Rays / Conduit

Outside Lowe's, we saw the sun setting through the clouds and producing those rays I've never photographed successfully before.



After building the frames and otherwise preparing for the Great Tomatocide (when, a few days later, we transplanted 31 tomatoes and 12 peppers, the compost turned out to be catastrophically hot, killing everything), we went for a ride.

Time was when the gardening we did would have wiped me out by itself, but as it was I doubt I could have fallen asleep without fifteen to twenty miles, minimum.




Stopped off and said hi to my friend Mich. Saw horses and someone else doing the raised beds on a big scale. The livestock you see in suburban KCK is always a bit surprising to me. It's barely suburban, we were riding down the hill to a sprawling rail yard, and KCK's diminutive downtown was less than a half hour away by bike.




It's like riding in the country except with leash laws.

We stopped at the Grintner house, too, but mainly we were on our way to the Conduit Graveyard. Corinna found it the week before. It's one of those things everybody else I know (including myself) tend to miss.





They really should make these more accessible to the public. The effect is, I'm sure, accidental but still beautiful and awesome.

I suspect it costs more to smash these things up than their recycled components will pay back, so in a place where land is cheap there's not even a big reason to stack them up. Naturally, I want to build a model of Stonehenge out of them, stack them two or three high. Or with a little work to bob off protruding rebar, you could make tunnels through a park, a labyrinth kids and adults alike could enjoy.



Corinna thought permanent low income housing would be the logical use for them, stack them in bridge underpasses and whatnot. Of course, that would require us, as a society, to acknowledge that there are homeless people who will choose to camp over staying at a flophouse even when it's single-digit cold, and to also decriminalize that way of life.



I know we don't really have vagrancy laws of the sort George Orwell documented in Down and Out in Paris and London, but given that we routinely arrest squatters and bulldoze their accommodations, I doubt these old storm sewers are likely to be showing up where indigents could visibly utilize them.



Not that I think my more artistic vision is any likelier to be embraced.



I wonder if there isn't some other use things like this could be put to. Reestablishing oyster beds in polluted bays, restoring eroded barrier islands, and sheltering reefs, I bet as a nation we have tens of thousands of these concrete Legos that could easily be barged down our rivers and deployed usefully.



Or we can just let weeds grow up in them and keep them just for intrepid cyclists, hikers and the odd tagger. There wasn't much graffiti in the conduits, really. I guess the privacy they afford (it'd be almost impossible to get caught at it) is also the downside, you don't have much of an audience for the finished art.



Though if we did the labyrinth in the park thing, it'd be an awesome canvas for characters like Scribe...