Otto

Otto

The bus turned right when it should have - for all anticipated purposes - turned left.  Observant, and now dismayed, Timmy Fairchild gripped his seat cushion and leaned forward to bite the seat in front of him.  He stayed quiet.  Lily, across the aisle, played UNO on the seat.  Timmy looked over, seat in mouth and wondered how one plays UNO alone.  The bus continued, paralleling the railroad tracks, past Old Reading Station, and merged on the Morgantown Expressway.  Timmy whimpered as he bit down.  The bus driver surveyed the long mirror, smiling his crook-toothed smile and adjusting his green engineer's cap, all thirteen students were aboard.  The children knew him, and he they; Timmy sat back.  Lily won.  Judith read.  Steven began with the yo-yo.

Otto glanced again to the mirror, "Children" he said, without the P.A. "look at this ridge that we are crossing."  Here, the road sweeps east and west, and then repeats, an oscillating curve.  The dead Pennsylvania brush and craquelure of the barren trees offsets the snow heavy sky.  By the time they reach the turnpike, Timmy has absorbed the view.  A passing truck with a pair of baby shoes dangling from the rearview, an encrusted stationwagon, a glass maker's truck.  Otto is reminded of two horsemen, surveying their land, a blue sky with the remnants of storm clouds and a flock of birds in migration.  The children began to realize their disorientation. Timmy looked forward, saucer eyed.  Lily giggled.  Judith turned the page.  Steven noticed the bus number, "8."

In this region, the Pocono Mountains dominate, a low-lying valley leads to the Chesapeake Bay.  The paths were worn long ago, by glaciation, and before that, through molten compression.  The rock shows itself, hidden in glens and along riverbanks, prodding at the soil with long teeth, compacted minerals jutting with ferocity. 

The ridge, Otto noticed, overlooks the valley they were passing through, the ridge witnesses and presides over the landscape.  "The Cuyp brothers imagined this very ridge," thought Otto, the brothers re-thinking themselves as surveyors, horsemen, limning the land, displacing themselves. 

Imagining ownership and freedom, wealth and family, the Cuyp brothers collaborate.  They do not own, and wealth comes only in  patronage, that is, with strings.  Jacob can see faces, he can see past their blue veins and pallor.  He sees them as they want to be seen, placing them in Aelbert's landscape, poised, in action as a family hunting party, presided over by the tilted cross of a buzzard, circling in the deep sky.  Aelbert is prone to flights of fancy, his fantastic cloud forms reticulating themselves from the cerulean sea above. 

Otto recalled the last collection of these paintings, the last time they had been gathered, was over 200 years ago.  Smithson had not made his gift - nor had the roads on which he and the children traveled been built.  Otto recalled further, his mind borne back - he remembered the farm, its rich soil in his hands, the stink of compost; he, the child scratching his head.  This Indiana farm, yielding grains, cows lamenting their dumbed articulations.  Otto recalled the lost cow he found, its hooves trapped, forelegs sunk into the muck of the river's edge.  The cow pleaded with its surprised eyes - the river's embrace should have sustained rather than drained her.  Otto remembered the ordeal - matting the mud with river reeds, blankets of leaves and sticks, an earthen platform - and then the weight as they heaved together, he and the despondent cow.  A storm, thunderheads gathering - a rain to drown her in the rage swollen river.  Otto freed the cow, returning her to the farmer with a hundred blind eyes.

In the flat valley, the bus passed a few cows fatigued by the cold,  shuffling and sitting and looking to the cloud bank broken by the sun.  They shuffled and whispered, cutting patterns in the cold dry earth and its gray stubble.  The cows watched Otto and his bus slow as it exited the expressway.

Steven paced the aisle with his yo-yo.  Otto became aware and flashed his eyes in the mirror.  Steven flopped into the seat behind Timmy and leaned and whispered to Lily, "Where are we?"  Timmy looked over with a confident tilt to his head and a quaver in his voice, "We're on a field trip - don't you remember?"  Steven , four years Timmy's senior, just looked at him.  Lily packed her cards and her pony-tailed blond hair twisted on itself as she first caught Otto's clear blue eye then looked away.  They had gone off course by at least thirty minutes and the children knew it.

Otto caught a patch of sun tearing across the Great Shenandoah Valley - its flattened upheaval spread vast before faulted mountains uprose.  Otto saw Aelbert's flash of light in that patch and recalled again the calmed flanks of the lost cow and the bell which sounded every fourth step.  He moved his cap to scratch at his skull covered with a down of white.  The cow was restored to the fool farmer who struck her with a switch and kicked her to the rotting barn.  Aelbert's cow enjoys a respite on the country ridge, comforted and reposed as the creatures surrounding Orpheus as he sang the songs of creation and loss.  Io safe from Jove's search.

A deep shaft of light glanced off the steeple's weather-worn wooden shingles A play of triangles across the scene, the steeple, ships' rigging, tilting rakes and shovels - forced all the town's crossings to bear on the composition.  It is the light, Aelbert would say - illumination, all is subject to the light, the weight of the sun.  The light in the objects confirmed their weight and asserted their presence.

The bus approached the Susquehanna River, they had passed into Maryland 5 miles ago.  The Susquehanna, reaching for the bay and further toward the ocean, has its headwaters in Western Pennsylvania, a glaciated plateau filtering gently downslope to meet Otto and the children near the outpouring.  The time of rivers and lakes is geologic, climatic, wrought thousands of millions of years ago, alluvial deposits, dolomite, lime and sand layered and compressed by force.  Otto understood that change can be violent, like the Delaware River bursting through its gap, cutting a mysterious rift, supporting the Minisink.  The Susquehanna moves gently and cautiously feeds at its headwaters. 

The children planned the route.  They wanted to see the banks of the river.  The river road afforded a view of a string of small islands, the Connowingo Dam and the Amos Falls, called Smyth Falls in times past.  The Connowingo Dam powers a great bit of eastern Maryland, it harnesses the downward flow of the river, displacing the river's energy to propel the modern mechanism of the city.  It is turreted, as a medieval castle, to remind us who we are, Otto thought.  John Smith recalled his near-beheading and his temporary respite as he negotiated the falls - reminded of his unenviable position to the crown and to his adopted father Powhatan.  The Amos Falls move with a power that is deep as the river,  the great height of the falls is hidden under water, like some buried Niagara.  The children were taken with the rumbling, though not with the spectacle.  Steven fiddled with his yo-yo string as Lily, holding Timmy's hand, smiled at the landmark.  Her hair lay flat and outlined her skull, as Timmy's bowl cut obscured the frailty of his. 

The bus joined I-95 at Havre de Grace, where the children stopped for Burger King and Otto treated them.  They had never seen a waterfall, nor had they been witness to the feeding of the bay.  The river seemed to simply dissipate, churning sediment and soil far into the deep blue waters.  Traffic whisked by on the highway, but Otto's happiness was secured by the glee with which the students met with the power of the falls.

Looking across the Chesapeake bay, another of Aelbert's landscapes was played out.  The vastness of the bay dwarfed the Pellekussenport, but the land was the same.  Otto grimaced at the trees, pushed to the fringes of the land.  The irony of wealth fell as a leaden weight.  Smith felt it, as did the Cuyps, as did Otto Nuss - he is not in control, they were the first to enjoy the natural landscape without working it, Smith was enslaved, Aelbert was beholden, only Jacob knew the protocols of obedience.  Otto knew the independence wrought in the landscape by Aelbert and by his own act of assertion - his decision to do some permanent good.

Ketchup stained, belching and swaying a bit with his overindulgence, Steven only recognized the rifle behind Otto's seat because he hunted with his father.  Father used to say, if you're going to eat a Whopper, you better know where that meat comes from.  Steven hoped the Whopper was not made from squirrel meat, and he wondered where Otto might be hunting after their trip.  It was only after his post-prandial nap that he wrote "911" in his breath on the window, half in a vague nervousness and half in jest. 

Otto sat.  Lily napped.  Timmy began shuffling the UNO cards.  Judith read once again, lost in the plains. 

They were all now propelled down I-95, a line carved through the landscape such that it strips the place of place.  One is simply immersed, merged with all others, the bus vanished, a molecule among atoms and molecules of varied shape and form - organisms carried in the enormity of the river.  For Otto, I-95 was akin to the mouth of the underworld river where Orpheus was tested.  This route, where momentum could be increased or halted, they were reaching another border - the valley of Avernus approached.

Here, where identity was stripped from the land, they approached Baltimore, unavoidable Baltimore.  The interstate passes the docks, flies above shipping containers and longshoremen.  For Aelbert this place would be a perversion of copulating wharves multiplied out of personality into mere industry, here is the action divorced from intent.  The containers are locked, isolated, moved about each containing their own darkness, to be concealed until their destination is reached.  Otto turned away.  They went east, closer to the harbor's opening.  As they crossed the long Francis Scott Key Bridge overlooking the Fort Carroll Lighthouse - Otto saw its crumbling mass.  It no longer showed the way to the shipping lanes, instead being infested with waste, vines, a richness of life amidst its neglected purpose.  The cormorants nests undermined the foundations of the house, its beacon fading.  As they crossed a cove, Otto spotted a wrecked tanker, dissolving in an iron-red stain near a dilapidated cemetery.

As Orpheus trailed Eurydice, Otto had his children behind him.  Timmy, past his fear, was playing solo-UNO.  Steven had gone back to harassing the twin 11-year-olds toward the back of the bus.  He laughed while the younger children giggled and yelped.  Judith, on the plains, drew her face into a frown as father and his family starved on the winter plain.  Lily met Otto's clear blue eyes with her shining green.  He despaired, his mouth sagged and heart slumped.  He felt his unshaven chin and scratched his liver-spotted head.  Soon they exited to re-fuel.  Otto, as he paid, trembled into the fuel station's shop, took on the texture of stone and spoke.