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Writing, tfurrows (circumlunar.space), 5/16/2018
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RPoD wrote about the rain in southern Wyoming[1]. I've only
been to Wyoming once, last summer when we drove through on
a road trip. We stayed the night in Rock Springs.
RPoD didn't write about any technical or scientific aspect
of the rain. Instead, he wrote about the color and the
smell, the texture and the feeling of rain. He wrote about
the experience of the rain, the shared experience with
nature and other forms of life, the contrast and the
awareness.
No one wants to read about the plain facts, especially when
the subject is someting as common as rain. RPoD added a
small bit of beauty to the world when he wrote about the
rain, because he wrote something personal.
But you came here, perhaps, to read about Clinkscales, so
I'll move on.
Down the road from this vacation rental in Columbia, MO
there is a grocery store. It's called "Gerbes," but it's
really part of the Kroger conglomerate; a once-local store
now assimilated into a monolith that doesn't care if you're
from down the street or another continent. They have good
prices.
Gerbes, when you're approaching it from the east on
Broadway, is on the right-hand side just after a road named
"Clinkscales." Before you hit Clinkscales, you pass roads
with names like "Westwood" and "Maplewood" and "Greenwood"
and "Glenwood." There are some woods there, which were
apparently quite inspiring when they were naming the roads.
For those coming in on Broadway from the east, a name like
Clinkscales is quite distinct. It's not woodlandesque in
the slightest. Since I'm a very inefficient shopper, I've
been to the store more than a few times while I've been in
town, and so I have seen the name over and over again.
Every time I see it, I try to imagine where it the world
the name came from.
Of course, I could probably search out the origin of the
name on the internet, but I have no intention of doing
that. It's much more amusing to imagine where it might have
come from.
The most mundane possibility that I've come up with is that
the street used to be the location of some kind of market
or exchange, where they weighed things officially. Perhaps
the cattle were driven to that location, or the crops were
transported there to be loaded on a train and shipped west.
In that possible reality, it might have been that goods and
wares were clumsily placed on large scales, rickety and
unstable from countless abuses and endless wear. The clink
and clank of that daily work may have been heard for some
considerable distance, inspiring the name Clinkscales.
Perchance instead that the name Clinkscales came from a
more distant past. There was a dragon-like creature that
roamed the American midwest as late, perhaps, as the 17th
century. The natives of Illinois called it Piasa. It was a
terrible man-eating bird, covered in scales. Native
Americans painted a likeness of it on a bluff, about 130
miles east of Columbia, MO. To demonstrate their terrible
hatred of this monster, the natives would shoot both
bullet and arrow at it whenever they passed the mural.
It's entirely possible that a dragon or bird of that size
and type, with a voracious appetite and ever-increasing
numbers of human enemies, might travel over a hundred
miles through the air to hunt and to escape being hunted.
If its scales were as tough as dragon lore in the old
world suggests, arrows or even bullets deflecting off
them might make a clinking sound. On the ancient field
where Gerbes now sits, there may have been an epic
battle between the encroaching humans and the last of
the Piasa, where arrow and lead ball finally penetrated
the clinking scales.
That might be a little far-fetched. Instead, the name may
have come from a gentle, musical history of the area.
The road is just off Broadway, and so perhaps it was
named for the ragtime music of Edythe Baker. Edythe was
trained in a convent in Kansas City MO, where she learned
the piano. As a little girl, Edythe may have spent her
free time tapping on the pipes in her dormitory, arranging
the crude clinking notes into scales. Her overseers might
have considered her talents and placed her in front of a
piano to set her on a more correct course of pious and
angelic piano music, only to have her clink out scales and
tunes that would be recorded onto piano rolls and played
in seedy flaper establishments the world over.
I've rambled long enough that the kids are back home and
demanding lunch. My point in all this was only to note that
while the plain truth might be quite boring, the things we
can imagine- even if inspired by a single street name- can
be quite enjoyable indeed. And writing is one way to share
that experience with others.
[1]
gopher://gopher.leveck.us:70/1/phlog/20180510.post
