ACCOUNT OF MY DAYS
Sequence: 4
REMINDER
Last summer I looked for the bridge whose enormous piers cast the
swirl of water in the river where Hobie Johnson drowned. Found a
road that dead-ended between the railroad and the river, a track
wandering through the brush to the muddy bank, a rope hanging over
the water. But the bridge was gone, piers down, and next day over
the river I saw that even the hole in the mountainside that the
bridge led to was sealed up. The guy who owned a pizza place near
where the whole mighty thing and its traffic of trains had once
existed had saved newspaper articles and pictures of it being built
and later being made to go away. In this part of the world, every-
thing vanishes without a trace, and then the without-a-trace is
forgotten. Plug a hole, let the frail paper yellow, words blur,
the whole thing gradually crumbles. True pain and scandal once
safely in the past, we can establish some kind of tourist zone
nearby. Put the graveyard on the hill so the dead get the best
view of the whole thing, while mourners are too distracted by grief
to notice. Maybe some piece of Hobie broke off, changed form,
drifted down the river system--Ohio in its giant crease between
states, juncture with the Mississippi, Mississippi down to the
sea--experiencing the whole phenomenon of half a continent empty-
ing itself of rain, dirt, trash, the question of origins forgotten,
that piece of Hobie lost forever in the Gulf.