I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can be / I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can be / That man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.
1.
In St. Louis, skunks are everywhere, cunning urban skunks concealed in alleyways and empty lots and the shrubbery around homes. There are skunks in the cemetery and skunks at the Indian mounds, skunks behind every restaurant where a tired cook is sitting on a folding chair under a light that casts its rays on the old brick walls and the shattered cement of the alleyway. You never see the critters, but just can smell them, the odor wafting over every sidewalk and parking lot.
Skunks, maybe, or weed.
2.
Prof. Jeffrey Blomster is an archaeologist with tenure at George Washington University (Elliot School of International Affairs). He tells this story: with some colleagues, he was invited to a conference on Meso-American archaeology presented at the St. Louis Museum of Art. Blomster teaches anthropology at GW and wasn’t able to leave D.C. until the conclusion of his afternoon class. It’s a 12 ½ drive from Washington to St. Louis. Around dawn, Blomster and his associates crossed the Mississippi River and arrived in St. Louis. It was time for breakfast and, so, they stopped at a Perkins restaurant. The menu featured an item called “The Magnificent Five” consisting of two buttermilk pancakes, bacon or sausage, two eggs, hash browns, and toast. After eating, Blomster and his colleagues drove to the St. Louis Art Museum. Before the conference, they examined the museum’s pre-Columbian exhibits. Chief among those artifacts were five beautifully crafted and spectacular Zapotec urns. The urns, built for burning copal incense, were the size of basketballs and, more or less, identical. They represented the Zapotec rain and lightning god, Cocijo, inscrutable with crossed legs and a wide apron-shaped loin cloth. Cocijo is zoomorphic with a broad snout split in a way that suggests a cleft palate; in his snout’s fissure, a serpent’s tongue is visible. He wears an architectural facade as a headdress, a great fan-shaped assembly of mirrors and feathers over his hoop earrings and a pectoral depicting the sun. Blomster and his associates were mesmerized. The urns were made from hardened grey clay showing flecks of red pigment. “They are the ‘Magnificent Five’,” someone declared. Everyone laughed. They were giddy with exhaustion.
At the museum, I looked at the “Magnificent Five” in their glass case, illumined in white light the color of heaven. Only four of the urns, part of the Morton May collection, were on display. But I had seen the fifth one upstairs in a gallery exhibition focused on cross-connections between different art and cultures. The urns’ state of preservation is astonishing and the scale of the ceramic figures is very precise – any smaller and they would seem unprepossessing, too much detail crammed into an effigy too small. On a larger scale, the effigy would be overwhelming, terrifying, an emblem of power from which any reasonable person would flee.
The Zapotec urns are described and indexed in the Catalogue of Zapotec Effigy Vessels as SLAM 249.1978.
3.
There is a below-grade courtyard, really just a narrow slot between buildings, with windows at chest-height in the gallery that opens into this constricted space – it seems to be about 20 feet wide running the length of the Meso-American (and prehistoric Indian) gallery. An installation comprised of rough brick arches of the sort one might imagine in a Roman aqueduct fills the subterranean courtyard. This is a site-specific art work by Andy Goldsworthy called “Stone Sea.” The window openings in the gallery wall are partially obscured by some greyish, semi-transparent mesh covering the glass. This produces the effect of looking into an adjacent area that is tightly packed with crests at the apex of the arches and deep troughs between them – the viewer seems to looking into a narrow place filled with criss-crossing immobile waves. The reason the work is called “Stone Sea” is that the slabs from which the arches are made have been hewn from limestone, the bedrock underlying this part of Missouri, an ubiquitous building material that represents the sediment of a prehistoric ocean.
At first, I don’t recognize that there is art pushed into the gap between buildings. I am looking at a display of copper tablets discovered in the area. The coppers are dusky green and incised with marks that show bird-like figures with raptor beaks – these are either predator deities or dancers dressed as eagles and hawks, the sort of beak-nosed figure that appears on the so-called “Bird man” tablet, a red-glazed ceramic found at Cahokia. When I look up from the array of oxidized coppers, I see the humps and hollows of the frozen sea installed between the buildings, a shadowy geometry of intersecting arches.
4.
SLAM: St. Louis Art Museum: you can go upstairs and see the Griggs gallery lined with big paintings by Max Beckmann, the largest display of this artist’s work anywhere in the world. Beckmann’s early works are drab wall-sized canvases of calamities – men struggling in the aftermath of an earthquake that has knocked down walls and the rule of law, pale corpses floating in the sea, shipwrecked people painted as in “The Raft of the Medusa” with the Titanic in the background parked up against a blue-white iceberg. The pictures in the rotunda of the gallery represent Beckmann’s work at all stages in his career: expressionistic dreamscapes, florid nudes that seem in dialogue with Picasso’s women, and the huge, late and enigmatic triptychs. These are works collected by Morton May, the department store owner responsible for the invitation extended to Beckmann to teach at Washington University in St. Louis after World War II. Beckmann was only on the faculty for nine months and never learned English – his wife had to translate for him when he spoke to his students. After that period, Beckmann left St. Louis and moved to New York City where he died about four or five years later. But he left many artworks in the Midwestern city, sold to his benefactor, the department store emperor.
5.
At the Moonrise Hotel, I hopped out of bed with a bad cramp in my left calf. As far as I could tell, it was still dark outside. The room was cluttered and very moist. During our three night stay, no chambermaid came to clean our room. The humidity glazed the bathroom mirrors in the morning and my car was soaked with dew and, it seemed, that our clothing was always damp as a freshly used towel. Once, Angelica was caught in a thunderstorm and soaked. Her wet tennis shoes were in the corner of the room with sodden socks. The cramp in my leg made me think that I should buy a banana to eat. My wife once told me that leg cramps are due to potassium deficiencies. Bananas are supposed to be a good source for potassium. Of course, the entire topic is cloaked in ignorance: I have no idea what causes leg cramps (I think it my be correlated to dehydration) and there’s no reason to think that bananas are particularly rich in potassium.
Nonetheless, after spending ninety minutes in the wet and misty Bellefontaine Cemetery, we stopped at a Kwik Star (the Missouri - Iowa version of the Kwik Trip gas stations and convenience stores in Minnesota) and I bought several spotted bananas there. Angelica had complimented a couple of Black girls on their hair and they asked her why we were visiting St. Louis. She didn’t have a good explanation. The girls were excited about attending a concert downtown that night – someone named Youngboy NBA, a rapper, was performing and the young women were thrilled that they would see him in a few hours.
6.
Bellefontaine cemetery is a large wooded expanse, landscaped like a 19th century urban park – a bit like Forest Park in central St. Louis or Olmsted’s Central Park in Manhattan. The graveyard has rolling hills, a small misty lake, and several nondescript chapels near the asphalt lane that winds and loops through the premises, spawning off-shoots and divagations with names like “Memory Lane” and “Ravine Trail”. No one wants to carry a heavy casket too far and, so, the network of roadways makes a pattern of curves and junctions running like veins through the cemetery: the design objective seems to be that no burial site be more than 80 feet from an all-weather lane. The road network seems vaguely organic. It’s like a schematic diagram of neural pathways, nodes, and ganglia superimposed over the shady graveyard. Many pointed obelisks stud the park and, in certain areas, there are rows of granite closet-like mausoleums, most of them looking like sedate and dignified public toilets. White angels crouch atop broken pillars and there are statues with wings and weeping eyes in niches atop slabs of rusticated granite. We have a map of the cemetery and our plan is to locate the graves of the brewers Busch and Wainwright and the obelisk marking the burial site of William Clark, the man who mapped the West with Meriweather Lewis.
7.
The cemetery is enclosed by a high cast-iron fence, greasy with condensation on the morning that we visited. The gateway nearest the freeway exit looks as if it has been welded shut. The neighborhood is sketchy with crumbling brick warehouses, small cabins with overgrown backyards, and a single mortuary located in a weather-beaten Victorian house. The cemetery that I visited in Hamburg, an even larger graveyard, had a quasi-medieval expressionist-style crematorium, a museum, several huge chapels full of stained-glass windows and carved wood, and many shops selling flowers, bouquets and wreaths along an elegant boulevard dotted with the ateliers of stone carvers and masons. Bellefontaine, by contrast, is a leafy enclave on the edges of dour-looking slum and the business of death is really nowhere evident. Most of the graves are old, pompous-looking, overstuffed like Victorian furniture.
It’s easy enough find the Busch mausoleum, a spiky hedgehog of a tomb, with spines and pointed Gothic windows arrayed touch-me-not style at a prominent location where the loop road (painted with a white line down the center) curves between smaller stall-like sepulchers. The thing is red brick, colored like a half-healed wound, and seems to imitate the ciborium that Queen Victoria had built in Kensington Park for her late husband, Prince Albert.
The Wainwright mausoleum is some distance away from the Busch tomb. Photos show the stone structure resplendent at the end of a green carpet of grass. These pictures are taken with a lens that has the effect of making the tomb seem set back from the roadway. In fact, the building is also very close to the roadway but the mausoleum’s strange dignity makes it seem set aside, isolated; it’s as if the tomb insulates itself from adjacent graves by a distance that the masonry seems to secrete. Louis Sullivan, the great architect who taught Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the mausoleum. It is a paradigmatic structure, a square-built block of tomb into which a round dome is inserted – this is one of the oldest of architectural forms: the circle within the square. The sepulcher is erected on a simple granite platform comprised of four steps that ascend to grey stone enclosure with benches flanking the box of the mausoleum. The tomb’s door is bronze that has ripened to a lush green patina that seems to approximate the ivy pattern in the heavy gate. An intricate floral pattern incised into the grey slabs surrounds the entrance and runs as a decorative frieze across the top and sides of the box-shaped mausoleum. The effect is similar to another dramatic circle within a square, the intricate jewel box of the Farmers National Bank at Owatonna, Minnesota, one of Sullivan’s most beautiful creations and the product of the great architect’s last, whiskey-soaked years. The Wainwright tomb is eloquent without being vulgar and its measurements are a model of proportion, elegant stasis, and mathematical rigor. The structure exudes a neo-classical equipoise without, however, seeming antique. This is a product of modernity, the same genius implicit in the Wainwright building downtown in St. Louis, the prototype of the skyscraper. Among the bric-a-brac of the other graves, the fluted, rhetorically smashed columns, the devastated angels, and the ornate, tub-like sarcophagi, the Wainwright mausoleum is timeless, complete in itself, a paradoxically airy monument to the world of iron, locomotives, and, ultimately, airplanes.
8.
I have some sort of pre-conception that William Clark’s grave will be set aside on a knoll that once overlooked the Mississippi River and its confluence with the Missouri. I imagine a clearing cut from the brush, an old stone bearing only a few words, a memorial simple and rustic befitting a great explorer. As a consequence of this misunderstanding, we drive in circles on the leaf-strewn looping lanes, actually passing Clark’s grave several times, a florid monument that doesn’t comport to my notion as to how it should look. In fact, the grave is ostentatious, a tall obelisk on a large granite platform, an elevated porch large enough to hold a modest chamber orchestra. The inset benches and steps leading up to the rusticated podium from which the obelisk springs are occupied by three fat women who look exhausted, heavy-set dames with some scrawny teenage kids with them. They are crowding around a big, sculpted bust of Clark, three-times life-size with a heavy beak of a nose like one of the raptor-dancers on the coppers retrieved from prehistoric Mississippian sites at the St. Louis Art Museum. The heart of the obelisk, or, perhaps, its loins, are cut with the level and compass of the Freemasons and there are Greek initials chopped into the stone. Under the capitalized Greek letters, a smaller carved legend reads “Behold, the Lord thy God hath set up the Land before thee. Go up and possess it.” This is a citation from Deuteronomy LXXI. Two long inscriptions remind us of Clark’s adventures in the West. The altar-like stone platform that offers the obelisk to the sky is decorated with a mask-like sculpture of a bison and a grizzly bear.
The fat ladies have some tangled paranormal investigation equipment spread out on the stone platform: wires, amplifiers, an electronic ear to capture whispers from the Beyond. Presumably, Clark is muttering to himself in the grave, or commenting on the present plight of the Republic, or, perhaps, reminiscing about the way West in 1803 and 1804 – the Sioux roasting whole buffalo on spits, the lithe Mandan girls, the winter lodges on the upper Mississippi, the river boats in the mirror-glaze of the river and the herds of antelope grazing in the shallows. The wires and amplifiers comprise a listening station for EVP – that is, Electronic Voice Phenomenon; they have tuned their frequency to the eerie static-ridden wavelength on which ghosts communicate. As we park our car and hike over the wet grass to the monument, the fat ladies and teenagers seem disconcerted. One of them scribbles a note on a pad of paper and, then, a little abashed, they retreat from the monument to their pick-up truck also parked along the shady lane. All the heavy granite, the altar of stone with inscriptions, the glaring grizzly and the placid, philosophical looking buffalo – all this hewn and chopped rock makes a hard shell around whatever is left of the Great Explorer. If he’s singing in his casket, we can’t hear him.
9.
It’s a lot harder to find the grave of the novelist William S. Burroughs. That location isn’t mapped on our brochure which largely plots the last resting places of industrialists, brewers, abolitionists, and crusading lawyers. But we can access the internet and use the “Find-a-grave” application to guide ourselves to the Burrough family plot.
The author’s namesake, his grandfather William Seward Burroughs (1857 - 1898), rests under another stake of stone obelisk. The words carved on the monument remind us of the man’s genius: he was the inventor of a patented calculating machine and founded the American Arithmometer Company in 1886 – later renamed post-mortem for the inventor as the Burroughs Adding Machine Company in 1903. William S. Burroughs, the author of The Naked Lunch and other provocations, was born 1914. The words “American Writer” are inscribed into the small lozenge-shaped gravestone a five yards from the white phallus of his father’s obelisk. Burroughs is called “William Seward Burroughs” (1914 - 1997). Visitors have piled-up pens on the little stone – to the right and left of the name and dates, I count about 12 pens and 9 respectively. A small yellow tablet about the size of a pack of cards lies half-open on the gravestone. Someone has put a shiny dime in the middle of the “o” in Burroughs and there is more change, mostly nickels, quarters, and pennies by the writing utensils on the right side of the stone. A small grey stone serves as a paperweight to a sketch drawn on a sheet of paper from the yellow tablet. A crudely drawn car is shown driving along a road way that leads to a small house with a pyramid-shaped roof. Next to the house, there are bushes that look vaguely like ears. Below the car, the word “ONWARDS!” appears. Some scattered clouds are sketched over the car and form a pattern covering the rest of the sheet. Despite the oppressive humidity and the wet dew-soaked grass, the drawing remains dry and legible as does the pad of paper. Otherwise the air and shrubs and, even, some of the moist stones are like wicks soaking up the ambient water.
I think it would be more interesting to eavesdrop on Burroughs’ post-mortem musings than to overhear William Clark. But that’s just a matter of personal taste. I don’t see any evidence that anyone has tried to record ghost voices in this part of the cemetery. There is a discolored concrete bench between the adding machine inventor’s obelisk and the grave of his grandson, the celebrated writer. I rest there listening for messages. Some dry leaves whisper as the skitter across the grass.
10.
I have driven to a part of St. Louis called Lafayette Square. Old textile and woodworking factories have been converted to loft apartments. The buildings are brown and sedulous, fortified long-houses with little windows and aprons of cobble-stone. One of these structures houses Eleven-Eleven, an upscale restaurant. The interior is raw brick, timber pylons, and several platforms on which tables are set; the ceilings are high enough that two and a half levels of dining hall can be stacked beneath them – there is a little elevated balcony, closed this evening, about five steps above the second-floor table where Angelica and I are dining. An anaconda-shaped conduit clings to the side of the peaked ceiling conveying smoke and fumes from the open-plan kitchen out into the humid air. Sweaty chefs are laboring behind serving counters at the rear of the room. Steam and little, transient tempests of fire billow over the hot grills and gas ranges.
I am eating a wonderful hunk of meat, a braised pork-shank served with crunchy onion rings, more caramelized onion, and a cherry sauce. At the table behind Angelica, who sits across from me with a casserole of grilled and fried mushrooms, there are four girls. The young women are festive in short summer dresses, sleeveless blouses, and heeled sandals. Their arms are bare and several of them are wearing shirts with scooped out fronts to expose moist and fragrant-looking cleavage. The girls have ordered drinks served to them in a either embossed copper cups (for the vodka mules) or martini glasses. They are all attractive, self-confident it seems, in no particular hurry to reach the gathering -- a club with a dance-hall or a mansion-house party -- for which they seem to be dressed.
A day later, Angelica and I are eating sushi and ramen noodles with pork belly in miso soup. We are seated in a café called Blue Ocean on Delmar, near Washington University. The walls of the restaurant are decorated with posters depicting robot warriors, wide-eyed anime fairies, manga samurai and princesses and pokemon. There is a six-foot picture of Totoro, yellow as the sun, painted on the wall next to the small bar with its mirror beside metal shelves holding bottles of plum wine and sake.
At the table next to us, a fat boy in blue levi jeans is eating sashimi. The fat boy has a ferny, weak beard dispersed across the lower half of his plump face. He wears round granny glasses. Across the table from the fat boy, a smaller young man is slurping soup and noodles. He has a pale doughy face and seems to be so out-of-shape that each inhaled slurp of noodles pains him so that he grunts ever-so-slightly with the effort. The two young men are students and they are discussing different video games that they have mastered. Then, the doughy boy talks a little about his mother and recites some of her recipes for tacos made with kimchee or Chinese hot-pot. I gather that the boys are planning to attend a concert at one of the venues on the street; the doors are not yet open.
The four young women at Eleven-Eleven, cool and radiant, seem to belong to another species than the boys in the sushi place. The boys are incels – that is, involuntary celibates. Their white flesh is covered with ill-fitting, food-stained tee shirts, and pants cuddling their bellies that seem about to overflow over tightly drawn belts. I can’t even imagine the young women speaking to the boys or encountering them in any social setting. If they were to collide, the young woman would regard it as an affront, but so trivial as to not warrant comment or, even, any sort of derision. The two species, the garland of girls and the incels obsessing about computer games, have nothing to do with one another. They couldn’t breed or, even, interact if they wished to.
One of the incel boys says that he is carving from mahogany a special controller for gaming. The wooden appliance will be smooth, lacquered with fine veneer, and, perfectly proportioned to the boy’s hand. I’m eavesdropping and pretending to be not attentive to the kids and their banter about Asian food and computer games. I expect that the business about the mahogany joystick and controller is something that I have either misheard or misconstrued.
11.
Angelica has booked a ghost walk. The participants are supposed to meet the tour guide at the War Memorial in downtown St. Louis. The tour starts at 8:00 pm but the guide has emailed ticket-holders and told them to meet at 7:45. The War Memorial is sepulchral building with fluted art deco columns and strangely featureless colossi flanking the shallow, ramp-like steps leading up to its sinister bronze doors. The facade is monolithic, square-cut, and fascist – it looks like it was designed by Albert Speer. The monumental sculptural groups are burly abstract figures that seem to have been sandblasted into anonymity, muscular men and women either straining to rein huge rearing horses or about to be trampled by those beasts.
St. Louis is built on a very gradual slope that tilts imperceptibly downward to the Mississippi River marked by Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch and the twin domes of the old Courthouse and old Roman Catholic cathedral. Union Station, now an expensive hotel with train-shed converted into an aquarium, is halfway to the river, midway between the freeways carving their way through the city at the crest of the hill and low terrace where the Arch stands overlooking the river. The Station is decorated by a gleaming, brightly lit Ferris wheel. Angelica’s rendezvous location at the War Memorial is four blocks toward the river from the Station and, in principle, a place very easily accessed. But on this specific evening, 20,000 fans have gathered to attend the Youngboy NBA concert scheduled in the arena kitty-corner from the War Memorial. Long lines of kids snake along the sidewalk, and the crowd bulges into the roadway. Mobs block the intersections, loitering on the roadway as they select the best, least-crowded approach to the concert stadium. The traffic is panicked, cars making sudden u-turns, careening the wrong way down one-way streets, jamming on brakes suddenly to let out passengers who, then, linger on the right-of-way. Webs and nets of concert-goers are stretched across the road and the intersections and I can’t make much progress toward the War Memorial with its haggard, Nazi facade at the end of the boulevard. This part of the city accesses freeways to the south and north and the roads are a confused tangle of one-ways, some of the main thoroughfares blocked by cop cars with spinning lights. The parking lots for ten blocks in all directions are advertising “Event Parking” (the event being the appearance of Youngboy NBA) at $45 a car. Somehow, I manage to penetrate the streets jammed with cars and pedestrians and let Angelica out in front of the stony, silent War Memorial. A couple of other ghost walkers are seated on the steps in front of the hollow skull of the Memorial. Behind me, the crowds are surging toward the doors of the arena that are just now opening.
Angelica’s ghost walk is supposed to be concluded at 9:30. She has paid seven extra dollars for four additional stops not covered by the main guided tour. I drive aimlessly along the streets uphill from the Young Boy NBA concert and the War Memorial. Then, I park at a Double Peach hotel, go into the bar, and order a margarita to sip as I read my book, Larry McMurtrey’s Lonesome Dove. A baseball game is playing on the TV. The waitress brings me my drink and I tell her that it’s crazy down the street at the Arena where Youngboy NBA is playing. The girl, who is black, says to me: “I would like to go to that concert myself. But I have to work.” I think that the hordes of concertgoers also seem to belong to a different species than the girls at Eleven-Eleven and the incel boys in the sushi place. Evolution is divergent. Species of homo sapiens are proliferating here in St. Louis.
12.
Angelica phones me from the shopping arcade at Union Station. Her tour has ended in the old train station. Several ghosts have apparently taken up residence at hotel occupying the station. There is a woman in white, a headless railroad employee, a small toddler who cries inconsolably. Angelica tells me that much of the tour involved sites associated with lynchings that occurred in the wake of East St. Louis race riots on July 1 - 3, 1917. The tour guide said the race riots were bloody, part of the “Red Summer of 1917.” No one else had bought the extended tour and, so, it was just Angelica and the guide walking down Market Street to Union Station. Angelica said that the last part of the tour was perfunctory and that the girl-guide seemed poorly prepared. She pointed to a shallow water feature, a catchwater basin between lanes on the boulevard. “It’s haunted,” the girl guide said. She told Angelica that the vicious white mayor of East St. Louis, his hands dripping with blood from the race riot, drowned himself in that catch-basin. On humid mornings, he rises from the slimy water as a wisp of mist. Of course, there was no explanation for why the Mayor of East St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, had wandered into the central city on the river’s west bank to kill himself. We drove by the catch basin, an elliptical pool between one-way lanes on the boulevard. It’s obviously an artifact of the construction of new buildings in this area, a drainage pond for the various parking ramps and new buildings erected in the area. So, it is unclear to me how the unfortunate mayor killed himself in a three-foot deep catchwater basin that wouldn’t exist until, at least, fifty years after the grisly race riot.
13.
Back at the Moonrise Hotel at the Delmar Loop, concerts are also underway at various reconstituted movie theaters up and down the avenue. The restaurants are hopping and the sidewalks crowded with university kids looking for trouble. The free self-parking lots behind hotel are fully occupied. There is no vacancy anywhere to park. So I have to use the Valet Parking at the hotel ($28 per night). The valet is a tall handsome black kid with dreadlocks wearing a jacket, white shirt, and camouflage shorts. I mention to him that downtown was crowded with Youngboy NBA fans.
“I would have gone myself,” the valet parking kid says, “but I had to work. Youngboy NBA has over a billion hits on his song posted on Facebook.”
“Over a billion hits?”
The Valet Parking kid grins (his mouth and teeth are pearly). “Yes, over a billion hits,” he says proudly as if the accomplishment were somehow his own.
14.
Youngboy NBA was born in 1999 in Baton Rouge. His given name is Kentrell DeSean Gaudren. “NBA” stands for “Never Broken Again”. He has made many records and has had a number of top ten Billboard Hits. He’s also been implicated in several drive-by shootings, attempted murders, and felony drug charges. In May of 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned him for federal gun offenses – at the time, he was on House Arrest at his mansion and estate in Salt Lake City, Utah. Youngboy NBA returned the favor by going on his “Make America Slime Again” tour, including the concert in St. Louis that inconvenienced me when I had to drive through the throngs of his fans.
Youngboy NBA has acknowledged ten children with eight women. He is said to have fathered at least two more children.
15.
A movie theater refurbished into a concert hall is across the alley from the Moonrise Hotel. On a narrow strip of windowless brick, a big portrait of Josephine Baker has been painted, her peach-shaped face hanging over the lane that leads through the block of hotel and adjacent buildings to the parking lots behind. Ms. Baker’s face emanates a gaudy aureole of fruity pink and yellow color. Her eyes are slightly rolled and her wet lip are partly open as if she is about sigh or whisper.
Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906. She became famous dancing in the Folies Bergere in Paris in a revue in 1927. In that show, she appeared naked except for a beaded necklace and a short skirt comprised of bananas. She wouldn’t perform for segregated audiences and, so, remained in France, becoming a citizen of that country in 1937. After World War Two, she was awarded the Resistance Medal and Croix de Guerre for wartime valor. De Gaulle also made her a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
When she was eleven, during the “Red Summer” of 1917, she stood on the west bank of the Mississippi and watched East St. Louis burn in the race riots. For the rest of her life, she recalled the procession of Blacks crossing the bridge into Missouri, wounded, terrified, and with no possessions except the clothes on their back.
17.
W. C. Handy (1873 - 1958), the composer of “The St. Louis Blues”, was a trumpeter and brass band director. Photographs show a compact man who looks like a member of a small-town Rotary or Optimist’s club. “The St. Louis Blues” was written out and distributed on sheet music. Real Delta Blues men discount Handy’s composition because it begins with a tango riff, a Cuban habanero. T. Bone Walker says that the song, although “fine music,” is not blues because you “can’t dress up that form” with imported elements of that sort. Handy explained the so-called “Spanish tinge” to the music in two ways. First, he said that when he wrote the song, based on a melody he heard sung in St. Louis in 1892, the tango was all the rage in 1914's dance-halls; Handy claimed he used the tango figure in the song’s introduction to lure dancers onto the floor only to surprise them with low-down, dirty blues. Rag-time was also important in St. Louis. The town was home to Scott Joplin. Handy has also said that he wanted to syncopate the bridge and accompaniment to the blues and that the habanero riff provided that opportunity. (I have visited Joplin’s home in St. Louis and I favor the latter explanation – the syncopation in the piano line sounds like Joplin’s form of ragtime.) In any event, the song proved very popular and entered the musical vernacular – the 12 bar blues section in which the singer performs a line that is repeated with the third line serving as commentary or completion of the lyrical thought lends itself well to improvisation. Handy recalled that people would make up hundreds of lines and sing the song all night long.
18.
It’s always hot down behind the levee at the river. The sun is overhead, searching the stone and glass canyons, and there’s no shade. The big arch hangs overhead like a blazing blue ribbon but casts no shadow. In the old Federal Courthouse, the exhibits are all about slavery and the Dred Scott decision. Large grainy photographs of Dred Scott and his wife adorn the walls, next to paintings showing John Brown on his way to be hanged. A photograph of the terrorist shows Brown with a maniacal gleam in his eye and an off-kilter jaw locked down to prevent even a ghost of a smile from crossing his face. Do his eyes really look ‘maniacal’ or am I just imposing what I know about the man in “bleeding” Kansas and Harper’s Ferry on the image? We never see with innocent eyes.
Under the lofty rotunda, some period photographs illustrate the construction of the dome: iron girders and straps were used to form the curves in the dome, a building technique similar to that used at the Federal capitol in Washington. Two long blocks away, we enter the old Cathedral of St. Louis the King. Some sort of service is underway. The air is dense with incense, an objectionable, pungent odor similar to the ubiquitous skunk, and a procession of priests and altar boys are slowly striding down the central aisle between the pews, walking behind a large cross mounted on an eight-foot pole; censers are swinging like bell clappers at the front and end of the procession and the altar boys seem drugged, somnambulant, in a kind of ecstatic daze, while the priests in their bright vestments gaze at me and Angelica with skeptical eyes. Whatever is underway here probably should not be seen with secular or profane gaze. The pews are crowded with nuns, all facing away from our vantage, anonymous cowls of various faded colors: blue and green and mouse-grey. Some of the nuns seem to be foreign with dark hands and wrists. The congregation of nuns are singing an old hymn and an elderly priest has entered the elevated cage of the pulpit and seems about to speak. A crowned mannequin beckons beside some ranks of lit votive candles.
Only two blocks away, the Wainwright building overlooks a small leafy plaza. The structure is now devoted to government offices. An ornate, abstract frieze outlines all the building’s edges, framing the windows and running along the top of the structure under the great jutting cornices. The ornamental frieze is a vegetal arabesque, an impenetrable thicket of terra-cotta knots and calligraphy – you look for words hidden in the maze, letters in Arabic from the Koran. Architects will tell you that this building, the first true skyscraper, is comprised of three parts: a podium or pedestal with large ground floor picture windows symmetrically arranged around austere square thresholds that look like the entrances to Egyptian tombs. Above the pedestal, seven stories rise over the street, walls penetrated by deep-set windows outlined by the ornamental pattern that is elaborated above in a great flourish of adornment, as tall as horse under the prow of the cornices – so there is a base, a shaft, and a cap to the structure, a vaguely organic form like something, perhaps, sprung from the “sea of limestone” under the earth. The building, which had a mundane purpose – it was the headquarters for the local Brewers’ Association – is reddish, a color like the exposed grain of a sequoia.
Sullivan and Adler suspended brick curtain walls on an iron-girder grid. This was an innovative design in 1890 and 1891 when the structure was built. But, I think, the tower rhymes with the dome of the Federal Courthouse building three blocks away. Both use structural iron as a frame on which to suspend brick or terra-cotta in the case of the skyscraper. It’s like the Joplin-style habanera acting as bridge in Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”
19.
Once upon a time, Eugene Field was a famous poet, the author of “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” as well as other verse supposedly loved by children. He was born in a row house, ten blocks down the street from the Courthouse and the Cathedral and the place has been preserved as a museum. It costs ten dollars to enter and it’s the sort of institution where you don’t expect to ever encounter another visitor: a small exhibition space, a steamy warren of two or three closet-sized administrative offices through which you walk to enter the three-story Victorian dwelling with its antique furniture and gloomy portraits. The windows on the upper level open onto a view of the baseball stadium, named after Anheuser Busch, where the Cardinals play their games, an immense eye pointed at the sky, behind tall ramparts of brick.
Some creepy dolls are on display and several large oil-paintings of Eugene Field as a cadaverous, lantern-jawed young man. (He didn’t get to be an old man – he was dead from multiple ailments at 45). Field was a newspaperman who wrote a column called “Flats and Sharps” but is best known for his books of children’s poetry. Some lines from those works are scrawled in cursive in the small library attached to the museum where first editions of Field’s writings are displayed – he also seems to have written travel books. Some of his writings were illustrated by Maxfield Parrish and those gaudy pictures, infused with honeyed light, grace the walls.
In the thirties, forty years after Field’s death, the rowhouses in this part of St. Louis were slum tenements. Five immigrant families occupied the house where Field had lived as a child. Plans were made to tear down the crumbling eye-sore buildings but local school teachers, who often read Field’s poems to their students, raised a hue and cry and the children of St. Louis donated their pennies in sufficient amount to fund the purchase (for $2000) of the structure. In those days, everyone knew about Field and something like 60 elementary schools were named after the man – I presume those places are now the Martin Luther King or Harriet Tubman or, for that matter, Dred Scott and Frederick Douglas schools. In his thirties, Field courted a 14 year girl whom he promptly married when she turned 18. There seems to have been something unsavory about the man although I think this may just be my projection onto him – it’s like my response to the picture of John Brown a few blocks away.
In any event, the Museum with its scary pictures – in his last days, Field looked like one of the dusty-suited zombies in Night of the Living Dead – is now a sort of embarrassment. Slowly, but surely, it is being repurposed to celebrate Eugene Field’s father, the St. Louis lawyer, Roswell Field. This attorney represented Dred Scott and devised a strategy, unsuccessful, of course, to transfer the case from State Court (where it was largely about property rights) to the Federal Court down the street where issues relating to citizenship and state’s rights could be litigated. (Of course, Dred Scott didn’t do any better in Federal Court than before the State judges – Justice Taney, I think it is pronounced “Tawney”, a spectral white-haired ghoul, ruled that a “Black man has no rights that a White man is obligated to respect.”) The tour guide mentions federal “diversity of citizenship” jurisdiction, a concept that she clearly doesn’t understand – I don’t blame her; I’m a lawyer and scarcely understand that subject myself.
To please his father, Eugene Field, went to law school but didn’t attend classes and flunked out. He was addicted to dangerous-sounding practical jokes – firing the college’s ornamental Civil War cannons and setting explosives around the Dean’s home – and, of course, amused himself by writing sentimental verse for children. He seems to have combined raw-boned perverse intensity with dreamy reverie. Eugene Field seems to me much more interesting than his righteous father, but that interest is morbid, and the museum is reinventing itself to celebrate Dred Scott and the life of the lawyer who represented him.
20.
The Missouri Botanical Garden was founded in 1859. Because of its age, the grounds are tightly circumscribed by city, shabby brick buildings lining narrow streets and old commercial buildings with crumbling facades probably too damaged to be gentrified. Henry Shaw, born in England, but an immigrant to Quebec and, then, St. Louis, a tiny river town when he established his hardware and cutlery business on one of the three streets running parallel to the Mississippi, made a fortune in Missouri and donated the acreage near his mansion as a public garden. Shaw (1800 - 1889) is shown in photographs wearing a kind of dark night-cap and he looks like a jovial plump troll, an eccentric figure that one might imagine in the periphery of one of Dickens’ novels. His mausoleum is on the grounds of the botanical gardens and his marble effigy, also Dickensian in form, shows him dead in his bed, his body swathed in pillowy looking bedclothes like white melted butter. He holds a rose in his pudgy right hand and his head is bare, bereft of the little black toque or night-cap that appears in his photograph. Powerful and wealthy, he founded the Missouri Historical Society, endowed Washington University, and built the Botanical Gardens, today one of the world’s major research centers for Linnaean taxonomy. (Linnaean taxonomy, the organization of plants on the basis of their physical features, is, perhaps, obsolete – more modern taxonomical research relies on DNA to establish correspondence between different families of plants. Consider, for instance, old world and new world cacti; as a result of convergent evolution old world cactus (technically “euphorbia”) look almost identical to the sort of cacti one encounters in the deserts of Sonora in Arizona and Mexico. But euphorbia have evolved from flowering plants like poinsettia and, in fact, are genetically distinct in all respects from new world cacti.)
Henry Shaw like many heroes of industry and commerce has fallen under a shadow. He owned as many as eleven slaves. When four of his slaves in a family group tried to run away by crossing the Mississippi into Illinois, Shaw intercepted them and sold the mother down the river to Vicksburg, breaking up the family to deter further attempts to abscond from the farm once located where the botanical garden is now extant. There is copious evidence that his slaves were sufficiently discontent to repeatedly attempt escape and Shaw was known to have hired bounty hunters to bring them back to his Missouri plantation.
21.
The gardens are relatively compact with broad paved paths and gates from which elaborate Chihuly chandeliers are suspended, spikes and whorls of pink and yellow glass. A desolate-looking boxwork garden, withered in this season, occupies a walled enclosure and, nearby, a moon-gate opens into a Chinese garden with a small arched bridge, a stream drizzling down some ragged slabs of limestone and, nearby, a little gazebo from which one can contemplate several hip-high scholar’s rocks, ghostly and gnarled and pocked with deep hollows. Beyond, there’s a dog-leg of lake, with another small bridge from which koi can be fed; a sarcophagus-shaped stone trough and some raked gravel with boulders inserted in the pebbles. This is the Japanese garden. The lake hosts several statuesque boulders standing in the shallow water covered with lily pads. At Pipestone, Minnesota, there’s a place where a little stream slicing through the prairie turf broadens into a lagoon edged with cattails and green, spiky reeds. In that lagoon, a couple of modest boulders stand surrounded by water, little islands of red Sioux quartzite that the touch of the sun makes shimmer with a thousand specks of mirror. I have always thought of that landscape, small and precise and elegant, as essentially Japanese in appearance and, of course, the lake in this botanical garden decorated by standing stones waist-deep in the water confirms this impression.
22.
Near the entrance to the gardens, a big geodesic dome, the so-called “Climatron”, contains a densely planted jungle. Small waterfalls shine behind a green fog of trees and ferns. The air is even more wet and warm than outside where it is, also, very humid. Palm trees soar overhead and the facets of the dome are full of bright light. A shrub bears an excrescence consisting of a long, tongue-like stalk, drooping down from a cluster of green fat fingers, bananas, in a bunch straining upward – these fruits could be draped over a girl’s hips to make a kind of short skirt. The downward-tilted growth, a fibrous stalk shaped a bit like a very long pine-cone, ends in a reddish cluster of necrotic-looking phalloi, protuberant pods dangling off the stem. This is some kind of banana plant but, to me, it looks like one of monsters in the movie Alien, the sort of thing that might lunge outward to clamp itself over your eyes and mouth or that might suddenly corkscrew, with alarming energy, into a spinning lance to pierce your belly or loins.
23.
The largest earthen pyramid in the world, Monk’s Mound in Cahokia, is now a kind of outdoor exercise park. On a humid Sunday morning, the parking lot a couple hundred yards from the towering mound is full of cars. The trail over open prairie to the foot of the archaeological feature is crowded with women pushing strollers, young men dressed like boxers and ultimate fighting contestants, girls leading large dogs, and middle-aged men and women wearing track clothes. On the pad of concrete at the bottom of the steps grooved into the south flank of the mound, a man is doing push ups – he is straight as a plank pistoning up and down with robotic efficiency. Several other men are stretching and running in place. The steps ascending the pyramid are lined with rows of people either ascending or coming down. Many of the people ascending the slope are jogging. It seems that the exercisers want to complete their workout before the sun grows too hot and the day too sultry.
Monk’s Mound seems to have been built over about thirty years by an army of workers carrying silt-fill in wicker baskets. This work was done around 1200 AD in the urban center at Cahokia, a place, then, occupied by about 20,000 people with very extensive suburbs and outlying districts extending as far as modern-day St. Louis. The outline of the mound is roughly the size of the great pyramid at Gaza although the pre-Columbian earthwork is shorter – the mound is about 100 feet tall. The place, originally called “The Nobb” by earlier pioneers, stands at the center of a green river bottom dimpled with dozens of mounds, some pyramidal in shape, others built like elongated trapezoids. At the edge of the urban area, a circle of large wooden columns (a “woodhenge”) may have been used for astronomical calculations. In the early 19th century,Trappist monks lived in a hermitage in the shadow of the great earthen mound, hence, the present name applied to the pyramid.
It’s hot and the concrete steps with their pipe railing are daunting. The steps are built in the place where wooden logs were originally placed to guide celebrants to the top of the mound. The first forty or fifty steps leads to the top of a terrace on the south side of the mound. It’s flat for thirty feet and, then, much steeper and longer steps march upward to the level top of the embankment. The mound is broad and long at its summit, more than a hundred yards with some paved walkways leading to overlooks and explanatory markers. Grasshoppers are darting and dodging around the path and the prairie grass on top of the mound. Runners are resting, stretching, comparing notes. Dogs strain at leashes. A couple of women in serious athletic gear wear weighted vests. Their foreheads are pearled with sweat. A man descends the steps with weights in both hands that he thrusts up and down into the warm air.
The irony, of course, is that to the Mississippian people who lived here, the mound’s slopes and summit were sacred, precincts from which the common people were presumably barred. A massive wood-framed temple with thatched roof once stood atop the mound, a building about ninety feet long. From the mound, the city of St. Louis is visible with the great keyhole of the arch glistening above its skyscrapers.
The high mound, once the pride of the city, couldn’t be maintained. It was too large and ambitious and, even before it was complete, the flanks of the pyramid slumped with landslides. The city around the mound collapsed under its own weight as well, apparently depleting local resources because of its high population density and, probably, riven by internecine feuding. The river may have flooded the flats and there was probably famine and civil war between rival clans. By 1300, garbage was being dumped in great middens at the base of the logs embedded as steps in the side of the mound. More landslides tore off parts of the pyramid and, gradually, the city was abandoned.
Where priests and political rulers met in the long-house atop the mound, crowds of people are now gathered, doing situps, stretching their legs, flexing on yoga mats, playing catch with their dogs, and boys and girls flirt, babies in strollers cry, and pale mists, possibly the ghosts of the bygone Indians, swirl around the edges of the bottomland woods. The skunk families are out in this vicinity and the paths and parking lots smell of their spray.
24.
It’s odd to see many people ambling around the mounds at Cahokia. The visitor center is closed for “reconstruction” (whatever that means) but the parking lot by the building is packed with the cars of visitors strolling between the green house-sized mounds. I’ve been here probably five times and there have never been more than a handful of people in evidence. In fact, the trails leading through the lower mounds were always completely deserted. A few people were browsing in the museum or looking at souvenirs in the museum’s gift shop. Once atop Monk’s Mound, I met a menacing gangster-type from the ruins of East St. Louis about four miles to the west. (East St. Louis is more wrecked and desolate than the 13th century pre-Columbian city.) Shadowy figures lurked along the green thickets in the park. Some of the desperate aura of the nearby slums had leaked into the ancient city. But, on this Sunday, the atmosphere was jovial, families on outings, people out for a run or a jog or a casual stroll - a tableaux by Seurat.
25.
During my previous visits to Cahokia, I never walked the short trail – it’s about a half-mile from the visitor center – to Mound 72. On this Sunday, two couples are ahead of me on the path. A dog lopes along on the leash of a man that I meet returning from the mound. It’s quiet here and the aggrieved families of skunks have released their scent into the air, a heavy odor that lingers along the trail. The walkway passes a reconstructed wooden stockade. Several big conical mounds are nearby, glistening with dew. Mound 72 is unprepossessing, just a sort of wave arrested in the field of sun-browned grass. The contours of the mound are hard to ascertain and the little knoll rises only about three or four feet above the adjacent prairie. But this humble hillock conceals one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the Americas.
In the mid-sixties, archaeologists working at Cahokia discovered the imprint of several so-called “Woodhenges” – that is, circular arrays of heavy upright poles set in post-holes. The poles had either been removed or were long since decayed, but the impressions left by the post-holes were easily excavated, particularly since the large columns were installed in the prairie at regular intervals. The configuration of the woodhenges was similar and it appeared to the scientists that the wooden poles dug into the ground were erected according to calendrical principles: alignments between the central focal pole and the radial posts marked the summer and winter solstices and the equinox. It’s thought that the woodhenge circular arrays were erected around 950 AD and, later, disassembled or abandoned.
The woodhenge at Mound 72 is about 3000 feet from Monk’s Mound and aligned with one of the edges of the packed earth pyramid. There are about a half-dozen “ridge mounds” at Cahokia – these are long narrow mounds that rise to peak about 10 to fifteen feet above grade. All ridge mounds, except 72, are aligned east-west or north-south. By contrast, Mound 72 is 30 degrees off-kilter from an east-west orientation. This causes the sightline along the Mound’s ridgetop to be aimed at the edge of Monk’s Mound. None of this seemed coincidental and the presence of the ‘woodhenge’ at the location, as well as the anomalous orientation of Mound 72 suggested that there was something unusual about that feature. Beginning in 1967, students from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, working under the supervision Melvin Fowler began excavations on Mound 72.
The work was difficult. Summer is hot and humid on these river flats and mosquitos, with stinging flies, are ubiquitous. In the late sixties, East St. Louis still existed as a noisome, dense, and heavily populated slum. Marauders from the ghettos in East St. Louis molested the workers. The motel nearest the excavation, located in another urban wasteland at Collinsville, Illinois turned out to be an popular brothel after dark. The trenches frequently flooded and water had to be pumped out of the holes. The magnitude of finds on the site and the voluminous artifacts made work very slow and tedious. Excavations continued for four years, not concluding until the autumn of 1971.
The first thing the team discovered under Mound 72 was a pair of elite burials, a man interred in a log-lined crypt, resting on many thousands of pearly shells and white pebbles, and a woman under him. The shells and pebbles made a mosaic in the form of a raptor-beaked bird. (Nearby, the famous red tablet showing a “bird man”, either a supernatural or a dancer, was found; this hawk-nosed, winged figure is the iconic emblem for Cahokia.) Four young men with their arms interlocked were found in a tangle of bones – perhaps, the men were sacrificed when their chieftain died and some surmise that they represent the four cardinal directions. In any event, the skulls of the four men were removed, hidden somewhere in the city; the men’s hands were also amputated and carried away. Below, a log-lined burial pit was full of cadavers, all of them women who seem to have been systematically strangled – their neck and hyoid bones were fractured. The females were between 15 and 30. Genetic testing reveals that they were of a separate ethnicity than the rest of the Cahokia population, either immigrants to the city or captives. (The women who were strangled were smaller and somewhat malnourished suggesting that they may have captives or enslaved.) Nearby, another charnel pit presented a grim spectacle of mangled bones all packed together in a jigsaw heap of cadavers. At least 39 men and women had been butchered or beaten to death with blunt instruments. The massacre had been sudden, frenzied, and the pit hastily filled. Finger bones pointing skyward showed that some of the dead were buried alive and, after being covered with dirt, tried to claw their way out of the hole. All told 272 corpses were identified in burial pits under Mound 72 – it’s estimated that, at least, 60% of the dead had been sacrificed or murdered. These gruesome events occurred around 1050 when the urban center at Cahokia was at its height.
Federal law now prohibits additional excavations at Cahokia. No one knows what, if anything, is lurking under the other mounds in the reserve area. Some work in the nineties uncovered a copper workshop on the west side of Monk’s Mound, a wood frame structure with fire-pits and ground scattered with green shavings of metal from tablets made there. (None of the tablets themselves were found; presumably after being completed they were either traded or given as gifts to other nearby communities.) The fact that the unassuming and scarcely discernible Mound 72 was packed with so much macabre evidence leads to various conjectures about some of the other features in the area.
26.
At Mound 72, a marker explains the different types of earthworks at the city-site: there are conical mounds shaped like tipis and hunting lodges, ridge-mounds, and square-shaped platform mounds on which wooden buildings were once erected. A side-bar explains the woodhenge features in the area. A map of the Midwest extending from upper Louisiana north to Wisconsin shows the Mississippian palisaded towns and city sites that have been discovered to date. This inland empire was centered around the great river extending east and west into Missouri and Oklahoma as well as into Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Curiously, there is not a single word about the dramatic discoveries made at Mound 72, nothing about the carnage committed here or the magnitude of the human sacrifices discovered at this location. It’s an odd omission and one that I can’t exactly understand.
I have toured the Visitor Center about a half-dozen times and noted a similar omission among the otherwise very interesting and well curated exhibits in the museum – nothing about Mound 72 except a couple nondescript sentences about cultural practices that might, or might not, involve “possible human sacrifice”. For many years, I have interpreted his lacuna as some misguided form of political correctness, as an effort to spare the sensibilities of local tribes who might be offended by the intimation that their ancestors engaged in such a thing. (None of the local tribes in the historic era seem to be related to the people who made Cahokia their home for five-hundred years – the name of the place refers to a 18th and 19th century Illini band who called the mounds “Cahokia” in their language.) If, indeed, a wish to avoid offense has resulted in the suppression of information about the most interesting, I think, aspect of the archaeology at this place, this would be unfortunate. You can’t suppress this sort of thing – morbid interest will always prevail and, in fact, the absence of display information about Mound 72 caused to me to go so far as to buy Fowler’s field report on his four-year dig – a dry, technical account written in daunting archaeological jargon, packed with diagrams schematically showing great entwined masses of bones and composed in an avowedly dull, non-sensational bureaucratic prose.
After my experience with the paranormal investigators at the grave of William Clark, I’m a bit more sanguine about what may be the perceived need to suppress lurid accounts of the mass sacrifices at Mound 72. I don’t know where the bones that were discovered in the excavation were sent. Maybe, they were repatriated to some tribe claiming allegiance to Cahokia although given the date of the work this seems improbable. Possibly, the bones are moldering in banker’s boxes in some museum warehouse or, perhaps, they were reinterred in situ. (The jumble of smashed bones at the massacre site at Cow Creek in South Dakota were studied, and, then, placed in subterranean concrete vaults at the location of the village destroyed in the medieval-era raid.) If the corpses are still under the prairie sod, I suppose that people with electronic equipment might trespass on the site in the dead of night and try to rouse the dead from their underground pits. Maybe, people might build bonfires on the small hillock and practice satanic rituals at Mound 72. Accordingly, I think it’s possible that information about the bloodshed has been concealed to keep thrill-seekers from conducting orgies on the little knoll or making video for YouTube of unseemly investigations and rituals.
27.
A couple of dogs were playing on Mound 72 when I was there and a couple carrying a cooler seemed to be looking for a shady arbor. A fierce old man was limping along the trail, stabbing the asphalt with his cane. Between two of the bigger, better defined mounds, Angelica and I saw three small deer, very tame, looking across the meadow toward us with apparent unconcern. A couple hundred yards from the closed Visitor Center and its parking lot, there are borrow pits from which dirt was dug to build the nearby mounds. The pits are like vases with their muddy throats crammed with brush, flowering weeds, and the shuddering masks of trees of various size. The air was heavy with a smell, at first fruity and perfumed, and, then, dense with stench.
“What is that stink?” Angelica asked.
“Carrion,” I said. “Something has died in that brush.”
I looked up into the hot sky to see if birds were circling. The hazy blue was empty, unbroken.
Two dozen steps closer to the parking lot, the smell of death dissolved into skunk. Families of skunks must have been trotting through this area, spraying the air to repel the dogs, the people exercising, the tourists. The sun glinted off the chrome on the parked cars.
28.
Angelica saw an albino spider at the botanical gardens. The little creature was atop the corner post of a poured concrete fence. The spider trotted forward to greet us, halting at the edge of the post. Although the arachnid’s surface was cream-colored with white hair on its abdomen, the spider’s body was translucent and the hemocyanin in its legs and thorax imparted to the creature a faint, copper-colored radiance. The animal was friendly, a bit like my white Labrador retriever, and it lifted its front legs in salute. Two bulbous black eyes, bookended by smaller black eyes, gave the creature a vaguely goofy look. It seemed to be smiling and, if the spider had possessed a tail, it would be wagging. I used my phone to take a picture of the spider. Angelica took a picture too.
October 3, 2025
