This Was a Junkyard, Now It's a Peaceful Oasis
I wonder how those who lived in earlier times accessed the past. In elementary school, we learned about American “pioneers” and how they brought to the woods, prairies, and grasslands not just necessities, but memories and often literally seeds for the future. These lessons were augmented in my mind by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series of books, where Pa’s fiddle and Ma’s shepherdess figurine were brought with the family during their many moves, always further west.
Many have asserted that Wilder’s books were edited heavily and in favor of self determination and manifest destiny by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Those books have been controversial in recent years because of their assumption that the Ingalls family, and thousands of others like them, had every right to move west. The indigenous people who already lived, farmed, and had their own memories there were seen as a nuisance to be rid of. At least the white people who stole the land were able to choose and freely carry their possessions. African slaves had to be extremely clever in bringing their heritage with them during the horrendous Middle Passage captivity, often, for example, by braiding seeds into their hair.
Until recently, and except for long-standing pockets of resistance in indigenous communities (and among too few savvy white people who always knew to attach a heavy, bloody asterisk to our history), the idea that the United States is a land plagued with the original stain of thievery and slavery was foreign to most of us Americans. The same rude awakening is happening in England, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal: places that captured, brutalized, and eradicated whole cultures and then fought among themselves to own the riches in the land.
For example, why was it necessary to explore the Arctic? To find a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, we are told. A visitor from that time to today would likely get testy when told why expeditions to exotic places are now looked back upon as at best folly and at worst war crimes. I love the way novelist Kaliane Bradley tackles this topic, one that would inevitably come up if time travel occurred.
Bradley’s novel Ministry Of Time, based, kind of, on a true story, features a near-future languages expert falling in love with a nineteenth-century English naval commander. In 1845, Graham Gore served on the ship Erebus during an expedition to discover a route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, which ended with the loss of all 129 officers and crewmen in hideous circumstances.
In Bradley’s speculative story, Gore is captured by a team with a time machine and brought into the 2030s. I will not give the plot away, but I will say that Bradley's use of the time-travel trope is delightfully enlivened by an intercentury romance that actually pushes the mechanics of time travel to the back seat. In fact, a high-level agent in the Ministry of Time advises the agent in charge of acclimating Gore to the 21st century not to worry too much about how it all works. She should really just relax.
We suspend disbelief about a fantastic process that surely results in some breakage, poison fumes, and dripping skin in order to enjoy the speculation. But in thinking about time travel, it’s necesary to place our own mechanical world on top of the concept. Gears and cogs move together, with all parts oiled and programmed correctly. Time machines never seem to languish in a lab that lost funding due to a change in administration or a government shutdown. Unlike universal basic income or public health care, time machines seem to suffer no lag time between creation and implementation. We never seem to need a decade of Blue Ribbon panels and environmental impact statements to launch them. And we usually find out they are diabolical before they begin to rust.
But there is something of a rusty time machine in southern Wisconsin. Dr. Evermor's Forevertron® claims to be the “largest scrap metal sculpture in the world, standing 50 ft. high and 120 ft. wide, and weighing 300 tons.” Built in the 1980s, it is housed in Dr. Evermor's Art Park on Highway 12 in Sauk County, Wisconsin. We – finally – recently visited after hearing about it for years.
Once there, you will likely be both aghast and enchanted by the scale of the Forevertron as well as its ancillary creations. The mechanics are less exotic than they seem, but that is due to Tom Every’s vision and genius and that of many who helped him build this proto-steampunk garden of delight. Here is just a partial list of scraps Every used to build this wonderland: two Thomas Edison dynamos from the 1880s, lightning rods, high-voltage components from 1920s power plants, scrap from the nearby Badger Army Ammunition Plant, and the decontamination chamber from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. This is Wisconsin, long an industrial and agricultural state, so there are also parts from breweries, power plants, steel mills, snowmobile factories, cargo ships, and railroad engines.
The bounty of Wisconsin is not only evident in the park, but in the area attractions, including Devil's Lake State Park and the Wisconsin Dells, both classic and perennial destinations for Illinoisians like me. It’s also good, fertile, beautiful land and it attracts people with ambitions. People like Pa Ingalls, who brought his family to the Big Woods of Wisconsin, never mind the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Ho-Chunk Nation, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, Oneida Nation, Forest County Potawatomi, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, St. Croix Chippewa, Sokaogon Chippewa, and Stockbridge-Munsee people who were already there and had already created the state’s economy.
The Arctic attracted people with ambitions as well, more for its location as a passage than usability. There is an implication in Bradley's book that hubris caused the horrific end of Gore's campaign (which he has been spared – and that is the end of my spoilers!).The expedition was only one example of how this need to take what is not ours ends up kind of terribly for the takers.
Every resident of every nation that acted as a colonizing power needs to confront their nation’s guilt in creating wealth on stolen land with stolen labor from stolen people – wealth that was only grudgingly shared with its actual owners. Tom Every dreamed of a machine, constructed from parts he and friends had salvaged over decades, that would take him "into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam." Time and space travel intrigued him, and I like to think he created a prototype for a way off this planet.
Escape from a world of continuous warfare, sociopathic policies, and villainous wealth concentration seems attractive too much of the time. Tom Every’s solution was to create a place of contemplation, some would say spiritual communion. There are many places at the park to sit and study the amazing follies, gizmos, creatures, and scrap material intended to become these things. Surrounded by the detritus of human innovation, reborn as fantastic tangible visions, is a thought provoking vantage point. What wonderful things can we do with what we already have, and with whom we share it