pigeon

those grandiose power lines out by the dam at lewis and clark lake

There must have been something going on out there.

It rarely rained, but when it rained, it rained big.

The ground was a dry mottle of yellows, cracked brown, skeletons of grass, a windswept ghost of a shallow ancient sea.

Hydroelectric. The word was potent and hopeful, like margarine; hyperspace; logic; automatic transmission; aluminum; air conditioning; interstate; fountain soda; street sweeper; penicilin; telephoto; short story; divination; science fiction....

Gavins Point Dam. Dad bought us admission to the guided tour one summer. The tour guide’s suit was military tidy; shined shoes on metal flooring. Humbly resplendent with facts. Clanking along entombed corridors — traversing the innards of a stationary battleship — the waters rush and pound around it, but the ship’s a hulking mountain, stalwart, permanent, a monument to postwar progress.

And yet I picture it, out there in the lonely dark — it’s made of concrete after all — one night one grain of sand relinquishes its grip, another night another, and eventually another — nothing lasts forever, after all. Water is heartless, soft, and relentless. Even the force field of a culture’s collective sense of wonder wears thin eventually.

But not mine, not when I was nine. My brother and I had the keys to the spaceship. Its home base landing pad was in the park, in Yankton, with refueling points at all the playgrounds and campgrounds — by Lake Yankton down below the dam, and Lewis & Clark above. (It’s filling up with sediment, apparently — whether sand is letting go or building up, destruction is inevitable.)

Those transmission towers — wireframe exoskeletons of hypertrophied Shogun Warriors — infallible insectoidal dominoes — nodal points along the fabricated wormhole network of galactic civilization!

(Our external brains were still external, then. We took up space, we hadn’t yet inverted time and turned within.)

Train tracks in the sky.

Machines of loving grace? Perhaps.

Dad’s gulf blue ’72 Gran Torino station wagon, our cross-country conveyance. Peering out the windows at the promenading plains. Can we go to that little diner, just across the dam, in Nebraska? I’m gonna get a Pepsi, with the pellet ice, in a nubbly plastic tumbler. Something fried, something whole, something good.

My Earth-born family around me, forming a mammalian campfire glow, surrounded by the vastness of all that possibility, all that open sky, that chill in the air as it’s coming on evening.

Something must have been going on out there. Signals in the dark. Aviation warning lights exchanging covert codes —

Read between the power lines.

Did the message get across?

Did the spacefarers escape?

Will they return?

Is it too late?

Will the dam hold?

Should we open up the spillway gates?

Do you remember the ignition sequence? What’s the number? Will you meet me at the predetermined place, out where the pylons point the way? When the launch window is open again, briefly as a firefly’s flash —