Cracked Window

In the 1980s, I tacked up a poster in my newspaper office. It promoted an exhibit at the Smithsonian that I never saw: “Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s: Past Visions of the American Future.” The poster gripped me in ways I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the fanciful and futuristic scene from a world that never came to pass. Or my childhood love of Tom Swift books. Or the deeper idea that whatever we think the future holds for us collectively and individually is always wildly wrong — except death.

Then the other day I stumbled upon a movie serial I had watched on TV as a kid, probably in the late 1950s. It had enthralled me like no other film. Made in 1935 and featuring Gene Autry in his first starring role, The Phantom Empire was a 12-episode science fiction western. A technologically advanced people from a sunken continent lived secretly 20,000 feet below the Earth’s surface. They watched the outside world via hidden cameras. When they ventured to the surface on horseback, they thundered into view through a camouflaged stone door in the side of a mountain. They had ray guns and robots, along with an aura of moral and intellectual superiority.

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Few blog posts for many months means I’ve been crushed with work. But that’s a good thing in these trying economic times. The heaviest load has come from serving as guest curator for a just-opened exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, called “Tall in the Saddle, the Pendleton Round-Up at 100.”

In May 2009, I began tracking down artifacts and other items for the 3,000-square-foot exhibit. What I thought would be the most challenging part of the project — persuading people and organizations to loan roughly 500 things — proved to be the easiest. The most gratifying part was meeting so many people who were so eager to help. The most difficult was crafting the story for a medium that was foreign to me.

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In 1978, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Melbourne, Florida, I covered a protest march by a few dozen Iranian students. Carrying placards and shouting slogans, faces flush with anger, they looked as if they had wandered onto the wrong movie set.

I didn’t know much about the target of their rage: the Shah of Iran and his hated secret police, SAVAK. Passing motorists gave the group confused looks. Nobody was paying attention to the unrest in Iran, of which these Florida Institute of Technology students were a distant part. Nobody could have guessed that the rich and powerful Shah would be overthrown the next year, or two years after that, in 1981, Islamist revolutionaries would seize fifty-two American hostages, ensnaring the United States for decades.

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When I was in college, my roommate and I often drove back roads deep into the Georgia woods. The roads would narrow to little more than rocky rutted paths. With no idea of our whereabouts and not caring, we’d then walk until the forest enveloped us. It was aimlessness with purpose, a meandering quest for serendipity. I miss it.

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When my wife and I were dating, I went to her apartment. She greeted me with an enigmatic smile. Smelling faintly of perfume, she led me upstairs to the bedroom. On the floor was a chalk outline, like those drawn around a dead body at a crime scene. It was me, she said.

Today I remembered that moment and the insight it gave me into her macabre sense of humor. Triggering the memory was finding “The Great Slumber a.k.a. The Blood Puddle Pillow.”

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