And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene

Jeremy Hauck
March 25, 2018

It was June, 1992. My sister and I were out of school and our grandparents took us on an epic road trip out west, to see the same places they had seen on road trips in the 1950s and 1960s. They had bought a motorhome, a Tioga, not a big one but still a proper motorhome, with its own bathroom and two beds, one of which folded back into the kitchen table by day. We set off from southwest Ohio and headed south.

First was Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, then Texarkana, Waffle Houses, KOA campgrounds, the desert, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, where the bats swarmed at dusk, the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, McKittrick Canyon, Gila National Forest. Between hiking through caves or woods or desert during the day and playing UNO in the evening, we would hit the open road, advancing along the meticulous itinerary Grandpa had typed up. I sat up front with the road atlas—the little copilot. Between cactus, canyon, and sand dune, we would encounter the abandoned settlements of lost civilizations, even as the Anthropocene was taking flower.

The Wild Spaces of Children’s Stories

Sonja Crafts
January 25, 2018

Willy Wonka “discovers” the exit from the black and white room.

The portal — a secret opening or entrance to a fantastical world, starkly different from the ordinary world that surrounds us — is found everywhere in children’s literature and film. It serves as an escape route from the mundane, and the magic of the world beyond the portal is often underscored by the drabness or unhappiness of the real world that precedes it. Examples abound: from the claustrophobic black-and-white patterned room (and, of course, Charlie’s life of poverty) that leads toward the candy-filled wonderland in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the colorless farm scenes and harrowing tornado that brings us to Oz, and of course the foreboding old mansion that the children evacuate to during World War II that houses the magical wardrobe/secret entrance to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Most children will instantly relate to the thrill of discovery that Charlie and Dorothy and Lucy feel when they first set foot in these wonderlands, despite the fact that this is something — entering a fantastical world through a magic passage — no one in real life can actually experience. So why is this feeling so recognizable?

Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

Wild Lot
October 26, 2017

The air is toxic. Floating, ashy bits of debris swirl around like particles in a snow globe. They flicker through flashlight beams and gather on canvas bodysuits, yet never amass on the dark, uneven ground. Voices echo, stunted, through the murk: “Willllll!” The mix of sickly green and flat marine-blue hues lends an aquatic quality to the atmosphere, a quality made even more pronounced by the submerged, undead condition of the ubiquitous trees. It’s a place to look for and find the lost, dead or tucked away in an incubation chamber. A place to listen for the bipedal flower-headed beast that hunts, scenting blood across dimensions. Forever night, it’s a place on the other side of the routine, the normal, the safe. It’s the Upside Down. But what is the Upside Down? Where does it end? And what does it mean?

Hiking the Urban Ruins of One of America’s Oldest Railways

Jeremy Hauck
May 31, 2017

Back in the winter of this year, I was poking around on Google maps looking for unexplored green space in Lancaster city, where we currently live. Zooming into the Northeast Quadrant, our corner of town, I found something that fit the bill (and then some). Little more than three blocks from our house was the terminus of a curved line of green, bending like a long crooked finger into the densely urban 6th Ward. I’d never noticed it before, and no label proclaimed it as a park. But its uneven color and raggedy edges all but confirmed a continuous tree canopy.

I studied the screen for a long time. It didn’t make sense that this much unused green space would be allowed to exist here, and nowhere else, under the radar. But from the satellite’s-eye view, it was perfect.

wild lot

Category: Abandoned Spaces

And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene

The Wild Spaces of Children’s Stories

Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

Hiking the Urban Ruins of One of America’s Oldest Railways