chase scenes serial #16
associations to continue to stand in for this new iceberg lettuce meal. As we descend into the Twin Cities I am still of the mind that they are almost exactly the same as Portland, OR. I have no sense of why I would form this association. In fact it is more than an association because I picture getting out of the airport and taking the street car into the city, strolling the alphabet district, and going to Powell’s. Is it because it is a medium-sized city? It is north of some line in the nation? Because I want all cities to be like Portland? And surely it will remain a Portland clone, at least in my interior compositions and scenarios for it, until I see it for myself. My father described it to me rather clearly and, no, qualitatively, and I still persist in my delusion. You see, this shows the folly of my rich description of Trapper’s Kettle for you will certainly flesh it out with all the Cracker Barrels and Stuckeyses that you have fallen upon. Perhaps watching closely as we descend‡ into the Twin Cities shall shake me. I am in the World Perks Club in the Twin Cities airport. It is not the same one I was in last year when on the way back from Rapid City I
‡ The sun is going down in Atlanta. I am on my porch with a black coffee. The air is filled almost constantly with the sound of jet engines. [I don’t know if it has always been like this since I moved here or if the increased frequency of my travels as of late have awakened a need in me to look up at the planes flying and be reassured by their not falling out of the sky into my neighbourhood.] Just as one drifts into silence, to the north, and the birds’ twilight songs arise, another cascade of deep whirring and metallic tearing of the sky into a solid being bored through washes across my house. All day I worked in the yard on the vegetable garden and the house. I worked myself into a rhythm with the planes, my enemies. At such a distance, and with such distance, having no plane tickets currently booked anywhere that I would have cause to fixate on, I can look at the planes, slightly darker than the sky they skirt, as beautifully heroic vessels, a parade of possible endings, Bismarck, Portland, Rome, Los Angeles, flames.
