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Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

Blessings

They arrived at the agreed upon place, straggling in twos and threes to the hotel lobby where masked attendants welcomed them with bows and ma’ams and sirs, ushering them through the entrance to the restaurant. With each new arrival everyone had to stand and greet the newcomers. There was laughter and embraces, explanations offered for those absent. The elders held out their hands and the younger pressed it to their foreheads, bowing down slightly, lending a formality to the occasion.  

After some stilted conversation, where everyone worked to reacquaint themselves after so many years apart, they decamped to the buffet. Some conducted reconnaissance of the full spread before making their selections, but most headed to the soups for a bowl of sour broth with pork or congee to begin. The serving tables were filled with local delicacies as well as more standard fare: Kare Kare, siomai and siopao, Laing, Lechon belly and more. For dessert there was cake and ice cream, flan and a Halo Halo station. 

Now that they were eating the talk was much easier. No one felt obligated to speak to the whole group, instead chatting with those closest. There was the usual discussion of politics, of what had happened in the city since the visitors had last been there, and all the good and bad of the world. Work was discussed and relations not present. The visitors talked of their lives overseas, of the weather and how cold it was, how the government worked and how (very) distant places were. 

As the evening wore on servers began to move about the restaurant loudly singing happy birthday at every table that had availed itself of the birthday discount for any guest whose birthday fell in the current month. Applause followed each rendition, ending when the next round struck up in what, for a few terrifying minutes, seemed, an infinite loop.  

They were in a land of discounts. There were senior discounts, birthday discounts, discounts for those staying at the hotel, discounts for charging the bill to the room, discounts for groups larger than 10, and more. The visitors had wondered as they made their reservation the day before if they would somehow end up being owed money by the restaurant.  

They were left alone when they were done eating, as every table was, to converse for as long as they wished. When they had exhausted all conversation they took their leave as a group, gathering again in the lobby. It was prom season and gleaming teenagers, practically vibrating with excitement, trailed by their proud parents kept streaming through. They looked on benevolently, reminiscing about the schools they had attended.  

The visitors had returned to one earlier in the day, exploring the grounds after claiming to the security guard manning the gates of the campus that they needed a copy of their transcripts. The campus was vast, a series of long, interlocking buildings with courtyards at the centre. High school, elementary and university students intermingled in a constant buzz of activity. They sat in the shade of one courtyard watching as people moved about, the air still, hot and heavy.  

Everyone said goodbye two or three more times in the lobby, lingering and not quite willing to let the evening end. Just as it seemed all conversation had been exhausted someone had another question or anecdote. There was heartfelt goodbye after heartfelt goodbye. More embraces and shaking of hands. At length all those who had come took their leave, the attendants bowing and ma’am siring them out. They disappeared into the darkness of the night, leaving the visitors to return to their hotel room. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

The Heart of the City

The church was under a white tent, protecting those gathered from the midday sun. Chairs, mostly empty, surrounded the pulpit. Surrounding it was a carefully manicured forest of green, with ponds and streams intertwined throughout. The already humid air was made positively damp by the greenery and water. People walked through but didn’t linger, heading to one of the buildings that encircled the gardens. Inside was air conditioned and gleaming. Well-dressed people wandered through the corridors of this oasis, idling in shops. There were security guards everywhere, watchful and unobtrusive. By the pathway leading to the tent, at every entrance to the buildings and within as well. They gave a cursory check of bags and asked people to take off their hats. A familiar protocol.  

The city surrounding this idyll was a warren of streets choked with exhaust and traffic. The pavement absorbed the noon sun, reflecting it back, affording no relief. A profusion of buildings crowded, apparently haphazardly around it. Modern business towers with gleaming windows, campuses for private schools built at the turn of the previous century, shops with apartments above them, the buildings crowded so close together it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Half-built complexes littered the landscape. Cranes stood beside them, seemingly forgotten. The streets were crowded with people, though not as much as the roads were snarled with cars. They lingered in the few places that offered any shade, where jeepneys and trikes picked people up, or hurried from building to building where air conditioning might be found.  

These two realms intersected underneath the mall in the parking garage with many levels and drop off points. The chaos of the streets outside was limited here, only because there so little room to maneuver. Every entrance and exit was manned by security, these individuals looking far more fearsome than those inside. They knew they were the barrier that mattered. There were many failings in the city, that no one would deny. Problems so vast it was hard to comprehend fully let alone hope to address them. Inside, all that could be forgotten, left invisible. There were no windows looking down on the streets. People drifted about, laughing, idling in restaurants and on benches. Enjoying a pause from what awaited them outside. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Drylands

The river, which in spring had briefly threatened to overspill its banks, was reduced to a near trickle, the stones that lined its bottom visible from the shore. They could walk across it without the water getting much higher than their ankles, though no one did. There was a time when such an event would have made travel easier – no need to find a place to ford – though no one would have been happy at the fact. A low river meant the same thing then as now: drought. 

The signs were visible everywhere. Leaves were already turning on the trees though it was still the middle of August. The crops were turning too, stunted and only half-filled out. The June rains had been miserly and the heat through July punishing. Creek beds and sloughs that might have kept water until midsummer had been dry since June. The mountains to the west had been bare since the end of May. Unheard of, though there was always someone to point out when it had last happened as though that were evidence of anything.  

The groundwater, always low through the summer months, was dangerously so now. The well they had dug when they first arrived was running dry. The water table had fallen several feet the year before and a warm and dry winter had not raised it. This year the levels were dropping fast, lower than they had ever seen. They had to be careful about how much water they used and had started contemplating drilling a new and deeper well. It was that or risk having to truck water in. 

With the creeks and sloughs and even the dugouts low and dry, there was a risk the cattle in the pastures wouldn’t have water, though they would run out of feed before that happened. The grass was burning up in the heat, turning brown, looking tired. Many years they might keep the cattle out on the pastures into September or even October, before turning them out onto fall grazing, the stubble left over from the harvested crops. Not this year. There wasn’t enough feed to get them through a normal winter, let alone having to start feeding early. Everyone was selling or planning to in the coming weeks. Shrinking their herds. The land couldn’t support them this year and maybe not next too. 

As August stretched on dry and hot, they had more difficulties with the well and realized they had no choice but to drill a new one. Test holes were sunk in the pasture near their house trying to avoid the gravel that pockmarked most of the surrounding land. A likely spot was found and the earth was cored out. Water flowed in and they lapped it out to see how much flow there was. Piping was put into the hole, surrounded by gravel and sand permeable enough to let the ground water through. The pipe itself had holes to allow the water to flow. A pump was attached and trenching dug and more piping laid in the ground to connect the well to the house.  

The day after the well was drilled it rained, a terrible thunderstorm with lightning cascading through the night. The rain lasted through the night, washing the land clean. Or it would have, if the storm had not brought smoke from the western fires with it. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

On the Quality of the Smoke in the Sky

The sun was a red orb gazing down upon a shrouded planet. Particles from the fires burning uncontrolled and uncontained across the northern latitudes drifted through the high atmosphere, carried by planetary winds, descending on population centres below.  

The sun glared through the haze, a sickly red. A poisoned wound that wouldn’t heal. The smoke created a layer of grime that hung above, washing out the blue of the sky and casting everything below in a dissipated light. A new world would be born from the ruins of this one, some claimed, but in the meantime, they would be left to inhabit what was left. 

The smoke had a palpable ethereality. It sat above, a strange formless cloud that never moved. The blue of the sky was still present, but faded. Marred by a layer of grime that wouldn’t wash clean. 

The smoke clung to the upper reaches of the sky, mixing with the clouds, darkening them, so that it looked like rain might be coming. Yet no rain fell, only an invisible ash fall. The light was no longer true, the days felt faded and obscure, like some lost past they couldn’t find their way back from.  

In midsummer the smoke appeared from some far distant fire, settling throughout the river valley. An ominous warning. The world felt smaller, the sky far away. They were trapped in a room with a ceiling that was slowly falling in. Compressed and seething.   

Drought and heat and locusts, the seasons seeming out of joint. Now, a cloud of miasma they were forced to breath as they went about their days. Oh, this broken world. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

The Predator

A half-dozen gather at the side of the road on their motorcycles beneath the pulsating midday sun. The heat shimmers in the air under that bright light. The earth has a reddish tinge to it here, arid looking, though they are far from any desert, unless one counts the concrete that makes up the highway and the streets that they ride through. A small town, the sort one passes without bothering to learn the name. Each of them wears a Predator mask as a helmet, heavy, unwieldy things that give them the look of a doll, their heads out of proportion with their torsos. Some are in shorts and t-shirts and flip flops while others are wearing something that resembles the Predator body armour without being an exact costume. No one pays them any mind. The men sitting under an awning at the nearby pancit shop don’t even glance over. In a practised unison they swing out onto the highway joining the steady flow of traffic, Predator-locks flowing in the wind. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

The Smoke

It arrived unannounced before dawn, so that as they awoke it was everywhere. As if it had always been present and the days before had been an illusion. A past falsely remembered. In truth it became hard to recall. It stayed for days, a lurking presence. The sky was grey and low, no hint of blue showing through. The sun was a faded, disconcerting red in the sky. A dying ember. There was a vague smell in the air and a taste of something bitter at the back of the throat that soon became unnoticed. Part of the fabric of the day. Just as they didn’t even realize they no longer looked to the horizon, knowing it was no longer visible. 

The changes began soon after. At first it was just a feeling of pressure on their chests, something constricting, along with a general unease. Something was wrong, something beyond just the smoke that was an insidious presence everywhere. People began to stay indoors but it seemed to make no difference. If anything, the weight on their chests became unbearable. It was all intolerable and yet it seemed there was nothing to be done but wait and hope it dissipated. Some said it was all coming from a great fire in the north or to the west and that it would not cease until the conflagration was put out. Others claimed there were as many trees as there were stars in the sky and that the fires would burn until all life went out of the universe. 

The whispers began after a few unchanging days. Insinuating and sinister, as palpable as the smoke itself. For most it was just a stirring of the wind in the grass. They heard it and wondered at it and its origins. Those who could hear the words carried within the murmurs were changed by them. They spoke of anguish, of hatred, of being told they were worthless lost things who deserved nothing. Those who could not distinguish what was said were puzzled by this. Surely these words were not from without but from within, the result of some fatal weakness they did not possess. After a time, those who could hear the whispered curses ceased to speak of them, except among themselves, no longer trusting those who couldn’t hear them. 

They no longer trusted themselves as well. The whispers had gotten into them, inhabited them. They took to wandering and forgot themselves. Forgot where they lived, who they were. They congregated together by rivers and in parks, taking what comfort they could in their shared circumstance. Their families came looking for them and they turned their backs on them, pretended not to know them, or perhaps they no longer did. They were transformed, day by day, hearing only the whispers and seeing only the smoke. All of them developed the same shambolic gait, a slow shuffling stride as though every step was perilous. Their shoulders were hunched and their backs bent. They were thin and wasted, aged even in their youth.  

Soon enough they were nearly unrecognizable. Their expressions were disconcertingly blank. They seemed to see nothing of their immediate surroundings, always looking away and ahead at the vanished horizon, as if waiting for its return. People avoided them, even as their numbers continued to grow. They looked away and pretended not to see, spoke of them as if they were not there. Discussions were had about what to do, though no one asked those afflicted. It wasn’t clear what they might say if they did, beyond complaining about the whispers, which general consensus had determined must be delusions. Once the smoke cleared, it was said, they would return to society. 

One day the smoke did, stealing away in the night without ceremony just as it had arrived. The whispers lingered another day or so, before they too quieted. The sun was bright in the sky, that was as blue as anyone could recall. Many wandered about feeling light, a weight they had forgotten about lifted from them. Each breath came easier. Isn’t it wonderful, they all said. Finally. The horizon was there and they all could see. 

Except for those afflicted by the whispers. Did they still hear them? No one was certain. They walked about in the same straggling way, scuffling and slumped, their eyes still looking off away. The horizon had returned, but not for them. As the weeks went by and the smoke did not return and they did not improve, it became clear that something had changed for them, perhaps something irrevocable, and they would not be coming back. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

The Lake

Evenings and days off he would go out for drives into the countryside, choosing a road and seeing where it led him. A familiar restlessness drove him, but instead of fleeing he was wandering in place, always with a home to return to. The roads radiating out from the small town he had come to in the cardinal directions became familiar in the same comforting way as the routines of his job. He got to know the hills, the little sloughs surrounded by trees that dotted the fields he passed, and the houses and yards filled with farm equipment and corrals that marked his progression. If his mind wandered and he came back to himself he would quickly know where he was when he spotted the yard with the Canadian and Saskatchewan flags or the hill with the three wooden grain bins painted orange.  

Several times he found himself at the lake, staring at its gleaming water. The first time he followed the southern walking trail that led to the hills that encircled the far end of the water. The lake became a kind of swamp there, the trail ending, filled with hummocks that were impossible to traverse without getting very wet. He tried, just to prove the point, nearly ending up with a broken ankle for his efforts. After that he stayed away from that end of the lake, taking the trail along the north shore the next time. The way there became impassible much earlier, the trail stopping and the ground becoming marshy. There had been thunderstorms seemingly every other day for a week and the ground was very soft. When he stepped out onto it, the mud swallowed his shoe up to his ankle and he had to fight to pull it out.   

It was the fourth time that he ended up on the road heading to the lake that he wondered just what was going on. Did all roads lead here? Clearly not, yet whether he started off going north or south or east, the highways and gravel roads he selected, seemingly by chance, always brought him back to the lake. He wouldn’t even realize it, until he saw the creek running alongside the road and then he was descending into the valley catching that glimpse of glimmering blue water in the sunlight. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

The Black Rider

The rider, dressed in black, journeyed west across the plains as spring arrived fitfully across the land. He encountered all manner of weather, the wind always at his face, sometimes bitterly cold. There were blizzards and rain and days so bright and warm it seemed impossible it could turn cold again. Snow lingered in most places, especially on the north-facing sides of hills and valleys which the sun only reached for a brief time each day. The rivers he came to were largely open, though ice still clung to some of the banks and they were swollen with runoff. The ground was damp and soft everywhere, even where it was bare, making his evenings miserable affairs. The temperatures would plunge below freezing, sometimes far below, and he would wake up covered in frost, his blankets and clothes stiff.  

He passed along roads – wagon trails more accurately – before leaving them behind and following buffalo and cattle trails that had a wandering westward trajectory. Sometimes there was nothing to mark a way forward, only the snow and the dormant grass of the vast plain. An empty place by all appearances, though he knew that to be deceptive. He had come from a place of towns and villages and farms and people and now encountered such signs of civilization only intermittently. The great tribal nations that had once commanded the immense sweep of the prairies were banished now and newcomers were taking plows to the grass. There were towns and homesteads here and there, but mostly he found only surveyor stakes buried in the still frozen earth waiting for warmer times for someone to pull them up and claim them. The ranchers had taken their cattle to southern valleys and would not return until spring had truly come to stay.  

This suited him, for he preferred to stay away from people. The presence of magpies, strutting and chirping and preening, would alert him to their nearby presence before it came into sight and he would go out of his way to avoid them. Sometimes it could not be helped. He passed by homesteads with families blinking at his sudden appearance as though they had just awoken from a winter slumber. One time, in trying to ride around a town he came upon a group of children with their sleds making the most of a steep hill while the snow stayed upon it. Their screams of delight, heard before he caught sight of them, startled him initially and he was still tense and frowning, with a hand at his belt, as he rode by.  

What people saw, when they noticed him at all, was a man in a long black coat with mud-spattered black boots. His shirt and pants were faded, almost absent of colour. As was his face, his expression always distant, his soft eyes looking past anyone who tried to meet his gaze. Some caught a glimpse of a pistol at his belt, a flintlock. A large cumbersome thing out of all time. Those who saw it wondered at it and dismissed it, for no one would carry such an antique across a land where wolves and bears and worse things than that lurked. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

Regarding Monuments

There are few monuments to be found in the Quarter. It has never been that sort of place. The wooden grain elevators that used to tower above each town would seem to qualify, yet they are unremarkable in the sense that every town in the surrounding regions had one as well. Most are gone now, fallen into disrepair or torn down, replaced by concrete elevators that loom far taller on the landscape. That is the fate of every construction in the Quarter it seems. So many of the railroads that once crisscrossed these parts have been pulled up, replaced by highways that pass by abandoned homesteads, with houses that are slowly falling into disrepair, being reclaimed by the landscape. The first inhabitants of this place left only stone rings where their tipi’s stood, before they were driven into exile.  

It seems that will be the fate of much of what has been built by Those Who Came as well. The home I grew up in will certainly not stand for centuries, marking the passing years as homes do in other places. It will be torn down or left to disintegrate, depending on the inclination of whoever comes to possess it. Even the towns and villages cannot hold here. They are abandoned slowly, street by street, building by building. People move to other towns, but most leave the Quarter altogether. Few return, for the ways back are difficult and slowly being forgotten by all who once passed along those roads. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.  

An Unbordered Place

Once the Quarter, and all that surrounds it, was part of a vast inland sea. That time is long past, the waters vanished, but one can still find the remains of the creatures who inhabited this place then. Ancient sharks and the first birds who had not yet learned how to fly. Their fossils can be found in the badlands and other desiccated places. It serves as a reminder that, though the Quarter seems unchanging and unyielding, it was not always as it is now and it will not be in some distant future. 

This place still retains some of the essential character of the ancient sea. If you stand in an empty spot, atop a hill where you can see the full horizon all around, you will see the undulating hills, cresting like so many waves, with no shore now to crash upon. It is the shapelessness of water that defines the Quarter now, always shifting, one moment reaching out to fill every crevice and the next retreating. An unbordered place. You cannot put boundaries upon it, for they drift and the place itself does not hold steady.  

In those moments, when you stand upon the hills alone (you must be alone), the time of the Quarter plays one of its strange tricks. Time is always strange, the past never being the past entirely, especially here. Close your eyes and listen the wind as it moves along the hills, stirring the grass and it is the endless cascade of waves upon a vanished sea.