Page 12 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Eleven

Trifle Tower An unsung hero of the environmental movement,
Leland “Buster” Brockle moved to California from his native
Tasmania in 1951. There he had been a dishwasher in a Hobart fish
and chips eatery. His emigration was prompted by an inheritance: a
failing rolling pin repair shop at 10861 Debacle Road in Gezund
Heights. He was in his late sixties, living on welfare, when he became
obsessed with the plastic flatware served in fast food restaurants.
Pushing a shopping cart through alleys in the evening, he collected
hundreds of thousands of knives, forks and spoons from trash bins.
He demolished the ramshackle structure on the property and lived in
a small trailer parked in back. And in the mornings and afternoons,
aided only by glue and instinct, Brockle constructed the fantastic
spire now visible from as far away as Gecko Park. It may be
examined up close until the entire block is razed for the new Museum
of Outsider Art.

Devil Tree Hot Spring A small rusting toxic hazard sign, easy to
miss at 65 miles per hour, indicates the junction of Highway 47
alternate and a formerly private road leading off toward the foothills
of the Calamites. At the end of this crumbling strip of ancient asphalt
is a restricted area narrowly avoiding qualification as an EPA
Superfund site. A natural hot spring there was known to the
indigenous population long before the Spaniards colonized Las
Californias. Following the admission of the state to the Union, a
small hotel was built to serve the guests coming from nearby
Placidena. Although most of the original residential building and
adjacent bathhouses can barely be made out through the barbed wire
fence, they stand as a testament to the folly of later generations. In
the Great Badmouth Earthquake of 1948 a pipeline ruptured, sending
hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil into the path of
the geothermal source of the hot spring. The ensuing geyser of
boiling oil and steam closed the establishment permanently.
Casualties included the mayor of Badmouth and members of a
theatrical troupe.

Paths are beaten for a reason,
Just as tourists have a season;
Ignore them both and look askance:
Before you lies a vast expanse.