Tag Archives: vacation

Exploring the Great White North, Part 2: Morlocks and Navies

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Before I go too much further into the tale of our adventures in the savage, icy badlands of Canada, there is a small detail which I feel I should clarify.

The cities in Canada are not literally built in the clouds.

There is a common belief that they are; tales of Canada’s sprawling cloud-cities permeate the folklore of nearly every industrialized nation. These tales, like many legends, have some small basis in fact. Seen from a distance, the grand cities of the Canadian steppes do appear to be floating on clouds.

We learned during our trip why this is. The cities of Canada are divided into two parts: the upper portion, with glittering skyscrapers and shopping malls and small outdoor cafes and little sushi places tucked away into business districts, much like you might find in any other city in any other place.

Beneath these parts of the cities, down in the earth where it is perpetually dark, lie the subterranean hearts of Canada’s civilization, where the Morlocks run the strange and ancient machinery essential to the places above.

These dark and mysterious caverns, the foundations of Canada’s cities, emit vast quantities of steam from the enormous, arcane machinery that supplies the parts above with water and electricity and powers the defensive grid. When you combine this with the fact that Canadian cities are almost always built atop natural hills or elevations, in order to provide better protection from Kurgan attack, it becomes easy to see how the casual observer, weary and snowblind, might believe the cities are actually floating on clouds. You can’t actually build a city on clouds in a literal sense; clouds are made of water vapor, a transient and altogether unsuitable foundation for heavy construction of any sort.

zaiah and I found ourselves deep beneath the city, in the Morlock’s territory, as we attempted to leave Canada Place and head back ’round toward the scenic parts of town.

Canada Place, as it turns out, is the main connection between the two Vancouvers, the one that glitters in the sun and the perpetually dark subterranean place of mystery and nightmare. We followed a path behind the building, which descended sharply and then widened into a broad street leading down into the heart of darkness.

Here you can see some of the vast pillars supporting the city, and the eerie red glow of the vast furnaces that supply the ancient machinery with steam. I fear this photograph fails to convey the oppressive nature of this strange place, gentle readers, as I was forced to use a very long exposure in order to record any trace of the details of the place, and thus it appears much brighter than it actually is.

We walked for about half a mile, along the wide passageway where huge trucks carrying coal and other raw materials thundered by. Giant turbines in the ceiling, which I was unable to capture on film, sat poised in readiness to fill the tunnel with cleansing flame should any unauthorized persons dare to venture down this far. As we walked, seeking any doorway or narrow access shaft that might return us to the sunlight and fresh air above, our every step was haunted by the fear of a clanking metal security machine stepping in front of us to challenge us with “Identification, Citizen!” In such an eventuality, we knew we would have little choice but to aim for the eyestalk and run.

Finally, after much searching, we found an accessway that, with many twists and turns of narrow steps, brought us back to the world of light. We were fortunate that the shaft we’d stumbled upon led directly into a construction site; it appeared to be long forgotten, reopened only accidentally and therefore unguarded.

The construction crews paid us no attention. Hearts still pounding, we climbed up onto the sidewalk and tried our best to blend in with the throngs of afternoon businesspeople sipping their lattes. We hurried along the moment we were out of sight of the tunnel we’d climbed through and left the busy sidewalks, circling around behind the business district. There we passed by the fields where, many hundreds of years from now, after the machine uprising, when nothing remains of this city save for her enormous and barely-charted sewers, human beings will no longer be born, but grown.

So it came to pass that we made our offerings of bus fare and blood to a Kurgan driving his bus in that direction, and soon found ourselves walking in a pleasant breeze along the docks that ring the island.

We arrived at exactly the right time of year, as it turned out.

The Royal Canadian Navy was hosting its annual fund-raising, during which citizens are permitted to rent some of Her Majesty’s naval fleet for private excursions in the glittering water surrounding the island. As we walked along the dock, zaiah pointed out this vessel, the Limited Offensive Unit Probably a Bad Idea.

This vessel, equipped with the latest Man-Powered Rotary Reciprocating Dual Thruster Units, looked to us to be a fine way to explore Canada’s territorial waterways, so we resolved to rent it at once.

We negotiated an exchange of currency with a man wearing an “Obey” T-shirt, and set off.

The first thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was the…no, wait, I take that back. The first thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was that the man in the Obey T-shirt had placed many safety supplies into a small plastic chest, but neglected to give the chest to us. We turned around and paddled back to retrieve it, in the event we encountered some unfortunate incident that might otherwise have led to our certain doom.

The second thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was the strange piles of rock carefully erected along the stony shore, offerings to the temperamental denizens of the deep waters, who are loathe to grant safe passage along her surface without these ritual tokens of submission.

At this point, I must pause to reveal that we were on that day the source, no doubt, of many interesting stories the Vancouverites exchanged with one another. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were both out in deep water paddling our small craft like mad, or the fact that your humble scribe was once again wearing bunny ears, but we were for whatever reason the source of much waving and pointing, and many shouted words drown out by the constant thrashing of our pedal-powered propellers.

So agitated by our unlikely presence did the Vancouver citizens become that another naval vessel, the Rapid Offensive Unit Unconventional Use of Weapons, was quickly dispatched to check us out.

Upon determining that we were an unarmed American woman accompanied by a man in bunny ears paddling our way around the False Creek sound and therefore unlikely to pose a threat to the safety and security of Her Majesty’s State, we were left to continue our journey in peace, though the continued reactions of Her Majesty’s subjects reminded us that there would be many a story around cozy campfires that night that started with “Hey, you aren’t going to believe what I saw this afternoon!”

We made our slow way beneath one of two bridges that span False Creek. This bridge, erected during the famous Art Deco era in Canada’s dim past, still bears the reminder of an ancient part of Canada’s history, now nearly forgotten by the youth of today.

Time was when balconies like the one you see here could be found on every bridge in Canada’s western half. According to the history books, when the Canadian government negotiated its treaty with the bridge-trolls that inhabited this part of the continent, these balconies were provided as a service to the trolls. Each morning, as the sun came up, the trolls would ascend to these balconies to announce the tolls for crossing the bridge that day, their low, guttural cries of “One copper! One copper!” or “Three copper! Three copper!” informing the tradesman what it would cost to do business on the other side of the bridge.

The trolls are long extinct now, disease and destruction of their natural habitat having been too much for them to adapt to. Architects today still sometimes include these balconies when they design modern bridges, though they do so only for tradition’s sake, without fully understanding why.

As we traveled farther along, we paddled by the enormous concrete Canadian Palace of Culture and Sport, erected at the same time as the Vladimir Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport was being built in Tallinn, Estonia, during Vancouver’s short-lived attempt to reach out across the Iron Curtain and recognize that ancient Medieval city as her sister in spirit.

Once, Canada’s athletic elite gathered here to compete for the honor of leading the front lines in the regular campaigns against the Kurgan raiders. Today, it is used as a storage depot for concrete, making it, on the whole, rather more successful than the edifice that sits crumbling to ruin in Tallinn.

We saw this graffiti painted on the side of the structure.

I must confess, Gentle Readers, that though my knowledge of Canada and her ways has been vastly expanded by our travels there, I have absolutely no idea what it means.

Exploring the Great White North, Part 1: Of Raids and Raiders

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So it came to pass that on Labor Day, or Labour Day in the modern language of Canada, zaiah and I ventured to take a train ride up to the frozen wilds of our northern neighbor to visit her.

I was not quite sure what to expect. I’ve heard the stories, of course: fierce raiders riding armored polar bears, carrying evil spears fashioned from ice; the great floating cities in the clouds, their perimeters patrolled by armed police riding the backs of furred, horned wyverns; the enormous, heavy tomes, their pages made of thin sheets of iron hammered from fallen meteorites, containing all the wisdom of the Elders in the nearly-forgotten language of the ancients. But I’d never seen any of these wonders with my own eyes, so it was with both fear and excitement I boarded the train, carefully stowing my borrowed polar bear saddle above the seat.

We arrived in the Wildlands in due course, bourne there by the great machine of iron and thunder, and within minutes of setting foot on Canadian soil our problems began.

Those of you familiar with the writings of your humble scribe are no doubt aware that I am often prone to wearing bunny ears in public. This is a not-atypical photograph, showing me in my everyday, about-town ears, which are equally at home during a formal evening in a fancy pub or while traveling the rugged, rocky slopes of America’s midwest.

So it will be no surprise to many of you that I was wearing bunny ears–indeed, these very same bunny ears–on the trip up to the frozen north.

Canadian customs officials, whose numbers today are carefully selected from the most savage of the Kurgan raiders (about whom I shall speak more later), with only those who best their competitors in savage hand-to-hand combat too terrible to write about here allowed to win the honor of protecting the border from their unkempt southern neighbors, were not amused by the ears.

Not at all.

I was questioned about them, at great length and by at least three different people, before zaiah and I were taken into a small room for additional screening.

Now, I am loathe to go to the hardware store, much less to a strange and distant land, without my bunny ears. The story of the ears is too long to recount here, though I will try to sum it up without too much damage to this narrative. The ears are a gift, or perhaps an inheritence, from my London sweetie emanix, who I met while standing in line waiting for an elevator (or as they say in the native British tongue, a “lift queue”) at a convention of perverts, sodomites, and other fine folks. She was, as regular readers will recall, dressed as an Easter bunny and passing out candy at the time. Since strangers have the best candy, I immediately accepted her offer. Fast forward a few years, a couple trips abroad, and an orgy in a castle in the south of France, and the torch has well and truly been passed. So to speak.


The source of my woes

Anyway, there we sat, just moments from disembarkation, sitting in a small room under the cold and watchful eyes of three people in bulletproof vests, who grilled us both about our motivations for making the long and dangerous trek into the icy plains of Canada with bunny ears. They demanded a list of every place I had lived for the past twenty years, whereupon they announced they would do a background check on me in all of them.

During this time, the lovely Eve, the namesake of the woman who chose knowledge over obedience, sat (or, rather, stood) outside the gate waiting. I was forbidden, in the strictest possible terms, to make any attempt to contact her, or in fact to use my cell phone at all.

Eventually, and grudgingly, they let us through. The entire ordeal took even longer than the unfortunate time I made the mistake of telling a British customs officer I was traveling to the UK to visit my girlfriend, which is, apparently, right up there with “I just came back from Columbia with thirty-seven kilos of the finest diamond-grade Bolivian blow ever to choke an elephant” and “I will avenge my people!” on the list of Things You Never Tell A Customs Agent. But I digress.

Customs behind us, we passed through the great hall into the lands of Canada, where I stood blinking, bag in one hand and bear saddle in the other, looking for our transport.

The saddle turned out to be unnecessary, as it appeared Vancouver was a Cosmopolitan enough city to have heard about and embraced the wonders of internal combustion. We loaded up into a Honda of some description or another–or perhaps it was a Toyota–and made our way past the barges laden with animal pelts and the street vendors hawking rhubarbs and small cursed figurines with glittering ruby eyes toward the home of someone who had graciously offered to accommodate us during our travels. (It turns out, in a strange twist of the-world-is-smaller-than-you-know, that her friends were companions of a woman I met in London at emanix‘s birthday party. The world is small, and strange, and really quite amazing.)

The next morning, we rose to brave the twisted ways of the Vancouver public transit system.

Now, I have used public transit in at least five countries. I have ridden a streetcar in Poland that was ancient before the sun was born. I have navigated London’s tube and lived to tell the tale, thanks to the warning to mind the gap. But I was not quite ready for what we discovered when we boarded the bus in Vancouver.

Vancouver’s public transit drivers, like Canada’s customs agents, are drawn by and large from the ranks of disaffected Kurgan tribesmen, unsatisfied with the raider’s life, which leaves too little opportunity to wreak violence upon the rest of Canada’s people. Those who fail to win the coveted spots at the border crossings often become bus drivers, where they greet requests for navigational aid or questions about the fare with the traditional cry “Hark’on dûl goth Khan dok’tôl Akan gol’Kosh Trk’han,” which translates roughly as “With my ax I shall destroy all that you love.” The bus drivers of the greater metro area belong to many different clans, which wage ceaseless war with one another in the dead of night along lonely, deserted streets while the city sleeps.

We learned from an unfortunate fellow passenger to stand quietly and pay attention, leaping from the bus as it crossed the intersection where directions, scribbled in strange glyphs on a large sheet of runed paper called a “map,” instructed us to depart.

We stopped at a charming cafe to collect lunch, then walked to Canada Place to sit beneath the sun and eat. The view from our benches was quite spectacular, with the banner of Canada’s dominant tribe fluttering gaily in the breeze:

There is a secret horror lurking in the design of Canada Place, a grim reminder of an ancient evil, which I will get to in a moment.

Our repast complete, we journeyed forth once more to visit Vancouver’s Police Museum, an excellent place for zaiah and I to amuse ourselves with tales of law enforcement throughout the ages .

The history of law enforcement is the history of weaponry. So it is probably no surprise that the most interesting part of the Vancouver Police Museum, by far, is its weapons room, entry into which is permitted only under escort through a large, locked steel door.

There is also, in another, much larger part of the building, a display of improvised and more exotic weaponry, most of which is made up of all manner of strange and lethal variations on the theme of “I will hit you with this until you die.” There were handmade spears, and flails, and whips, and a spring steel cobra (a fine weapon I was introduced to by a friend of mine in my misspent college days); blowguns, and shivs, and butterfly knives; brass knuckles, and clubs, and axes with curved handles. It was an inspiring display, which made me long to disappear into my workshop for a few days and come out with a doomsday weapon that I could use to hold the moon for ransom. Ah, those glorious days of my youth…but again, I digress.

In front of the museum is a rather…peculiar statue, commemorating the pledge made by Canada’s law enforcement officers to be the friends of small, strangely-proportioned, bipedal space aliens with oddly-configured heads and tiny hands whenever they might be in need:


Vancouver’s finest, known throughout galactic sector R-4 as a friend of any being in need

Rumo(u)r has it that a pod person once saved the police commissioner’s life, during a massive and unlikely conspiracy involving time travel and wildly improbable space aliens who look like crosses between sentient ivy and lingerie models. The next Men in Black movie will reportedly be based loosely on this story.

Our visit done, and reluctant to board a bus again, zaiah and I chose instead to walk the streets of the city, to better learn her customs and culture. Our wanderings brought us over a grand, soaring bridge, where we found this message spray-painted on the pavement, a chilling reminder of the Kurgan raiders who to this day live deep in the Wilds and stage occasional incursions into the civilized parts of the country.

Through messages like this, they seek to remind Canada’s citizens of their grisly practices of ripping the hearts from the chests of their enemies, lest the citizens become too complacent.

On the other side of the bridge, we spied the stylized peaks of Canada Place from the other side.

There are few alive today who remember the days of old, when Canada was known mainly for her hordes of ravening wildmen, who set sail in small, fast warships to plunder up and down the Western coast of the United States in search of treasure and women.

Though the design of this building seems innocent to modern eyes, there was a time when the sight of peaked sails just like these, traveling from over the horizon, would strike terror in people for hundreds of miles along the coast, as they signaled another assault from the Canadian longboatmen. This is why to this day nearly every city on the Western seaboard is still surrounded by tall, thick stone walls, with peaked watchtowers along the coastal side. Once, those towers were practical rather than ornamental; from them, watchers would stand guard, day and night, endlessly scanning the ocean for the first sign of those curved white sails, ready to sound the alarm that would bring men and boys rushing to arms to try, hopeless as it might be, to repel the invaders.

There are few who still remember; today these peaks do not bring the terror they once did. But I will confess, Gentle Readers, that when I saw the building, there across that narrow inlet of water as we crested the bridge, a chill crossed over my heart. It was soon gone; I know, in the rational part of my brain, that there is no longer any reason to fear that Canada will return to her warlike ways. But perhaps that fear has passed into the collective unconscious, a faint echo in our DNA of the trials we once faced from the rampaging northmen of the sea.

We faced a different trial on our way back from this place, one born of dangers subterranean rather than seafaring. But that part of my tale will have to wait until next time.

Boston Chapter 12: Pachyderms Gone Wild

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I didn’t expect the elephants.

The day with figmentj was quite lovely, featuring strolls through Boston Commons and antique naval mines and Christian hair metal and frightening clocks with plastic women in chains and all manner of other parts of the general Boston experience. We ended it by watching the sun set over the river by Harvard square, the peaceful tranquility of the flame-touched sky broken only by the screams of the boating-slaves rowing along the river under the gentle exhortation of scourge and lash:

But all such things must come to an end. Eventually, it was time to head back to Claire’s to help her get settled in to her new digs with all her various and sundry possessions, including her rather fetching Viking helmet, before sailing through the air in a magic metal tube back to Portland.

I am sad to say, Gentle Readers, that once again I failed to seize the opportunity to photograph Viking kazoo porn. I did, however, assist in the moving of many heavy mass-bearing objects up many flights of stairs, which, while undoubtedly not as great an accomplishment as photographing Viking kazoo porn, is an accomplishment nonetheless.

The next morning, Claire had to be on campus early for a meeting of some sort or another, where her indoctrination into the ways of life at Tufts University would begin. I had resolved to seize the morning and make the best possible use of it by remaining asleep while she got up to head to campus. I had resolved to head there myself, at a much more reasonable hour, as I am generally a much more reasonable man than those who profane the early hours with wakefulness, and to meet Claire there when her indoctrination session had concluded.

I didn’t, as I have mentioned, expect the elephants.

Tufts University is not, by the strictest definition, a clown college. Indeed, it excels in the pursuit of many intellectual endeavors unrelated to clowns. Its history, however, is tightly woven with that of the clown, as one of its earliest benefactors (and a source of much if its early funding) was none other than Pt. T. Barnum of “There’s a sucker born every minute” fame. He made his considerable living, though presumably not his endowments, on the back of that maxim.

In 1889, Barnum, when asked by the university’s trustees what he could do to help support the institution in a time of great need, donated the stuffed and mounted hide of one of his most beloved circus animals, Jumbo the Elephant, to the school. There is a parallel to this take in the Islamic story of the archangel Gabriel, who gifted the patriarch Abraham with an enormous stone called the Caaba which later became the object toward which Muslims now bow when they pray, when (as Ambrose Bierce observed) the patriarch had perhaps asked for a loaf of bread.

Just as the Caaba has exerted a magnetic influence on the Islamic tradition ever since, so has Jumbo the elephant had a similar effect on Tufts University, which might have taken its name from the small tuft of coarse fur that adorns the end of an elephant’s tail. The stuffed and mounted elephant was subsequently destroyed in a fire, or so the legend goes, and every bit of it was lost except for the tuft at the end of the tail. The symbolic meaning of this will be left as an exercise to the reader.

There are elephants everywhere on campus. Not actual elephants, you understand, but their representations, in painting and sculptures and mixed media and all matter of other forms too frightful to mention. The pachyderm permeates the collective subconscious at Tufts like gay porn permeates that of an Evangelical minister; and, as with that selfsame Evangelical minister, it leaks out everywhere.

I discovered a strange building during my exploration of the university grounds: a vast building, filled with miles and miles of shelves, along which were stored bound volumes of printed pages. It was kind of like an iPad, if you took all the books in it and, for some reason, printed them out. Prominent in that building was this picture of the Elephant Rampant, trumpeting its victory cry after seeing its enemies scattered before it like leaves in the wind, their broken bodies staining the ground red with their blood and the tears of the widows:

I also witnessed this man, perhaps convicted of some terrible crime, fleeing the Hall of Justice with its symbolic sculpture of an elephant triumphant as its keystone, ahead of the swift and brutal Justicars who will in a few minutes’ time come from these very same doors to run him down, for the education and amusement of the rest of the campus:

The position of the Justicars in the annals of Tufts history is long and interesting. The universally has a long-standing rivalry with its ancient enemy, Bowdoin College in Maine. This rivalry in times long past was fought at a low level, with skirmishers from each college occasionally leaving the walls and fences of their respective universities to stage raids on their adversary’s stronghold under cover of night.

However, in the black days of May in 1897, a large and powerful force ventured from Bowdoin on the path of war. They arrived in the afternoon of May 23rd, and the three days that followed are too grim for the telling. In the aftermath, the Tufts ruling council created an elite group of warriors, the Justicars, whose elephant-shaped masks of cold iron and moon-forged silver soon struck fear into the hearts of all who stood against the university.

Today, the battles between Tufts and Bowdoin are fought in ritual combat on the fields of the gladiators, and the Justicars serve a different function.

Down the hill a bit, one can find these sculptures, erected as reminders of the ever-watchful vigilance and benevolent care of the Great Pachyderm:

And further down still, near the university’s main temple, the idol of the Great Jumbo stands proudly. Offerings of the people adorn his side, written in the secret ancient script.

My journey to the Tufts campus was not without some small difficulties. Claire’s new home is located a short walk from the grounds. I am not, as those of you who have read some of my previous adventures, gifted with a good sense of direction, or even a sense of direction at all. It is only through conscientious memorization of routes and landmarks that I can find my way from the kitchen to the bedroom.

So I will confess a measure of consternation with the prospect of finding my way unaided from her new home to the university. Fortunately, through an accident of geography, Tufts University is located at the pinnacle of the only hill in the neighborhood. “Keep going up,” she said. “As long as you’re going up, you can’t miss it.”

Her advice was outstanding. With the mountain itself as my guide, I am pleased to report, Gentle Readers, that I became lost only twice, and did not walk more than half a mile out of my way.

Close to the edge of the campus, one finds this sprawling mansion, the home of the President of the University.

The low hedge you see ringing the house’s grounds are all that remain of the high, impregnable walls that once stood on that very spot, erected in haste after the attempted coup of 1979.

In that year, the grad students, who spend long and dangerous days in the eternal darkness of the mines beneath the campus, working day and night with pickaxe and shovel mining nuggets of knowledge in dangerous conditions for little pay, and whose labors made the university’s High Council and its president rich beyond dreams of avarice, rebelled. They seized the entrance to the mines and lay siege to the residence of the President himself before the rebellion was crushed.

Today, the relationship between the ruling class and the university’s laborers is much less tense. The laborers have negotiated contracts with the ruling elite that grant them some small measure of hope of upward social mobility, while the elite have largely been able to retain their fabulous wealth and their odalisques, who calm the fears of the aristocracy with the gentle applications of the feminine arts.

It was in bemused reflection of those arts that Claire later found me, wandering the campus without purpose or goal. We dined upon local delicacies called “burritos” and “quesadillas” that afternoon, before returning to her new home to engage in the rearrangement of things and stuff into a more suitable configuration.

The next day found us once more in her car, the vehicle whose stalwart service had seen us across an entire continent, through deep canyons and soaring mountains, past strange landscapes teeming with Mormons and the Guatemalans who’d carried off one of our own, this time on a shorter journey to the airport.

I have flown, through strange happenstance of fate and circumstance, many times in the past couple of years. Each time, I have flown on Delta Air Lines, and each time, my luggage has come out somewhat the worse for the wear. On my trip back from Europe, documented many posts ago, the handle was broken–somewhere, if I recall correctly, between Amsterdam and London. On this trip, I arrived in Portland to find a large gash ripped in the front of the suitcase.

It was not until my next journey, to London and King’s Lynn for a debauched celebration of birthday hedonism, that my faithful suitcase would receive a terminal blow. That is a story for another time.

Boston Chapter 11: When Hair Metal Attacks

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I have, as the regular reader will no doubt have noticed, been remiss in relating the end of the tale about the adventures experienced on the road to Boston. The parts concerning giant prairie dogs, rooftop wonderlands, Guatemalans, and the fury of Nature have been related already, but a cavernous hole remains in my tale, that of our experiences once we arrived.

Fear not, gentle readers, that much-needed hole is about to be filled.

As I related before, we carefully timed our arrival in Boston to coincide with the wrath of Hurricane Irene, which had filled us with some not inconsiderable consternation yet which turned out, truth be told, to be something of a damp squib.

We spent the night–a night which, I might add with a not inconsiderable amount of frustration, we had originally intended to spend in Cincinnati in the care of the pet lesbians–watching reruns of the new Dr. Who on TV, while outside the walls Irene thundered her rage, by which I mean tossed around a few leaves and then slipped quietly away to go sulk somewhere else.

We did, as I mention before, brave the fury of the hurricane to find cheap Mexican food. Along the way, we passed this building, which is apparently for sale.

It’s an old Catholic church, on a large plot of land with an old school (complete with dormitories!) behind it. Apparently, the whole complex is long abandoned and up for sale. Oh, the thoughts that poured through my head, let me tell you…I thought, gentle readers, of secret lairs and poly communes and hacker spaces and, buried somewhere deep don inside, perhaps just a bit of doing something unspeakable on the altar, assuming it’s still there.

Ahem.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, and figmentj soon arrived to carry me off. I was soon able to meet her then-fiancee (and now husband–congratulations, sweetie!), and together they exposed me to downtown Boston, a weird record store, and, God help me, Bulbous Bouffant.

The latter actually came first, and it turned out to be rather a good thing. Had I not been exposed to the wonders of the Bulbous Bouffant, I might have departed that afternoon to wander Boston’s urban delights with my sanity wholly intact, and the consequences of that might have been…unfortunate. We ventured, you see, to a vintage record store.

Dear God, we ventured to a vintage record store.

I am a child of the 80s, by which I mean a teenager of the 80s, and so I’ve lived through what is arguably some of the worst pop music the 20th century ever produced. It didn’t seem all that bad, at the time; but I suppose it is always hindsight that reveals true horror. While we’re in the thick of it, our brains shut down, a protective measure gifted to us by millions of years of evolution and an ancestry made up of hunter-gatherers who were often so busy fighting of leopards with their bare hands that they couldn’t afford to spend the time to think “Holy shit I’m fighting off a motherfucking leopard with my motherfucking bare hands!” And so, during the 80s, it all seemed totally natural and normal that we would listen to music produced by emotionally volatile prima donnas with bleached hair teased to within an epsilon of reason and sanity on the illuminating topic of how bad they got it for teacher.

All this I knew, having, as I mentioned, lived through it, though that doesn’t mean I was quite prepared to come face to face with that unfortunate chapter of musical history, in the form of…

…Christian hair metal.

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, which as near as I can tell both began and ended with Stryper, let me repeat that: Christian hair metal.

Christian hair metal is a microcosm of one of the most knotty and intractable problems of theology; namely, how can a divine being who is both good and just allow evil to exist? On the one hand, the fact that Christian hair metal ended with Stryper is evidence of God’s bountiful mercy toward His creation; but on the other, the fact that Christian hair metal began with Stryper is inherently at odds with the notion that there exists anything which is beneficent or just anywhere in all that which is or ever will be.

That wasn’t the real horror, though.

The real horror was lurking for us over the checkout counter.

Yeah, I got nothing.

The horror of my adolescence relived, we headed out to Boston Commons.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Boston Commons. I’ve been there a few times now, and one of the best memories I have of my sweetie Shelly involves the two of us watching the two happiest puppies in the world playing with each other on the grass on a beautiful spring day there, many years ago.

On this particular day, a bit more blustery and less sunny than that day, there were no surrealistically happy puppies rolling around with each other. There was, however, a man passing out flyers and railing against the perceived deficiencies of the public school system.

I spent most of my formative years in southwest Florida, where I received, it must be said, rather a good public-school education. Upon leaving that state, for reasons far too complicated to relate here but involving some of the more appalling shortcomings of the capitalistic system under which we live, I landed for a time in Georgia, where I spent a few years being knocked about by that very same capitalistic system. While I won’t bother to give you the details, I can offer this bit of hard-won wisdom: Should you ever be given the opportunity to become a minority partner in a desperately underfunded tech startup, run. Run your ass off. Don’t look back.

But I digress.

The upshot of all of this is that I am deeply inculturated with the ideas and values of the American South. So I can be forgiven, I hope, for assuming, when confronted with a man in a public park angrily carrying on about the shortcomings of the public educational system, if my first impulse was to assume that he wanted the subject of evolutionary biology struck from the curriculum, or wanted to bring back a mandatory hour of prayer to the classroom, or something else along those lines. It has generally been my experience, you see, that when someone complains about the quality of education in the twentieth century, it’s because he wants to bring it back to the eighteenth.

So it was with quite some surprise and pleasure that I listened to him for a bit, and read the pamphlets he was handing out, and I learned that he was arguing in favor of teaching critical reasoning and analytical thought in the public classroom, and proposed a course of study rich in mathematics, science, and logical reasoning.

One day, Boston, I will return to you. Even if only for a short time. Oh, yes, I will.

My tale is at this point nearly finished; there is little left to relate save for the bit about the elephants, which will have to wait until next time.

Boston Chapter 10: Pets and Cats and Pets and Cats

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As we closed in on Cincinnati, bearing down on the city like…err, two people in a car packed full of stuff, Hurricane Irene bore down on Boston like a a violent, tropical, cyclonic storm of the western North Atlantic, having wind speeds of or in excess of 72 miles per hour and powered by a thermocline along the boundary layer between ocean water and air.

Normally, ordinary reasonable people will, when faced with the prospect of a hurricane, attempt to leave the place it’s approaching. We two, however, as even the most casual of observers may by this point in this tale be able to infer, are neither ordinary nor reasonable.

Our original plan had been to arrive into the delightful care of the pet lesbians late that evening, then spend the entire next day exploring Cincinnati with them before departing on the last leg of our journey to Boston the following morning. After our encounter with the Guatemalans, though, all semblance of planning had been utterly demolished, and even the few remaining tattered scraps of our intentions were soon to be blown away by Irene’s fierce winds.

As Cincinnati’s city lights loomed in our windscreen…

Okay, okay, you got me. That’s a lie. A blatant, dirty, filthy lie. Cincinnati’s skyline at night is hardly capable of looming over a chihuahua puppy with an inferiority complex. The only way to get its skyline to loom involves the use of a helicopter, a telephoto lens, and about six hours in Photoshop. Seen from Interstate 75, the glittering vista of Cincinnati is something of a damp squib. I’m sure it’s a lovely city and all, but the approach turned out to be…well, let’s just say I’ve seen more sparkle during a drag king burlesque show at a science-fiction convention. But no matter.

Ahem. Back to the story. While Claire maneuvered the car into Cincinnati’s warm if homely embrace with the precision and grace that is the hallmark of everything she does, a man’s disembodied voice on the radio kept us updated on Irene’s progress along the Eastern seaboard. According to NOAA projections, which are usually better than tea leaves but not quite as good as a bookie’s spread on the Red Sox game, the hurricane had scheduled its arrival to correspond almost to the hour with hours…confirming a deeply-held suspicion that I’ve had for quite some time, which is that major meteorological events generally happen in order to inconvenience me.

So we determined, in defiance of any sort of reason or common sense, to alter our plans so as to arrive in Boston ahead of the hurricane, the better to appreciate Nature’s wrath from the inside. The reasoning seemed sound at the time–if we got there ahead of the hurricane, at least we wouldn’t be driving through it, right? I mean, that makes some kind of sense, right?

Sadly, it meant cutting short our stay with the pet lesbians and departing early the next morning.

I will confess to being a bit testy about this as I had quite looked forward to spending some quality time in Cincinnati. We arrived at the home of the pets rather late, where we were greeted by two highly adorable but groggy women (reassembled from a pile of kittens under our gaze) and their two cats, Calcifer and Mei Mei. This is what they look like in human form (this picture was actually taken at a con some time ago, rather than during the trip, but it’s a good likeness):

Now, at this point it might be necessary to segue for a moment into the matter of naming cats.

I, personally, have always wanted to own a cat named Loki. zaiah objects strongly to this plan, even going so far as to declare it a hard limit; she will not, she says, share her home with a feline named after a trickster god, on the idea that this might be painting a target that is perhaps a bit too appealing for the whims of Fate to pass up.

As for me, I have the Kanji character for Chaos tattooed on my body, so at this point, I am probably well beyond concerns about self-preservation from the fickle affections of uncaring Fate. I blame it on Youthful Indiscretion, as I hear that’s what one does. zaiah, however, has not been so rash, and so is more concerned with avoiding the gaze of Fate.

Anyway, I bring this up because the pets have two pets: a cat named Calcifer and a cat named Mei Mei, as I mentioned.

This is Mei Mei.

Now, one might argue that perhaps living with a pair of demons in feline form is not the best path to take in the spirit of not wanting to paint a huge target on one’s self for the entertainment of the fates. Technically, I suppose, only Calcifer is a demon (and a minor one at that), though Mei Mei means “sister” and one could infer that the sister of a demon is also a demon, or at least half-demon if the sister is a step-sibling, unless perhaps the sister was adopted, which I suppose might be possible given that I’m not aware of any policies forbidding cross-planar demonic adoptions in Cincinnati’s legal code, though I’m also not aware of any adoption agencies that place the unholy spawn of demonic forces from the Pit…but I digress.

The two of them and their cats greeted us, and made us comfortable in a bedroom with a slanting floor. We chatted for a time (much too long, really considering the lateness of the hour and their schedule the following morning, but I swear it wasn’t my fault…they’re both much too interesting NOT to talk to!).

They were gone on some mysterious errand when we woke the next morning, or perhaps they had reverted back to being a pile of kittens and were watching from somewhere just out of sight. We packed up the car–a task made, it must be said, considerably easier by the absence of our traveling companion, who presumably at this point was grooving in Nashville with her Chinese-speaking Guatemalan companions, or doing whatever it is one does in Nashville while in the company of one’s Chinese-speaking Guatemalan companions, which is an experience outside the realm of knowledge of your humble scribe. It was with considerable sadness, at least on my behalf, that we set out for Boston, racing the fury of Mother Nature to see who would get there first.

As it turned out, Mother Nature has a short attention span.

I’ve been in many hurricanes in my time. It’s inevitable, really, when one lives in Florida, which I did for many of my formative years. I’ve strong memories of driving through the jaws of a fearsome hurricane on the way back to Tampa from Atlanta, on account of some poorly-considered scheduling on the part of the DragonCon staff, who unwisely chose to make the convention coincide with a hurricane. I know what hurricanes look like, so I speak with authority when i say that Irene was a bit rubbish.

The trip into Beantown turned out to be effortless, as all the freeways into town were utterly deserted. The lanes leading out were jammed bumper-to-bumper with folks fleeing Mother Nature, but we were just about the only folks heading into town; it looked, all in all, rather like a scene from a made-for-TV zombie apocalypse movie, only with fewer walking dead and a bit more rain.

Not a lot of rain, mind. When we arrived at the home of Claire’s friend, with whom we had arranged to stay a night before she moved into her new digs at the edge of the Tufts University campus, the rain was falling in patchy gusts from a sky that looked as if it was trying to be sullen but couldn’t quite manage it, much as a young child who wants to be cranky but has just finished a cupcake and two ice cream cones and isn’t quite sure she remembers why. Occasional gusts of wind whipped the leaves around, but didn’t quite work up enough enthusiasm to separate them from the trees.

We ventured out in search of cheap Mexican food, and witnessed an especially vigorous gust of wind that toppled a plastic sign out in front of some store or other, but overall I had the feeling that Mother Nature was really just phoning it in. And I have to admit I felt a little let down. I mean, I gave up a day in Cincinnati, and the way I see it, it was the least she could do to acknowledge that sacrifice with something that was worth rushing into town for. Stinging rain whipping out of a darkened sky, angry bolts of lightning tearing apart the firmament, gale-force winds making the buildings shudder straight down to the foundations…hell, at least an unexpected thunderclap or two would have been nice.

But no. A bit of insincere wind and occasional sprays of light rain do not, in my book, warrant a mad rush away from spending time with the pets. Mother Nature clearly didn’t respect me or my needs, I feel, and I am still a trifle annoyed at her for it.

Boston Chapter 9: When Guatemalans and Nature Attack

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We had a plan, honest we did.

It was a simple plan, too. There wasn’t any of the “When NATO realizes the futility of resistance, they will peacefully turn over control of the free world to me” complexities of most of my plans. Our simple plan was to leave St. Louis and head toward Cincinnati, where we would meet with the pet lesbians late in the evening. From there, we would…

Okay, let me back up a bit.

zaiah and I have a pair of pet lesbians. We met them a couple of years back, as regular readers may already know, when they were couch-surfing their way down the West Coast. Owing to an unfortunate (for them) or very fortunate (for us) confluence of events, their plans in Portland had fallen through at the last moment, and a mutual friend had phoned me up and said “There’s a couple of people who really need a place to stay for a night or two, can you give them crash space?”

They are, it is fair to say, two of the most adorable people currently alive today. In fact, they are so adorable that, rumor has it, when nobody’s looking they turn (in some quantum observer-locked loop kind of way) into a pile of kittens. I mean, just look at the two of them! This level of awesome should not be attempted by anyone save trained professionals.

So zaiah and I have unofficially officially adopted them, kinda. When they heard about our cross-country trip, they offered us crash space in Cincinnati, and since spending time with them is something that’s awesome under any circumstances, I jumped at the chance.

So it was with sadness but also joy that I left St. Louis behind, knowing that as each passing mile brought us farther away from City Museum, it took us closer by the same degree to Cincinnati. We had planned to stop for dinner in Louisville, Kentucky, before reaching our destination, and to linger the following day, taking in the delights of Cincinnati in the company of two of the most delightful people I have ever met.

I have but one picture of Louisville. My memories of the place extend scarcely beyond this; for all I know, Louisville itself extends scarcely beyond this. Perhaps it is not even a real place; perhaps it exists in a kind of limbo, a psychological space where one’s companions are carried away by Guatemalans, a psychic residual trace left after the actual memories are erased. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Fate, it seemed, had other plans.

The first wrinkle was Hurricane Irene, also heading toward Beantown and scheduled to arrive about when we did. The second was the Guatemalans.

Irene demolished our plans in her wet and windy way. It started when we hit Louisville, where we arranged to meet with some friends of our traveling companion Erica. We decided to eat at The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was perhaps our undoing; never trust decisions made at any establishment which features non-working replicas of trolley cars prominently in its decour, as my dear old grandmum used to say.

The first sign that trouble was afoot came when Erica excused herself to receive a telephone call. She returned after a considerable delay (and the arrival of our food, which anyone familiar with The Old Spaghetti Factory’s general level of service is no small measure of time at all) with news that her parents feared for her safety in the face of the oncoming hurricane and wanted her to abandon her odyssey with us at once. The arrival of her friends, a pair of mild-mannered and agreeable Chinese-speaking Guatemalans, happened at approximately the same time, such that they, too, were aware of her family’s proclamation.

They had, apparently, at least to the best of your humble scribe’s ability to put together a cohesive narrative from three separate conversation threads, one of them being made by a person quite visibly upset, journeyed themselves from Nashville to Louisville just for the purpose of dining with us. The notion that Erica was to cease her travels with us forthwith posed something of a logistical dilemma, as it left her with no means for returning home from that particular place.

Her friends offered to help with the logistics by giving her a ride with them back to Nashville, which would take her some small distance, I suppose, back toward Portland, but not by so much as to make a significant difference, logistically speaking.

She discussed this possibility, or at least I infer that she discussed this possibility, with them at some length. As the discussion took place largely in Chinese, a language which is, I fear, entirely opaque to your humble scribe, I do not feel entirely comfortable vouching for the contents of the conversation. They could, for all I know, have been talking about nuclear fusion, which is something I’ve been meaning to write about in this very blog, or anime, or indeed even the cost of hiring a professional assassin on the open market (something which I also must confess to having entirely no knowledge of at all), or automotive repair, or découpage, or just about anything else, I reckon.

The meal progressed, bills were settled, and our traveling companion bade us farewell with the news that she would be taking up the offer of a lift to Nashville in the company of her friends.

I am not sure, to this very day, quite how that went, as the two of them had arrived in a two-seat car. My knowledge of geography is almost as limited as my knowledge of spoken Chinese, so I can not venture a guess about the practicality of traveling from Louisville to Nashville on the lap of a Guatemalan gentleman. Some weeks later, well after the conclusion of the journey through which I am so laboriously making my way, it came to my understanding that she had in fact returned to Portland, though I can not speak to the hows of this. At this point, as we bid our goodbyes in the parking lot, her path diverged from ours, and she passed from this story.

Our stay with the pet lesbians was to be similarly impacted by Irene, but that will wait for the telling of the final part of our tale.

Boston Chapter 8: A Rooftop Made of Awesome

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By this point in our trip, as we lingered in St. Louis, I believed I had seen the most awesome thing ever. Perhaps not the most awesome thing that could exist, mind you; but certainly the most awesome thing that did exist.

That was, I must confess, a failure of imagination on my part. I was, even now, still a little bit naive. We had not yet, you see, gone on to the roof of City Museum.

We also had neglected, in our eagerness to explore the awesome candy bar made of awesome (metaphorically speaking), to notice that our traveling companion Erica was not to be seen–a harbinger, as it turned out, of what awaited us in Louisville. But more on that later.

At some point–I think it might have been when we were exploring a tunnel made of mirrors whose entrance was an enormous clockwork bank vault door about twelve feet across–we got a text from our wayward traveling companion.

That tunnel is pretty cool, by the way.

So is the snack bar, which includes among other things a set of chairs made out of old bumper cars, and a lot of secluded little cubbyholes with unexpected furniture in them..

But I digress.

We met with her downstairs, between the gigantic fish sculptures whose mouths opened into tunnels up to the ceiling and the main entrance whose walls were decorated with antique circuit boards, and after some discussion, we decided to check out the wonders on the rooftop.

The roof to City Museum is accessed via an elevator whose shaft is filled with windows, which you get to via an entrance flanked with nude statues of women supporting the world atop their heads. (On these, I have little to say, as I had always been led to believe that that role was filled with elephants riding on the back of a great turtle…but I digress.)

Peering over the edge of the rooftop is an interesting experience. It is not often that one sees an airplane and a bus protruding from the side of a building, with tunnels made of rebar extending both around and through them.

Peering around the roof is even better. There’s a Ferris wheel, bolted to the highest point of the roof; and an enormous slide which towers from the platform with the giant metal praying mantis on it, that swoops down to the fountain that spits water at passers-by. The slide has a tunnel atop it, so those who eschew prosaic things like staircases can, if they wish, climb back up the hard way.

We ended up riding the giant slide by the praying mantis several times. It’s a mind-bogglingly terrifying climb up, at least for anyone with even a residual trace of the ancient fear of heights which lurks in the recesses of our dim collective unconscious. Which means, naturally enough, that it’s a total blast to do.

It’s so high that even sitting at the entrance to the slide can induce a bit of virtigo.

I have video of myself sliding down this slide a speed somewhere between “ridiculous” and “insane,” which I have not yet found the time to upload to YouTube.

We also spent quite a lot of time on the ferris wheel, which in addition to being bolted to the top of a skyscraper had also, apparently, been modified to spin rather faster than is traditional for this particular variety of carnival ride. Again, hella fun.

The view from the top is quite lovely.

The rest of the roof is decorated in a kind of “industrial wasteland meets Disney World” motif, only cooler. We scampered about for a time, like visitors in Kubla Khan’s domain.

Alas, our taste of the bliss which awaits the righteous in the world beyond was all too brief. We still had a lot of ground to cover, and the pet lesbians to reach before nightfall. So we made our reluctant departure. On the way out through the parking lot, I looked up, nothing with some sorrow an array of fascinating structures we hadn’t had the opportunity to explore.

We returned to the car and resumed our journey to Boston, on our way toward our next milestone with the pet lesbians and, before that, the Guatemalans who would abscond with one of our party. That story will be told next time.

Boston Chapter 7: Squeeeeee!

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There is a place that is the embodiment of all that is good and wonderful, where those who are virtuous–those who have, through the diligent and conscientious effort to right thinking and a proper attitude, developed an innate sense of what is worthy and good for the soul–can one day hope to go. And it’s in St. Louis.

Upon fleeing Meramec Caverns, which according to a little-known tale was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James (or so I’m told), we made our way to the city of St. Louis, where we stayed the night with some friends of Claire’s. The next morning, while we had breakfast on the back porch and scratched a large and patient poodle behind the ears, they said “You are going to City Museum before you leave town, right?”

At that moment, I was still naive. I vaguely recall saying something like “Yeah, we talked about doing that.” Enlightenment was, for me, still several hours away, which explains the casualness of my reply.

After we had finished our buttered muffins and bid farewell to Claire’s friends and the floppity-eared dog, we traveled in a meandering fashion through downtown St. Louis. The museum wasn’t terribly easy to locate, even with the aid of a GPS gadget whose synthesized voice makes an amusing phonetic mess of the word “Washington,” or as it says, “Waaaaaashingtorn,” as in “In five hundr’d feet, turn llleft on Waaaaaashingtorn Avenue.” But we eventually wiggled and woggled our way there, and parked in a small nondescript parking lot on a small nondescript block.

At this point, enlightenment was mere minutes away.

We rounded the corner, and the entrance to all that was good and wonderful stretched before us, as glittering and magnificent as the pearly gates of myth, only cooler–poetry written in curved rebar and patterned steel.

I still was not quite aware of what lay beyond, but at this point, I was beginning to have a dim sense that this would be an experience by which all future joy could be measured.

Part of that dim sense was sparked, no doubt, when I looked up. It’s not every day that one encounters a building with a hollowed-out airplane glued to it, with tunnels snaking around and through the superstructure.

We passed through the gates and gave money to St. Peter, who turned out to be significantly less expensive than the more traditional depictions might lead one to believe. From there, we passed through a wide stone hallway, cast-iron lamps mounted to its walls, and out into a vast, tiled chamber decorated with sculptures of all sorts of strange and bizarre sea monsters. The ceiling was entirely hidden by strips of–I don’t know, foil of some sort?–which moved constantly in the air currents, in ways this image can not convey.

Enlightenment was roaring toward me like a freight train whose engineer, coming off a four-day bender of cocaine and a bevy of Brazilian hookers, had fallen fast asleep at his post, his hand firmly on the throttle, urging his great iron horse to an exuberance of speed far in excess of what was safe or sane, and…oh, god, that sentence got away from me a bit there. Sorry.

What you can’t see in the picture above is the ceiling, or more precisely the tunnels in the ceiling.. Most of the statues are hollow, and there’s a network of tunnels fastened to the ceiling which you can get to by limbing up, around, or through the fishy sculptures. It’s awesome.

Above the ceiling is a crawl space, about four feet tall or so. The crawlspace itself, accessible only through the tunnels, is a warren of more tunnels, strange spaces, sculptures, pipes, and little little maze-like things that bring the explorer out abruptly into unexpected metal balconies.

By now, the eight-year-old inside me, who as I have probably mentioned really isn’t all that different from me, was just absolutely singing with delight And we hadn’t even started to scratch the surface of awesome yet.

City Museum is like a candy bar made of awesome. Beneath the milk chocolate coating of awesome is a creamy center of nougat filling made of awesome, with a rich caramel layer of sweet, sweet awesome carefully folded on top. No matter how far you explore, something even more awesome is awaiting the next…um, bite.

Upon crawling down out of the ceiling, we found ourselves in another huge room, dominated by an awesome staircase of awesome up to the second floor, which was made all the more awesome on account of being flanked by a gigantic slide coming down.

A gigantic slide! Running all the way down the stairs!

“Giant slides” is actually something of a standing theme at City Museum. At one point, we discovered a narrow space on the second floor with a small trap door that descended into darkness. Claire hopped into the hole and found a long, dark slide that drops down into the basement, where a narrow slit in the wall brings one back up into the Land of Weird Fish Sculptures It’s hard to imagine, even with all the faculties of the human mind, anything more fun.

But I digress.

The top of the slide that hugs the stairway looks like this:

Midway down the slide, this is the vista which presents itself to the rapidly descending visitor.

I want that giant round cage, oh yes I do. The things I would do with it would contravene at least sixteen international treaties. Oh, yes. I even have the perfect padlock for it…

We spent a couple of hours running (and sliding) around with glee, and then we decided to head up to the rooftop, which is also part of the museum.

And were blown away. As cool as everything we’d seen so far was, the rooftop was even more awesome. If the inside portion of City Museum is a candy bar made of awesome, the rooftop is a candy bar made of awesome being fed to you by a gorgeous houri dressed in nothing but awesome while you recline on a bed of awesome while being fanned gently with fans of awesome that stir the sea breeze of awesomeness all about you. If paradise is a place of joy unimaginable by mere humans, the rooftop of City Museum is that place.

That bit, however, will have to wait until next time.

Boston Chapter 6: Going Deep Underground

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I have never quite understood the romanticization of famous criminals.

I mean, I just don’t get it. People look at, say, the Mafia, or serial killers, and make them out to be some sort of romantic mythic figures, blazing their own path through life, heedless of the laws and mores of ordinary folk and occasionally feeding ordinary folk into wood chippers. I’ve heard that imprisoned serial killers actually get fan mail, often from women who offer them sex or marriage or both, and frankly I find it all bewildering (and just a touch unsettling).

Take Jesse James, for instance. What is it, exactly, that was romantic about this guy? As near as I can tell, the man was an illiterate, slave-owning, narcissistic sociopath who discovered a taste for killing people as a mercenary for the Confederacy and, after the war, privatized his former government service job by robbing banks and murdering clerks, students, tellers, and random passers-by–sometimes while dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen.

Just the sort of person you want babysitting your kid, right?

I mention Jesse James because some hours after leaving the Glore psychiatric museum, and with brains still reeling from the experience, we opted to stop at Meramec Caverns in the once-Confederate state of Missouri.

Meramec Caverns is a large cave system that’s noteworthy for a number of reasons. It’s geologically unique, sporting some of the largest-known limestone formations in the world. It was a part of the folklore of the Osage tribe of Native Americans, who used it for shelter. The cave system was said to be used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War.

And apparently, Jesse James hid in it once.

Of all these factoids, it’s the last one that gets the most press. In fact, as soon as you arrive, there’s no question at all about what you’ll be getting for your entertainment dollar:

I quite like cave systems, so when the idea of stopping in Stanton to check out the caves was floated, I offered an enthusiastic “yes” vote. We arrived just before closing, and bought our tickets from a fairly indifferent park ranger who explained to us that the caves were once used as a hiding place by Jesse James. From there, we proceeded through a huge cavern that’s been turned into a gift store to the tour entrance, where another park ranger told us he’d be taking us on a guided tour and that the cave system was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James. In case we were wondering why the cave was famous, a neon sign helpfully advertised the little-known fact that the cave was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James.

We walked past a model of a small wood cabin that was, apparently, similar to a cabin once stayed in by Jesse James, through an enormous chamber that was in times past used as a ballroom, and then brought past a couple of statues which, the tour guide explained, were placed on the spot where a sheriff had discovered boxes known to have been stolen by Jesse James.

Occasionally, I consider the fact that more people know about small-time thugs like Jesse James than about Norman Borlaug, the dude who got considerably less fame by saving the lives of over a billion people, but I digress.

The cave is actually quite lovely. In a lot of ways, it’s absolutely the perfect, Platonic ideal of a cave, with huge chambers and small passages and even an underground river. An underground river! How cool is that? Our guide explained that when Jesse James holed up there, the local sheriff cordoned off the entrance, but Jesse James was able to make his escape by swimming down the river and discovering a heretofore-unknown exit.

It’s quite dramatic all on its own.

Apparently feeling that the natural wonder of sparkling, crystal-clear water rushing underground along a path that’s dripping with all manner of limestone formations isn’t enough, the cave’s owners have put in a bunch of colored lights, to make it even more dramatic.

I do have to admit it’s pretty.

The cave is altogether lovely even when it’s not being lit like a bad 80s hair metal band.

The passing time was freaking our travelling companion Erica out a bit, as she doesn’t like driving at night, but Claire and I had quite a lot of fun on the tour. At least those bits of it that weren’t about Jesse James, who as I may have mentioned was a murderous, sociopathic thug with bad hair and in whom I am almost entirely uninterested. I got a lovely picture of Claire some way through the tour.

Shortly after this photo was taken, we arrived at the end of the tour.

I have no pictures of what awaited us there. If I did have any pictures, I would be reluctant to share them with you, Gentle Reader, on the grounds that, unlike Jesse James, I am not a violent, sociopathic thug with bad hair, and I bear you, my blog-reading public, neither malice nor ill will.

Indeed, it is with some trepidation that I even describe the horrors that await those who take the tour in mere words, for the experience is not for the faint of sanity.

Imagine, if you will, a vast, bowl-shaped chamber upon whose sides have been poured many tons of concrete, to better accommodate the stadium seating set therein. Imagine that this seating faces a quite lovely, and very large, waterfall of solid rock, the slow accumulation of limestone carried by the endless drip of water over a period of hundreds of millions of years–a breathtaking example of nature’s subtle and profound beauty.

And now imagine the part ranger–the one who talked to us about Jesse James–playing a tape recording of what might once have been stirring patriotic music, many many decades ago, while presenting a light show against that magnificent backdrop of rock, complete with projected images of the American flag, by…

…I swear I am not making this up…

…furiously toggling a large panel full of light switches to make colored lights flash on and off.

It’s a spectacle that I don’t think could be found anywhere else on Earth besides a cave in the American South, a simultaneously cheap and cheesy display of faux patriotism that’s almost, but not quite, a parody of itself, and so very, very, desperate in its sincerity. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it, and the memory of the spectacle has, I feel, filled a much-needed gap in my life.

I’m not quite sure how we left the cave. It’s entirely possible that the combination of lights and sounds to which we were exposed had temporarily stunned my ability to form short-term memory, my brain seeking some Freudian mechanism to cope with the essentially un-copeable. Or, and perhaps more sinister, it’s possible that we were exposed to some highly advanced form of neurobiological programming, planting the seeds of behavioral conditioning deeply into our psyches, awaiting only a television ad for Fruity Oaty Bars to transform us into unstoppable killing machines, unwitting foot soldiers for the new Confederacy or something.

Our behavioral conditioning for our new Jesse-James-loving, cave-dwelling Southern overlords complete, we headed out into the night. The next day would bring with it an experience that the eight-year-old in me will never forget.

Boston Chapter 5: Little Hospital of Horrors

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I’m a little surprised, whenever I think about it, that human beings were able to successfully treat, much less cure, any disease whatsoever prior to…oh, I don’t know, about 1977 or so.

Seriously, whenever one picks up a history book or (God forbid) a book on medical technology, it seems that before the advent of Star Wars all we had were superstition, stone knives, and dried tiger penises. In fact, even to this day, many people’s sum total understanding of basic biology scarcely extends beyond stone knives and dried tiger penises–but I didn’t come here to talk about the alt-medicine crowd.

Instead, I came here to talk about Boston. Err, not Boston itself, you understand, but our journey toward that fabled (and by now near-mythical) Xanadu, where my friend Claire had been accepted to a university or a Thunderdome or something. By this point, it was all getting a bit blurry, what with the heat and the prairie dogs and the Jesus of Wheat and all.

When we next set out, with Erica driving and me trying with only modest success to deal with a client’s crisis of some sort about something or other, the temperature was already nudging toward the triple digits. Frankly, I’m sometimes a bit surprised that any human being successfully survived summer in the Midwest prior to the invention of air conditioning. We had determined days before to make a stop at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. We had a book which called it one of the 50 “most unusual museums in the United States.” I’m not quite sure who made that list or on what criteria it was based, but the Museum of Spam (the quasi-meat product, not the email full of Nigerian princes and penis pills) is on the list, and that’s good enough for me.

The Glore Psychiatric Museum is housed in what’s left of Missouri State Lunatic Asylum No. 2–yep, that was its official name. Now, I’ve seen a number of Hollywood films involving a small number of friends who happen to be traveling alone across the country. All of them recommend stopping for a time in the ruins of an old lunatic asylum, so stop we did.

The first thing one sees upon entering the museum is this old newspaper illustration, apparently dating back to the time of the asylum’s founding, which depicts life in an insane asylum as a rather proper Victorian affair replete with formal tea and, I don’t know, Badminton games or something. “I say, old chap, after our noonday repast, would you fancy a stroll through the park, followed by a rousing cricket match?” “That sounds delightful, dear fellow, but I rather think we should postpone the afternoon meal until after our sport.” “After our sport? I say, are you mad?” “Quite so, old sport!”

We ventured farther in, where we were met by a cheerful gentleman who assured us that no psychotic, supernatural offspring of crazed serial killers bent on bloody vengeance had been seen ’round the grounds in almost a fortnight, so we were confident that our stay would be pleasant and free of the bother one normally can expect from such things.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that anyone unwise enough to be crazy prior to the age of Pac-Man was in for rather sorry treatment at the hands of his fellow man. The museum has a floor full of devices which had previously been used to “treat” mental illness, and to my (admittedly untrained) eye, rather a lot of them looked indistinguishable from the sorts of devices the Inquisitors might use. Take these gadgets, for example:

The chair on the left was used to calm patients by restricting their mobility. Sometimes, apparently, for weeks. The gizmo on the left was designed to confine a person in a very small box which would then be spun ’round at high speed until the unfortunate occupant passed out or threw up, or both–presumably on the premise that a vomiting mental patient is better than a mental patient who…um, isn’t vomiting, or, err, something. The precise details of the therapeutic modality are beyond my grasp of the art.

And the definitions of “mentally ill” were as all over the map as the treatments. In ages past, an unmarried woman who wanted children might be confined to an asylum, as might a married woman who didn’t. (True fact: the dude who invented the diagnoses of “nymphomania” included diagnostic criteria such as a fondness for chocolate and a penchant for reading works of fiction, I swear I am not making this up.)

It rather seems, all in all, that the considered opinion of the entire medical establishment over a very long span of time was that the mentally ill were just being stubborn, and merely needed a few nasty knocks about the head to get them to cut it out. This seems to your humble scribe rather like saying a legless man is simply being lazy, and all he needs is a good swift kick in the pants to get him on his feet again…though I didn’t come here to talk about the Republican party, either.

The general theme of “knock them about a bit ’til they learn to cut it out” as a treatment modality for cognitive and emotional impairment continues through quite a lot of the medical equipment on display:

Some of the items in their collection would look, I have to say, right at home here in my dungeon, and I wouldn’t mind building something like that long cage on the left…but only for people who are of sound and willing mind. I may be a mad scientist, but I’m not, well, crazy, you know? At least not like the folks who actually thought these things would do some good.

A number of other displays commemorated the sometimes colorful and occasionally fatal eccentricities of a few of the hospital’s more outstanding patients. Take this one, for example, which is just kind of weird until you know what it is, at which point it becomes weird and gross.

This bizarre work of art was made by hospital staff, not by a patient, out of the materials found in a patient’s…err, stomach. The patient in question, you see, had what would today be called obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the particular manifestation of her obsession lay in eating any little bits of sharp pointy metal things that she could get her hands on. Which, as you might expect, eventually killed her.

See? Weird and gross. I did try to warn you.

This guy, on the other hand, was straight out of the X-Files:

The story, as near as I can remember it, is that there was this dude who was completely convinced he was sane, while all the people around him thought that he was stark raving mad. He was utterly convinced that there were railroad box cars containing evidence of his sanity being kept at an undisclosed location, and he wrote about them obsessively. Somewhere along the way, he also became convinced that the television set in his room contained a secret mechanism by which he could send messages to the vague and sinister forces hiding the box cars from him, or perhaps to agents opposing those sinister forces (it’s not entirely clear to your humble scribe) so he wrote long, rambling, incoherent letters about box car numbers and train routes and railway schedules and stuff, or something, and tucked them inside the television set, until it eventually quit working.

Which, I reckon, wasn’t actually the outcome he had hoped for. It’s bad enough when a secret conspiracy has plotted to conceal evidence vital to your sanity in railway cars; it’s even worse when you can’t watch next week’s Gunsmoke on television.

This next bit is a tiny section of a huuuuuge piece of embroidery, created by hand by a patient on what I believe to be a hospital bedsheet.

We puzzled over it for quite a while. Reading it is rather like trying to track a coherent thought through a untrodden jungle the way a traditional Chinese doctor might track a tiger across the savannah, following its telltale traces in the slightest disturbance of underbrush, before shooting it in the head and drying out its penis to make phony aphrodisiacs that are sold in small glass vials from musty shops whose owners don’t really give a toss about the extinction of a noble species for the sake of superstition…but I digress.

This display one was one of my favorites.

One should not court another man’s wife if one wishes to avoid a sticky fate. You heard it here first.

The basement of the old hospital, where we ended up after we decided to separate and explore the ancient lunatic asylum separately just as Hollywood has taught us to do, bore a large steel door with these markings:

It is unclear to your humble scribe exactly what sort of disaster supplies one keeps in the morgue, or indeed what eventuality those supplies are intended to ward against. I can only imagine it’s not a zombie-related disaster, as keeping one’s zombie-related disaster supplies in the same location as the corpses of the newly dead is likely to result in a certain inconvenience.

We fled the museum through the gift shop, where many commemorative items were available for sale (“Relive the experience again and again!”), and then were once again on our way to Shangri-La. There were by now only a couple of adventures left before our encounter with the Guatemalans and our renewed appreciation to the full fury of Nature’s watery wrath, but those tales will need to wait for another telling.