Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 In 2017 as part of a larger tour of Hollywood and its surroundings I took a trip p the Santa Monica Mountains to visit Will Rogers State Historic Park and joined a tour of the ranch house, polo grounds and stables. I did not know then I was seeing what would in less than a decade become lost history. By the second day of the LA wildfires the ranch house and stables were among the many cultural markers lost to the inferno. Their destruction pales in comparison to the thousands of homes destroyed, the thousands of people displaced and the lives lost. Nonetheless, the loss of what was a testament to a fascinating character, a uniquely American success story, is a blow.  Memorials and honors to Will Rogers abound west of the Mississippi. Most notable among them is the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, near where the Will Rogers story truly begins. Rogers was born in 1879 in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory near what the coming railway would soon influence rechr...

 Urban exploration, as the term is used by the seekers of crumbling architecture, has a distinct appeal from the more popular and not specifically named spectacle of ancient ruins. The latter offers clues to a long-vanished world, a life so abstracted from our own that any narrative assembled from the remnant pieces is fueled by speculation. Urban exploration hits closer to our shared cultural home. It offers pieces of a familiar world and a life we know. For some an abandoned urban landscape evokes specific memories but, even for those visiting the shattered remains of a once thriving location, there are enough commonalities to imagine the place at its peak with relative accuracy. Whether or not we knew the now decaying place in person we bond over the shared history, a bond formed by remnants of a shared culture, history or routine. There is a haunting bittersweetness, then, to most such spots not entirely different from visiting a cemetery or a memorial. Most abandoned areas tel...