At least, the central downtown, as it looked before World War II, rests on a sloping platform about the size of a small bowling alley.  The model is fenced by glass barricades and includes elaborately detailed buildings, several moving street cars running in grooves in the plywood, and over 3000 tiny figures.  The more complex vertical physiognomy of the hillside neighborhoods is represented in other, less convincing dioramas.  Some tiny neon lights decorate the commercial sections of town and there are plenty of nondescript warehouses and walls painted with old advertising.  These sorts of displays are always disappointing: the small toy-soldier-sized pedestrians all look alike: there is no one urinating on a wall or masturbating in a parked car, no beggars and no streetwalkers, not even any side-walk buskers.  The inhabitants of this miniature city, even when grouped together, carry their solitude with them – they are a lonely crowd, vaguely melancholy figures standing isolated in archipelagos under the plaster and paper-mache arcades.  The display is interesting but it costs 15 dollars to see and you will spend ten minutes at most looking at the model.  The science museum contains various hands-on displays – you can create fog and make it blow upwards in round rings and there are various pendulums and scales on which children are playing.  Three or four big dinosaur mounts occupy a cement island surrounded by wheelchair ramps.  One of the dinosaurs, a beaked raptor with big clawed hands is unique – the only mounted specimen of this creature, Torvosaurus tanneri, is located in the Union Terminal science museum.  (There is also the femur of an Allosaurus split open to reveal that the hollow bone is studded with purple amethyst crystals – like birds, dinosaur’s bones are hollow.)  If you collect interesting names for the “terrible lizards,” you will also enjoy seeing a huge Galeomopsus pabsti skeleton; the name suggests a dinosaur named after a beer or, perhaps, a pope, although the label says that the term simply means “helmeted dinosaur.”) The science museum also contains a “Bat Cave”, a simulated limestone cavern that is dark, claustrophobic, full of balky frightened toddlers, and, more or less, unpleasant.

It cost Jack and I something like $47 apiece to enter these museums and we didn’t opt for the IMAX theater or the expensive Holocaust museum add-ons.  Your best bet at the Union Terminal is to arrive just before the hour on a Sunday afternoon.  Old men, a bit like High School teachers, lead tours of the Terminal building itself, focusing on its railroad history, architectural features, and engineering.  The tour lasts about as long as you are willing to ask questions of the docent – in our case, about ninety minutes – and costs exactly nothing.  These tours take the visitor up to the catwalk above the mosaic friezes where the remarkable acoustic characteristics of the great concrete half-dome can be demonstrated – reverberations last ten seconds in some places and words whispered on the other side of the rotunda are reflected to its opposite side and can be clearly heard.  The guide shows visitors the board rooms for the Union Terminal, the small alcove, a bit like a chapel, where Amtrak passengers wait for trains (or arrive) in the middle of the night, and also the dining rooms, the Rookwood ceramics in the ice-cream parlor, and the elaborate jungle fantasy in textured linoleum outside of the ladies’ restroom.  The tour is very interesting and, of course, the price is right and, therefore, I recommend that visitors simply avail themselves of the Terminal tour and don’t waste money on the other exhibits in the station.

The boardroom for the Terminal displays a long table made from some kind of exotic wood harvested in the Amazon and no longer available – indeed, probably a felony to even possess.  There are fourteen Art Deco thrones around the table, two seats for each of the seven railroads using the terminal.  Around the perimeter of the room, big naugahyde-upholstered couches are arrayed against the walls – they have ashtrays built into their armrests.  The ashtrays are grooved, but not for mere cigarettes.  Railroad moguls smoked massive cigars and the ashtrays have been designed to accommodate these stogies.  Of course, the place is haunted and, on occasion, the docent tells us, the old boardroom, upon being unlocked, smells strongly of tobacco, pre-Castro cigar smoke.  There’s some question about the source of the smell – some of the night janitorial staff have been observed smoking cigarettes outside utility entrances to the Terminal and I’m not entirely certain that one can distinguish cigar smoke from the fumes of cigarettes.  

     
27.
The sun emerged for the first time in ten days while we were inside the Union Terminal.  The guide on the Rotunda Tour (this is how the Terminal tour is designated) told us to stand outside the chapel devoted to Amtrak use.  There are old pews where weary travelers can wait for their pre-dawn trains and, with the sun shining, the place is filled with ecclesiastical light.  The guide pointed to a place on the floor in front of the marble basin of the water fountain.  The shoes of a million people pausing to drink from that fountain have worn very slight indentations into the floor, ghostly ruts that catch and reflect the light sliding through the old windows.

Outside, the city rises from the river flats cradled by hills.  The late afternoon sun ignites the windows in the skyscrapers.

28.
But it’s foggy again and dreary the next morning and there are, even, some deadly slicks of melting ice in the parking lot at the Zoo.  It’s an old facility with gabled roofs and an elephant house modeled vaguely on the Taj Mahal and big, empty pens radiating from inaccessible brick habitats, warm dens where most of the animals are hiding themselves against the cold.  The zoo is famous for Fiona, a three-year-old hippo that has become the mascot for the zoo.  But Fiona is not outside to day – after all, she’s an African animal and, although its not cold by Midwest standards (about 36 degrees), it’s still too chilly for the sleek five-foot long baby animal to amuse us outdoors.  (Fiona was born premature and had to be kept in an incubator like neo-natal human infant.  She was suckled from bottles.  On the sign beside her habitat, it says: “Fiona’s determination and her will to survive has been an inspiration to many,” something that I don’t doubt for a minute.)

Most of the zoo’s creatures are hiding themselves this morning.  In the Taj Majal, two elephants are desultorily stroking their bales of fodder with delicate-looking trunks.  A polar bear paces back and forth in its den – these animals always seem deranged in confinement.  The kiosk housing white lions donated to the zoo (or “on permanent loan”) by the Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy is padlocked and there is an air of sorrow about the structure which seems a bit derelict.  I sniff the air to see if I can smell the feral stink of the beasts but there is nothing.

It’s puzzling that the Cincinnati Zoo has a relationship with Roy.  As far as I can determine, Roy worked with the zoo to breed the white lions used in the duo’s Vegas act.  In fact, Roy seems to have been the chairman of the Zoo’s big cat breeding program, an alliance with the Cincinnati institution that seems ethically questionable to me but was probably mutually beneficial to both parties.  Siegfried and Roy got the “pick of the litter” as it were and the zoo was given beautiful white lions to exhibit to its visitors.  This arrangement dates back to, at least, 1998 when Siegfried and Roy granted the Zoo display rights to Sunshine and Future, two magnificent female white lions.  They joined Prosperity, a celebrity white lion that is said to have slept in Roy’s bed with him and that had been fed, as a cub, from a silver spoon – the lion appeared in Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas shows, arriving in a stretch limousine.  Ultimately, there were four white lions in the zoo, two females and two males.

Siegfried and Roy’s glamor evaporated in October 2003 when Mantecore, a 380 pound white Bengal tiger, mauled Roy Horn at the Mirage Casino.  The tiger dragged Horn across the stage, holding the stricken performer by his throat.  Siegfried and Roy’s animal trainer grabbed Mantecore by the tail but the beast would not relinquish it’s grasp on Roy.  Ultimately, carbon dioxide canisters had to be deployed to extricate Horn from Mantecore’s jaws.  Roy’s esophagus was crushed, his spinal cord compromised, and a ripped artery spilled most of his blood across the stage.  Horn demanded that the animal “a magnificent cat” (in his words) be spared.

Horn suffered a stroke possibly at the time of the attack, or, later, in the hospital.  He told reporters that the tiger had sensed his distress and was trying to drag him off the stage to safety.  “Mantecore saved my life,” Roy Horn said.  Later, one of his 267 employees said that Mantecore was frightened by the “beehive” hairdo of a woman in the front row of the audience.  This claim, denounced as the ravings of a drunk by Siegfried and Roy, led to an investigation into the act by the USDA which concluded that the entire show was unduly hazardous to performers, animals, and the audience – there was only a low barricade between the spectators and the cats which the tigers could easily have jumped.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Cincinnati zoo euthanized the elderly and helpless Prosperity, the limousine lion, on January 6, 2020 – just a few weeks before we visited.  Future was euthanized on account of old age (inability to walk) in 2014.  I don’t know the status of Sunshine and the other lion.  As they say in Grimm’s fairy tales: “if they are not dead, they are living still.”


29.
In my coat pocket, at the zoo, I have a bottle cap, some receipts, and a clammy banana peel.  In the winter, I always carry banana peels in my pocket  in case I encounter a beggar or poor person without gloves.  I can donate the banana peel and the indigent person can use it to make gloves to protect his or her fingers from the frost.


30.
After a dark entry, the corridor opens onto a space the size of an old-fashioned suburban living room that faces a wall of thick glass.  When my eyes accustom to the gloom, I see that the glass encloses a big space with scuffed white walls where there is a huge dead tree, something like a theater set for a modernist production of Macbeth.  The tree spreads black boughs outward, huge dark arms set in the shoulder of the trunk that rises to an abstract, splayed crown.  A big gorilla who seems to be mostly russet belly is sitting on one of the upper branches, lounging there as if on a balcony.  A smaller gorilla is sleeping face down with rump upraised in a corner of the habitat.  Another man-sized gorilla is sitting on a concrete step next to the glass.  The gorilla is a thing of darkness with black eyes and black hands and a dark black coat.  I see the gorilla next to the glass first and stumble toward the creature, almost tripping over a man who is sitting in the darkness on the ground next to the window and a few feet from the animal.  The man doesn’t say anything but nods.  He doesn’t want to disturb the gorilla who is gazing fixedly into his eyes.

I take a different vantage on the gorilla next to the glass.  The animals forehead is wrinkled, as if with deep thought, although who knows what the animal is thinking or capable of thinking.  Some cold light sifts down like snow through skylights overhead.
 
31.
Near the gorilla habitat, the sidewalk leads up a slight slope to a brick shed with a metal cupola on its roof.  The shed is the size of an ostentatious mausoleum in a Victorian cemetery and it’s door even seems to be a sort of bronze gate.

Inside it is dark again.  A few beams of artificial light pick out a display case in which there is a beautifully detailed ceramic model of a bird.  The bird is the size of a pigeon and stands atop a roost-like pedestal.  Some explanatory plaques label the bird and a mural shows the city of Cincinnati painted with a enormous flock of birds, shaped like a question mark, in the sky.

The ceramic bird is so lifelike that, at first, I think that it has real feathers and beak.  The bird’s eyes are red with black circles at their center and the creature has silvery, slightly iridescent wings and a protruding almost hemispherical breast and a cast-iron-colored beak.  The bird’s breast feathers are rufous, a bit like a robin, but a more complex color, subtly pinkish and red and brown at the same time.

It’s silent in the tomb.  Some cousins to the bird at the center of the exhibit, also ceramic apparently, are mounted to the side.  These show the sexual dimorphism of the vanished species.
The bird on the clay roost is an effigy of Martha, the world’s last known Passenger Pigeon.  She died in the Cincinnati zoo’s possession in 1914, was immediately shipped to the Smithsonian in 300 pounds of ice, where the corpse was dissected and, then, stuffed by government taxidermists – the actual feathery pelt of the last Passenger Pigeon remains in Washington, D.C.


32.
In her last years in the zoo, Martha was mostly inert.  She sat on a roost scarcely moving.  Visitors sometimes pitched sand at her to make her stir and shake her wings, but she would not take flight.  The zookeepers thought this was cruel and installed a glass barrier to keep people from pelting the last bird of her species with dust.

A couple generations before she died, Audubon described passenger pigeons as darkening the sky.  When they roosted, the birds landed on top of one another “forming solid masses as big as hogsheads” so that the boughs broke and the birds dropped in great squirming tangles suffocating one another – this Audubon tells us “destroyed hundreds of them” at a time.  The pigeons had a harsh ‘unmusical” cry that could be heard for several miles and landed in “cities” that were long and narrow.  The cacophonous pigeon cities covered acres and were L-shaped for some reason that will never be known today.  Primarily, they ate mast, an old word that refers collectively to nuts and seeds and fruit fallen to the ground under trees.  (Soft mast is fruit; hard mast is nuts and seeds – the word is from the Old English, maest, meaning “nuts”).  All animals, including humans, are destructive in great numbers.  Passenger pigeons destroyed growing crops and orchards.  Audubon describes their manure as falling like “flakes of slowly melting snow”, a literal shit-storm that filled the air with a white mist.  The manure itself was acidic and killed vegetation that it coated, although a few years after the infestation, the soil would be particularly rich and fertile where a flock had been.

Of course, everyone killed the creatures in vast numbers.  The Seneca Indians named the birds “bread” and they were apparently sweet-tasting and meaty like squab.  Hunting them was no problem – if you threw a rock at a flock, you would bring down a dozen birds.  Shot gun blasts killed thirty at a time.  By the 1870's, the birds were killed competitively – one man won a prize for destroying 30,000 in one afternoon.  (This story seems apocryphal to me – I don’t know how a tally of this kind could be maintained and the round number seems suspicious.)  The birds ranged between the Rocky Mountains and the Eastern seaboard.  Everyone knows the story of a single flock that took three days to pass some place, reported to be variously in New Jersey or Ohio.  Ornithologists describe their flocks as a macabre mechanism for population defense – they relied upon “predator satiation”, that is, hawks and humans could kill them until they were sick of killing them and, yet, the breeding population would survive.  Perhaps, as many as 3.5 billion passenger pigeons existed at one time. 
Like the high-plains locusts and the Carolina parakeets, the enormous numbers of passenger pigeons vanished, more or less, overnight.  Billions of them blackened the sky from horizon to horizon in 1870.  Around 1900, the last pigeon was killed in the wild by an Ohio farm boy (that man lived until 1979).  The farm boy’s family understood the importance of the kill – they had a local taxidermist stuff the bird, albeit crudely (buttons were sewn to the feathered skin for eyes).  The last wild passenger pigeon’s corpse can be seen in Ohio State History Museum in Columbus.

There is debate about the demise of the passenger pigeon.  Satiation predators, like men with guns, could not possibly have murdered 3.5 billion breeding (and, therefore, replenishing) birds.  Other factors must have been at work although it’s unclear what they were.  Deforestation depleted the mast on which the birds foraged, but this factor is also insufficient as a cause for their extinction.  In 2014, geneticists discovered that passenger pigeon DNA, extracted from the skins of museum specimens, showed cyclical reductions in genetic diversity – although the analysis is complex, we now know that the passenger pigeons went through periods of time in which their flocks were relatively small, and, therefore, less genetically diverse.  It’s believed that the population of the pigeons waxed and waned over the centuries.  Apparently, the huge population of birds witnessed during the middle years of the 19th century was one of their periodic increases in numbers – these population booms, however, were always followed by “busts”.  Unfortunately for the species, the destined diminution in population coincided with human impact in the form of habitat destruction and overhunting – and, thus, the species became extinct.

(The truncated biography of the passenger pigeon is eerily similar to the deadly locust infestations that occurred during the same period.  The Rocky Mountain locust devastated croplands to the extent that the army, then, hunting down and killing off the Indians, had to be diverted from this task to delivering foodstuffs and other provisions to farmers on the High Plains rendered destitute by the insects.  But these locusts, literally innumerable, became extinct to the extent that there were not even any museum specimens in existence – what we know about the locusts today is derived from chiseling frozen ‘hoppers out of glaciers in Montana and Wyoming.)

An zoologist named Whitman had a breeding flock of captive passenger pigeons at the University of Chicago.  He sent a dozen birds to the Cincinnati zoo around the turn of the 20th century in the hope of perpetuating the species.  By 1910, only three of the birds survived, George and Martha, and a third unnamed bird.  Within the year, George and the other bird died, leaving Martha widowed.  The zookeepers at the Cincinnati Zoo offered a reward of $10,000 dollars (the equivalent of $256,000 today) to anyone would could capture and bring to the zoo a male bird to mate with Martha.  The reward went unclaimed and Martha died on September 1, 1914 and, with her, the species that she represented.

 
33.
It is a curious to note that the last Carolina parakeet in existence also died in the Cincinnati zoo.  This was on February 21, 1918.  Like the passenger pigeons, the Carolina parakeets had alse existed in vast flocks, the only species of parrot indigenous to the continental United States.  Although beautiful, with melodious voices, the parakeets were pests and their vast rainbow-colored flocks destroyed crops and fruit wherever they went.  These birds were also hunted and, ultimately, vanished  around 1900.  Several Carolina parakeets lived in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo but they didn’t successfully breed and by the time of World War One, only one of them remained, a bird named Incas.  The zookeepers reported that Incas and his mate, Lady Jane, produced more than a dozen eggs, but as soon as the eggs were laid, the birds rolled them out of their nest to be destroyed on the concrete below.  The zookeepers and Cincinnati newspapers announced that Incas, who perished a few months after Lady Jane, had “died of grief.”
   
When Incas died in February 1918, his cadaver was also put in a container with 300 pounds of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian.  It was war-time and the delivery of mails was somewhat perturbed and the dead parakeet in his icy sepulcher never reached Washington.  No one knows what happened to the specimen.  (In the past decade, there has been some speculation that the shipment was never made and that the dead bird, instead, was sent to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, and, there, tagged incorrectly.  Examination of bird specimens in the museum’s collection haven’t discovered Incas mummified cadaver.)



34.
A gay, broad-tailed squirrel with bright black eyes is playing in the elm tree above the flamingo habitat.  The flamingos look like thorny bouquets of long-stemmed roses.  The squirrel executes daring leaps from branch to branch, scrambling up into the swaying crown of the tree. 
If squirrels were rare or came from some exotic clime, we would regard them as a wonder of the world.


35.
In the late 1920's, Macedonian immigrants operated lunch counters in downtown Cincinnati.  These restaurants served an odd “fusion” dish (as we would say today), Cincinnati chili.  When you are in Cincinnati, of course, there is a temptation to stop at one of the ubiquitous chili joints for a bowl of the stuff.  Two chains dominate the market – Gold Star and Skyline – and they advertise extensively on Tv and the radio.  Gold Star touts its chili as not being “watery” and never frozen; Skyline claims its flavor is superior and its portions larger.

Jack and I stopped at a Skyline chili emporium near the zoo.  The place was large, had its own dedicated parking lot behind the building, and the food was served with startling rapidity.  When you are seated in one of these places, the waitress brings you a bowl of oyster crackers.  You can order the chili three-way or four way: three-way means spaghetti noodles with meat and tomato sauce covered with neon-orange shredded cheddar cheese; four-way adds kidney beans to the concoction.  The Greek origin of the chili is evident in the seasonings in the red meat sauce, made, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a secret recipe involving various herbs and spices – on the basis of taste, the tomato sauce is enlivened with cinnamon, nutmeg, all-spice and cumin.  (Some home recipes also add dark chocolate).

Skyline’s chili was, indeed, watery.  After eating the cheddar cheese and most of the noodles, a few tablespoons of water remained in the oval bowl.  The noodles are cooked until they are limp and tasteless – very thin noodles, like vermicelli, are used.  The meat sauce, once you are used to it, is okay – although it tastes nothing like Southwestern chili.  A platter of the chili costs about 4.98 and is a good bargain – you get plenty of noodles, ground beef and cheddar cheese.  But the stuff is soupy with slimy noodles and the cheddar cheese isn’t exactly fresh, although it is claimed to be, and here is my advice to travelers: unless you are curious about this food item, said to be iconic in Cincinnati, I think, it’s best avoided.


36.
I had a banana from the hotel in my pocket and I think I ate it on the drive back near Indianapolis.  I was a bit disheartened to see that bananas cut lengthwise are the food of choice of many arthropods kept in terrariums in the World of Insects at the Cincinnati Zoo.  The big ebony millipedes coiled like springs in their glass case seemed sleeping on brown and decaying banana pillows and the taxi-cab cockroaches orange and yellow also swarmed the sliced banana.  Beetles, in general, were all provided with fodder in the form of a half-decayed banana set in the glass terrarium.

The enormous bird-eating spider was folded-up, a bit like a hairy brown fist.  I couldn’t see how it was fed.


37.
On the outskirts of Cincinnati, next to I-75, there is a cyclone fence surrounding a fire scene.  Some blackened shells of metal rear up over a heap of jagged slag.  Ash and soot blow in the wind.  A sign has been posted on the cyclone fence: Thank you Firefighters.

It’s impossible to determine whether the message is meant to be sincere or sarcastic.  Not much seems to have survived the blaze.


38.
The impeachment, which is a series of speeches, clogs up the air-waves.  When you enter Indiana, all the public radio stations vanish and their frequencies are replaced by Christian broadcasting programs – preachers yammering about salvation and the love of Jesus and the fires of Hell.  It’s distressing and reminds you of the handsome, white corpse-face of the dullard Mike Pence


39.
Along the I-75 corridor, one encounters innumerable signs advertising for personal injury lawyers.  Since I am a personal injury lawyer and since I have never advertised, I find these billboards distasteful.  One thuggish-looking guy advertises that he is the “Hammer” and that he wants you to call him if you are in “a big truck” accident.  The billboards helpfully show examples of big trucks if your, perhaps, in doubt as to what this means – schematic semi-tractor-trailer rigs, panel trucks, dump trucks and cement mixers with big rotating drums.  The Hammer’s number is 1-800-888-8888 and he claims to have collected a “billion dollars’ for his clients.  The Hammer’s competitors have their own billboards. Keller & Keller uses sex-appeal – the lady lawyer shown on the billboard looks like Ava Gardner; she can be your advocate.

One lawyer’s billboard ad is particularly unfortunate.  The guy, who looks scrawny and freckle-faced, is wearing boxing gloves.  Presumably, he will punch opposing counsel and the iniquitous insurance companies into submission.  But the billboard shows the skinny, slope-shouldered lawyer wearing white boxing gloves.  From a distance, it looks as if the tough guy is carrying a couple of fleecy-white baby lambs against his chest.  Viewed from closer range, the lawyer looks like the victim of a terrible burn injury that has left his flayed and blistered hands swathed in white surgical gauze.


40.
The coronavirus is on the march.


41.
I exit the freeway at Crawfordsville where I plan to see the building in which General Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, A Story of the Christ.  The structure is depicted on the internet as a brick building with a domed copper roof and a round tower.  Except for a few openings piercing the facade next to the entrance, the study is windowless – in fact, it is more than windowless: there are sills and window indentations in the walls for decorative purposes but they were bricked-up from the building’s inception.  It’s an elegant crypt of a building that I would like to see with my own eyes.  But the museum is closed for the season and this renders the place invisible as far as computer directions are concerned.  If you can’t get in to the museum, then, the Internet assumes that there’s no reason for you to go and, in fact, doesn’t want you to waste your time and so there are no Google directions to the place – you’re on your own in a maze of roads running through impoverished hollows in a leafless deciduous forest, no snow here, just brown litter under the trees and broken bottles on the shoulder of the road and ugly little sheds that are evangelical churches of no known denomination.  The cars and pickups all know where they are going and they come up fast behind you as you hesitate at intersections and. if you’re not careful, one of the big trucks might clip you so that you will require the services of the Hammer or his ilk.

At the end of a lane, I come upon a junkyard.  I don’t care that much about General Lew Wallace anyway, read his best seller when I was in seventh grade, I think, and didn’t much like it (too sanctimonious), and the free-standing study that he built in which to write his books isn’t open anyway.  And, so, it’s best to make my way back onto the freeway.


42.
Driving north on I-39 toward Rockford, snow covers the ground, a dirty mat about six inches deep, and ground fog is rising.  In the distance, I can see things like ghostly battleships or vacation cruise-line cruisers with amusement parks erected, it seems, on their upper decks – these are vast grain elevators hovering near the horizon.

The all-grey sky and earth create freaks of perception.  I think I can see some sort of huge shadow moving across the sky far away to the West and, when I roll down my window, I hear harsh, unmusical and metallic cries.  But it’s just my imagination.


January - February 2020