[sense of place]
To the Old Ones, it had been known as North Dakota. The place had once buzzed with the sound of machines and the cacophony of a brief flowering of mechanized civilization. Now, the once powerful machines of another time sat, slowly decaying and melting into the landscape. They had been fueled, it was said, by the very substance of the Earth. The origin stories spoke of a time when the Old Ones in their arrogance consumed the Creation. It was said they had cracked the very depths of the Earth itself, churning its substance through machines, pumping and squeezing the finite vital fluids and ores to fuel their appetites that were never satiated. Energy from the Earth fueled life itself, as it always had, yet for a brief moment, like the builders of the biblical Tower of Babel, a civilization had flourished in an incredible efflorescence of mechanized man, by harvesting the power inherent in consuming the very body of the Earth. Old maps the man had found among ruins displayed North Dakota as a large rectangle imposed on the landscape. He had always wanted to travel to these “places of the lines� to see what sort of imprints or barricades might be inscribed on the earth. He had once been in the ruins of an old library and had found a large, cracked and faded map of a place that had once been called the United States. Fascinated, he had rolled it up and taken it home. In the winter, he would often spread the fragile paper out on the table and stare in wonder at all the lines and places upon it. They had little meaning now. The sun was beginning to dip in the west as he walked up to the top of the small ridge. A rusted, vertical cylinder with a conical top stood on the horizon just ahead, the remains of its corrugated, zinc metal shell overgrown with rust and the sooty stains of countless prairie fires. As he walked closer, he could see the remnants of foundations denoting the presence of what the Old Ones had called a farmstead. According to tradition, these places had been occupied by a family who raised vast quantities of food to feed people beyond number. In the unpredictable climate of the present, there were few places where food could be grown with any assurance. All but a few of these ancient agricultural villas were long abandoned, either melting back into the earth, or salvaged and recycled for new purpose by new people. Once common, most of the corrugated metal tubes, once used to store dried grains, had been stripped from the landscape by violent storms.
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Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.
Energy sustained life. Without energy there would be no life.