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8-13-92. Vermilion, Ohio.
Walking
around Vermilion, Ohio, while staying at the Motel Plaza, Highway 6, near
where the Vermilion River flows into Lake Erie.
Sidewalks on gas station property on a main road and sidewalks on the property
of an apartment complex off to one side of the main road: both cement walks
were laid down in the last decade, by the looks of it, but neither meets
the other --- they stop near the edge of the 2 properties, leaving about
a 12 ' space (grass) between. The gas station's builders were probably legally
obligated to put in "public walks" but did the absolute minimum,
probably realizing that just about everyone drives by this space anyway.
An example of how many "public" spaces are created in modern urban
spaces after private property is divided up --- spaces that are strangely
absent, borderline, and suffused with melancholy as the evening crickets
start up.
Or is
it that with a turn of the head these spots may become exhilarating instead?
Spaces holding something we can't quite see by looking directly at them,
something that can be seen only through the corner of the eye, or only once
we've looked away, something unbounded and found and lost and found?
TV lights flickering
like campfires in darkened living rooms.... images changing rapidly, often
more than once a second.... endless REM loops....
Down the
street farther, the entrance to a cement contractor's business office. Huge
solid cement blocks, c. 3 ' x 3 ' x 3 ', line the entrance road.
The blocks have metal `handles' or loops (of rebar?) on the top, used by
a crane or backhoe to hoist them into place (they must weigh at least a
ton). All are standard smooth cement, made by filling in a mold. But the
tops of each show individual patterns, little ribs and ridges and nubbly
crusts in the cement left from the swirl of a hand-held cement trowel (?)
topping off the block in the mold.
Why are
these blocks here? To advertise the contractors' expertise, his ability
to make and handle cement? (Or, rather, his ability to hire people who have
these skills.) Probably it is something like that: these blocks are a 15-ton
ad. But the blocks also shift and seem stranger the more I think of them,
floating halfway between work and play, sign and object.
The traces
of the movement of a human hand and its tool on the tops of these blocks
is like an anonymous signature of the moment of their making. I am moved
by this despite myself, despite the fact that I know full well I am thinking
absurd and irrelevant thoughts right in the middle of a commercial strip,
staring at a space that no one else thinks worth a second glance during
either the day or the night.
The elements
of the sign extraneous to the sign are the most moving, the most human:
not the obvious features of weight and smoothness in the blocks that show
off the contractor's expertise, but the swirl of a person's trowel on the
top that is irrelevant and invisible to anyone driving by to do business
in the building. These are marks that can only be seen if you are walking
and looking late at night, out of proper time---for in the daytime all this
activity might be seen as loitering or trespassing. The marks that are invisible
until nightfall are marks that are full with the movement of their making,
a sign of sign-making. Yet they are also full of absence: the maker's hand
moved here and then moved on, signature-swirls that actually erase his presence
and name rather than sign it.
Been here
and gone....
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