Earthblog

I've been to this place before. 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 20 and now 22. Too many times. Times when I didn’t want to go. Times when I don’t remember. 

This may be my last time.  But my memories here are old enough to fossilize, or rust.

Beyond these gates there is a place where waste takes extraordinary shape.
Agricultural byproducts gain sentience: head, gasket, brake, arm, lever, coupler. Complete, welded, jointed, united, mounted and tensile.

 A utopia. A democracy. A lonely, lonely empire hugging that dangerous, congested interstate. A menagerie. A zoo.
A kingdom for majestic creatures to roam silently.

I wonder:

Did that tractor dream of one day flailing tyrannosaurus arms towards the snow-dusted peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
Did that el Camino ever imagine, even on its best days, of being part of a sea serpent?
Did that grain elevator ever fathom the possibility of smelling that river valley every morning for eternity?

Do machines have wild dreams?

“Is that a gas-tank off a 1967 triumph classic?”


“Is that even a kind of motorcycle?”


Is that the sound of this eerie valley humming tarnished wheat and river songs?
Broken muffler bell gong orchestra tuned to open eerie. Is that a mallet made from a golf ball?

 "is that the end of the path?"

***

 

"This place has so many secrets, and you have so many questions." he whispers through his sparkplug teeth.

"And there is no one here to answer them." she says, soaring under crooked trees.

 "I couldn't explain to you the things I’ve seen. Or, more immediately, the things I’m about to see.”

 "But no one is listening."


***

A brand new Wal-Mart shopping center, all right angles and ugly asphalt parking lots, has suddenly erupted from an empty field.
Across the street, dinosaurs crane their necks as they watch living, breathing, hot steel machinery idol after demolishing the bridge they had
watched sag slowly over eons under the weight of a million moaning automobiles the day before.

 "The saddest thing," says the dragon to the well-lubricated, neon yellow monstrosity, "is what you don’t realize.
You are OUR ghosts, you see, and we are YOUR inevitable conclusion." To which the machine had no retort, for it was off.

***

An eerie elegance looms in this place. Like cobwebs on coil spring cobra's teeth. Rebar rattler in the sand.
Like a path made from the secret sternum of an ancient dump truck whale. Like bronzed, bug-eyed bumblebee, or the austere electric ostrich.

It is hard to tell if this is art, or attraction. Roadside monument or flurry of post-modern industrial mastery.
Should I bring my nephews or call the Guggenheim? Does it matter?

***

"I'm just looking for a safe place, away, where I can raise my calf." She says, as she heads south into the only open field left.
Her milk is heavier than iron.

The Swetsville Zoo is being slowly dismantled, its occupants being spread around Timnath and other parts of Larimer County.
Please visit—and DRIVE CAREFULLY through the construction—to pay your respects,
before this place becomes extinct; fossils lodged in the molten magma of innumerable imaginations...

Matthew Sage also created The Village Vidiot Cult photo essay.