Fireplace Field
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Cobblestones take over at the slight rise in the road and the buildings thin out for country fields. Fit together with jagged sides, the bricks cause the sounds from passing vehicles to switch to a hum lower than the rubber wheels normally give on dull asphalt. At the same place the ordinary asphalt turns red, the street narrows, and an old fireplace wrapped in dead vines stands where the land falls away.
This slope s a public park now. Empty and windblown in mid-February, nothing but last fall’s leaves loosened by a warm streak and scuttling along the dead grass. On all sides, the property eventually touches four-lane streets, rusted-out bridges or parking lots and entryways to industrial buildings. The most common traffic through the area is delivery trucks, diesels and vehicles driven by workers that flood the streets or abandon them depending on hourly schedules.
Though the walls have come down around the fireplace, it’s possible to envision where they might have been and the views from the windows in them. From the imagined windows, the prairie on a winter afternoon is golden yellow, a color as rich as wheat beer, but offering nothing in its shape that is of value or interest. The family who set the walls and stacked the fireplace probably never considered the view or that it might disappear. Much of the country looked that way, but the slope gave this place a higher view into the valley now blocked by development and transportation ways.
Desolate and certainly isolated, they were not wrapped in the prettiness only. They busied themselves during the day with the crops and the livestock. The children scattered feed to the chickens near some other outbuilding that has vanished. More animals were kept in pens and there was probably a work shed so the boy and his father could build wooden harnesses for the oxen.
Across the street from the plot is a museum dedicated to frontier life and a local family who operated a farmstead on nearby land. The museum was designed to resemble a barn crossed with modern design in the glass wall on its broad side. Closer to the road near the museum entrance is a monument that shows a wagon and some oxen pulling it. The animals and the human characters are bronze and implanted in a stone slab and they face westward as though they were following a trail. The animals leading the wagon are individual statues separated from the wall, as though they came to life and walked out from the scene.
Sanctity is a memory here as is the land and its original purpose. The museum is an attraction in colder months for field trips and, for historians, it’s of year-round interest. But in warmer weather, the field is occupied by children flying kites and playing tackle football in air heavy with smoke from burning leaf piles in the surrounding neighborhoods. Frontier families settled the land, but here it’s so evident that the world around the fields have been conquered and beaten. Both the hills and the museum halls reveal that the simplicity and maybe even the purity intended that came with the original settlements has vanished, gone a direction that previous generations had not intended.
