Finalist
Terrain.org fifteenth Annual Nonfiction Contest
“Thank you for calling the Minnesota Division of Transportation. Please choose from the next 5 choices…”
From the motive force’s seat of my automobile, within the afternoon solar, my telephone on speaker, I look forward to my daughter to dawdle out from center college.
“In case you want details about Minnesota drivers’ licenses or identification playing cards, driver compliance, or exams, press one.”
Exterior it’s a conflicting spring temperature. Simply yesterday, I worshiped the nice and cozy wind. Right now, with a pair extra levels, I turned on the air and rolled up the home windows. Perhaps additionally to muffle my ensuing awkward telephone name from an eavesdropping passerby.
“In case you want details about automobile registration, possession transfers, titles, liens, or plates, press two.”
I’d gone by iterations of what to name this bizarre piece of property; a inexperienced area, an city wild, greenway, empty parcel, city inexperienced area, pocket park. I had settled on inexperienced pocket, however Anika advised me she struggled picturing the dimensions of one thing known as a inexperienced pocket. She steered vacant lot.
“In case your name is about business autos, press three.”
The phrase vacant implies potential previous or future occupation, which supplies this plot an excessive amount of credit score. It’s a uncared for embankment wedged between a bridge, a residential road, and a freeway. Nothing substantial was, or will ever be constructed.
“For details about highway situations and development, press 4.”
At the moment, heavy concrete limitations sit scattered throughout the face of this lot. Every tattooed with a black stencil MNDOT. So, I’ve gone to the supply.
“For all different Division of Transportation points, press 5 and an operator will help you.”
I faucet 5 and put together for the bumbling query to spill from my mouth.
“Transportation, how can I provide help to?”
“Hello! My title is Dan Ibarra, and I’m a resident of Minneapolis.” God, I sound immodest. Calling myself a resident of Minneapolis, as if I’ve an precise urgent query of some citizenry worth. “I’m calling to search out out a definitive time period… used for a sure unused plot of land… inside the metropolis limits?”
“I’ll join you with Land Administration.” They didn’t must even give it some thought. “Okay, thanks!” I reply, apologetic.
The road clicks over and two feminine voices choose up.
SORRY…
“Minnesota Division of Transportation, Workplace of Land Administration reception desk.”
IS NOT AVAILABLE. YOU CANNOT RECORD A MESSAGE FOR…
“Minnesota Division of Transportation, Workplace of Land Administration reception desk.”
THIS MAILBOX IS FULL.
A person’s voice cuts in to supply instructions on utilizing the State of Minnesota voicemail system. I cling up on him. A number of fast faucets and I’m at MNDOT’s Land Administration web page and discover the “Contacts” tab. These job titles present me no perception into what these folks do, or who can be the best particular person to strive. Workplace Director, Actual Property and Coverage Growth, Surveying and Mapping appears like a superb wager, Photogrammetry & Distant Sensing, Geodetics—what the fuck is Geodetics, it’s like some L. Ron Hubbard shit—Descriptions & Commissioners Orders, possibly? I perceive my definition of description will not be their definition of description, however I strive my luck.
A really good man with a really thick accent picks up. The white noise and distance in his voice relay he’s taking this name from inside a transferring automobile. I begin in on my spiel once more and proceed to poorly clarify my request.
“So, you say you wish to construct on a boulevard?” I’m so sorry for what I’m placing you thru, you variety, first-generation, overworked authorities worker. I thank him for making an attempt to assist me, and try to higher clarify myself. My daughter has lastly appeared and, seeing me on the telephone, quietly swings herself and her heavy college bag into the entrance seat. “I believe possibly it’s a remnant lot? Sorry, I’m no working at present however you’ll be able to e-mail me. You see e-mail? You may e-mail me this location and I can discover out for you. Okay?” I agree and thank him a second time, however I’ve already stopped listening. I’m not going to e-mail him. He’s answered my query. I cling up and attempt to clarify the decision to my daughter as we drive dwelling.
Picture by Dan Ibarra.
Remnant land is outlined as, “a parcel of land, after a partial taking by eminent area, so small or poorly formed as to have virtually no worth.” That is precisely describe the wedge of property I stroll by each day. It’s a sloped unfold of area, a 100-square-foot triangular swatch of rocky floor, low grass, pigweed, and foxtail, set alongside the outer rim of the Seward neighborhood in Minneapolis. Its light slope is a pastoral distinction to the encompassing metropolis, an overgrown buttress from the arterial freeway, towards a dead-end intersection. Bordering the southeastern perimeter of the remnant, a ineffective 30-foot stretch of warped and rusted metal highway barrier hangs on decaying sq. picket posts. Two yellow diamond indicators stand the place the 2 perpendicular roads meet and finish. Emblazoned with black arrows, each level in reverse instructions, recommending every other means however ahead throughout the face of this remnant.
A want path (a class of trampled pedestrian path chopping by grass the place the panorama designer had determined a sidewalk wouldn’t go, however the folks had a distinct concept) cuts diagonal throughout the remnant from the dead-end nook of South ninth Road and Twentieth Avenue South and reconnects alongside the higher ridge the place a brand new stretch of Twentieth Avenue bridges throughout the freeway. This implies, like a boring Bermuda Triangle, the stretch of southernmost sidewalk briefly connects Twentieth Avenue South and Twentieth Avenue South. Purposeless, our remnant is an city sedimentary financial institution on the confluence of sidewalks, bike lanes, condo buildings, parking heaps, bridges, and highways.
The encompassing geography wasn’t all the time metropolis, and this sliver of property wasn’t all the time a remnant. Ten-thousand years in the past, because the Earth thawed out from the final ice age, this plot of land was an natural sedimentary financial institution alongside a large shallow river of glacial soften, housing a stand of white, purple, and jack pines. Large beavers and mammoths utilized these new forests as a treasured shelter from new invasive predators to the world, the Homo sapiens, an animal who has miraculously begun to make use of hearth and stone instruments to hunt and devour their prey. As glacial soften ceased and the river receded a pair thousand toes, the water reduce a extra distinct form. Future generations of those early people will seek advice from the flowing water as Hah Wakpa or Misi-ziibi. Later, a brand new invasive species known as “French Explorers” will come to name it the Mississippi River.
Explorers begat missionaries, and Norwegians, and Swedes, and Germans, and loggers, logger barons and flour mills, laborers and labor protests, main social development and industrial development, and Chinese language immigrants escaping racism within the West, and elevated populations, and streets and houses, and municipalities stretched far out from the financial powerhouse of that river. At the moment our proto-remnant lot was remodeled from jack pine and prairie into the modest intersection of Taylor and Walnut Road—renamed respectively to ninth Road and 20th Avenue in 1873 when the conglomerate municipalities-turned-city realized they had been going to have an absolute massacre on their fingers with six totally different Oak Streets all around the map.
Roads grew to become rails, and in 1900 the immigrant working class inhabitants working and residing close to intersecting rail traces constructed themselves a home of worship on this nook and named it Trinity Lutheran Church. It was a stable and modest constructing. A tall, majestic, dark-brick cornerstone for Norwegian immigrants seeking belonging. Embedded on this church was the story of this new Norwegian congregation, their obstinate American assimilation, a pinch of Twentieth-century adultery by way of some controversial worldwide love letters, and the origin story of a college—then Augsburg Seminary. In 1966, together with quite a few lower-income communities throughout america, the church was slated for demolition because the federal authorities plowed and steamrolled an eight-lane interstate freeway by town, and thru the constructing’s again door. Because the spiritual epicenter for Augsburg, now a full-fledged faculty simply two blocks north, the literal dismantling of Trinity Lutheran Church launched an id battle for the college. Bodily untethered from their church, going through the broad challenges of thriving in an city middle within the late Nineteen Sixties, the college scrutinized whether or not to maneuver the faculty, or decide to their newly-deconstructed neighborhood.
They selected the latter, and in Augsburg’s 1964 Annual Report the college championed their new increasing city campus: “Rolling hills, stretches of greenwood, elm-shaded walks and ivy-covered buildings, so typically connected to the favored picture of a school, is not going to be true of Augsburg. It is a metropolis the place concrete, curbs, automobiles, and congestion are extra typical.” Each earnest and true, the assertion is sort of prophetic contemplating the sector of enormous concrete blocks I now traverse as I climb up and over the grassy wound of Trinity Lutheran’s last resting place enroute to my present place of employment, Augsburg College. Though the college’s imaginative and prescient focuses far past its early seminary objectives, the college nonetheless commits itself deeply to nurturing their neighborhood, and nonetheless makes area for the Trinity Lutheran congregation to look at providers on campus.
The freeway tore by, it toppled Trinity Lutheran, it severed the intersection at ninth road and Twentieth Avenue, splitting and warping Twentieth right into a bridge. It birthed, then left orphaned, our small slice of remnant lot. For the next many years the remnant sat pretty placid and quiet. Numerous pedestrians, day after day, reduce alongside the need path throughout her face with no second thought. In Minneapolis, whose strict constructing codes make it typically cheaper to tear down and construct anew than to retrofit, it’s a small brevity to stroll throughout an area so generationally disregarded. Early on in my relationship with the remnant I took {a photograph} of it, mounted by two bright-orange dumpsters. I don’t bear in mind what was being dumped, however the containers had been set on both facet of the need path as if to ask a curious pedestrian to wander between and thru the blaze-orange gateway of this forgotten place. This may occasionally have been essentially the most motion our remnant had seen in years.
Lately, neighborhood members started to search out sensible worth and refuge within the poor uncared for form. In the future, I don’t bear in mind when, a single tenting tent appeared within the weeds up towards the tall freeway wall. Typically it could be there for under a day or two, or over a weekend. One time a single ragged blue tent stayed for every week. I by no means met its occupants however given the gathering trash baggage, salvaged plywood, and stolen buying cart, I assumed homelessness. Slender orange plastic caps and stray syringes exterior the tent flap conveyed what is likely to be the basis of their battle.
Rising up within the Eighties, the homeless housing stereotype was a smoky alley, inside a big fridge field, with newspapers for blankets. I by no means personally witnessed an individual sheltering in a cardboard field, however I’ve to imagine the stereotype grew from some type of city actuality. Then arrived a tenting tent. The usage of tenting tents by the unhoused appears apparent, prefer it ought to have sprung up in quite a few places, way back. However the reuse of the tenting tent didn’t broadly present up till the Nineteen Nineties. Which implies someplace out there’s (or was) the equal of a homeless Frank Lloyd Wright who, taking a piss behind some sporting items retailer late one summer time night, spied a crumpled nylon tent within the rubbish and had a revelation.
Many people skilled a sluggish return to normalcy after the 2020 pandemic. Others appeared not so fortunate. And extra tents sprung up. There have been about two to a few dozen tents, brilliant blue tarps, plywood, tied down with multicolored nylon rope, huddled collectively alongside the remnant and the neighboring block-long sliver of weedy boulevard close to the freeway wall. I didn’t attempt to discuss to them. They didn’t bug me. All of us collectively most likely wished the opposite would hold away. That’s the fascinating means a crowded metropolis is paradoxically aligned with obstinate, western American individualism:
• A M E R I C A •
Keep Out of My Fucking Enterprise.
Up to date American homelessness really originates because of joblessness, and begins with the lovable hobo. That man—along with his fingerless gloves, 5 o’clock shadow, crumpled prime hat, and red-and-white polka dot handkerchief cantilevered on a stick over his shoulder—would’ve settled down completely if he needed to, or if there was work available. The unique hobo was extra akin to a migrant laborer or a crust punk than somebody with precise housing troubles.
My tone right here could also be pissing you off. I’m writing it gentle. I understand homelessness is de facto fucking sophisticated. I’m not going to unravel homelessness right here, and these aren’t free-wheeling hobos taking pictures the breeze. These are of us in monetary wreck from one too many American medical payments, susceptible addicts ripping their lives out by their veins, and people not welcome (or required) to remain in psychological well being clinics. They’re folks with actual, critical issues, forgotten, missed, and left behind. People for whom the Venn diagram of capitalism and their private existence don’t overlap.
And due to this, I’m impressed by encampments. I don’t need these of us to be homeless, however I’m grateful they’ve greater than a cardboard field or polka dot bandana to guard them. The usage of a tenting tent is a piece of brutal societal genius; these discarded artifacts from privileged novel outside leisure actions, whereby folks spent the lengthy weekend pretending to personal nothing, are actually ingenious reappropriations by these most in want. That sturdy weather-protective polyester and people heavy-duty galvanized stakes produced for enjoyable get togethers, now maintain lives collectively.
I don’t suppose encampments are nice. I’m assured they’re stuffed with precise hardship and hazard. Though it does appear that the media of a tenting tent possibly produces an concept of higher communal unity reasonably than of us abandoned and on their very own. I don’t know if that’s true. Perhaps there was equal camaraderie when everybody was lined up in sagging cardboard packing containers. However the mere use of the phrase “encampment” implies a neighborhood id the place there could not have been earlier than. Who ever heard of an enboxment?
Atop the gently sloped burial place of a church, the panorama now explicitly communicates, “Don’t you fucking dare.”
The encampment persevered as dwelling on this similar location for a lot of the spring and summer time, till at some point it was gone. I had seen one thing like this occur earlier than. Folks had been camped on a shallow grass peninsula subsequent to the on-ramp from Cedar Avenue to Hiawatha Avenue south (two intersecting roads deemed essential sufficient to protect their authentic monikers within the nice numerical road title substitute of 1873.) There was room for possibly 15 crowded tents on that lot. The encampment was quickly evicted, and as an alternative town erected a fringe of tall, offended, black fence, hooked outward on the prime like a regimental line of black snakes, able to strike, promising ache and dying to any who tried to reenter their hallowed floor of sacred on-ramp. I ponder if any of these occupants ended up on the remnant.
I don’t know when, why, or how the encampment on the remnant was toppled. One summer time morning I drove down the road to park in my standard spot, and it was gone. It was eerily clear and sanitary in comparison with what one may anticipate. All that was left was trampled grass, grime, and particles. Not “we simply evicted individuals who had been residing right here” particles, extra like “the morning after the final evening of the State Honest” type of particles. I felt a slight pang of empathy for the flushed-out of us. I puzzled the place all of them landed as I trudged up and previous the desolation.
However the space wasn’t desolate for lengthy. I might have predicted it, seeing what had been constructed at “The Holy Triangle of the Black Snake Temple and On-Ramp.” Two days later I drove up, parked in my standard spot, and I noticed them. At first, I didn’t perceive what it was I used to be taking a look at. They resembled a herd of concrete cattle, penned contained in the remnant, grazing on the grass and empty Gatorade bottles. I scanned the road and, the place beforehand existed a camp, there have been dozens and dozens of torpid obelisks nested within the patch of area.
Picture by Dan Ibarra.
Technically they’re known as Jersey Obstacles, or Okay-Rails. And even in case you stay beneath a rock, you’ve nonetheless seen one, as a result of they’re made from rock, gravel, and water. They’re stout, medium-length, waist-high concrete partitions with broad, sloping bases. They’re largely noticed as plinth-sized pachyderms strolling nostril to tail, snaking alongside American freeway development, or lined up shoulder-to-shoulder defending a brand new constructing web site like broad, dim, bouncers.
Initially conceived in California as everlasting concrete partitions to scale back the chance of automobiles and vehicles careening off mountain passes, it was the state of New Jersey who conceived the concept of molding the blocks into cellular sufficient lengths to be hoisted by forklifts and cranes. Thus, the Jersey Barrier namesake. The entire idea, design, and software of the Jersey Barrier isn’t attractive, nevertheless it’s good, and type of caring. If a automobile collides with a Jersey Barrier, the objective is for the automobile’s tires to journey up onto the slight angled base, pivoting and redirecting the automobile again into its authentic route as a substitute of into oncoming visitors or off the facet of the mountain. The design additionally reduces harm to the automobile physique because the tires elevate the automobile up and away from the wall.
The mission description was, “make a wall to maintain automobiles from flying off the highway.” However Jersey Obstacles are an developed species in comparison with an earlier predecessor, that size of rusted barrier alongside the remnant. With Jersey Obstacles some engineer took slightly further time to think about the motive force, the automobile, the physics, the fabric, and designed one thing extra. It’s a barrier, nevertheless it’s additionally a caring technique of safety, a concrete automobile cushion, a crash cradle.
These crash cradles on the remnant are every stenciled with the heavy black initials of their proprietor and the true caretaker of this property: “MNDOT,” the Minnesota Division of Transportation. The best way MNDOT repurposed their crash cradles, strewn throughout our poor, candy plot, utilized to extinguish residing, doesn’t really feel caring. It’s brutal, hostile structure. Atop the gently sloped burial place of a church, the panorama now explicitly communicates, “Don’t you fucking dare.” It echoes an earlier concrete design mission additionally designed to maintain folks out, commissioned by one other authorities division.
That story begins in 1970, when the U.S. Atomic Power Fee (now the Division of Power) was confronted with the issue of what to do with the waste from their analysis and manufacturing of nuclear weapons. They determined their best choice was to deposit all of it inside a 2,000-foot-deep underground salt basin in southeast New Mexico. In addition to the basic issues of throwing piles of nuclear waste down a really deep gap, the engineers additionally confronted the problem of successfully talk this subterranean hazard for the subsequent 10,000 years, till at the moment the waste would not be a radioactive risk to life.
For some perspective, 10,000 years in the past is the place we started, with big beavers sheltering among the many jack pines alongside the financial institution of broad glacial runoff. Wanting ahead 10,000 extra, there’s no assuming any class of shared human tradition, language, or lexicon. How will we talk hazard to an unknown future? Within the Nineteen Nineties the DOE commissioned a group of artists, philosophers, and designers to conceive essentially the most common technique of risk communication for this harmful, desolate area of New Mexico. What the DOE determined to put in is a 16-mile concrete perimeter punctuated with 32-foot-tall granite pillars engraved with written warnings, together with weather-resistant depictions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The mission will likely be finalized and constructed starting in 2033. It’s an uninspired compromise in comparison with my favourite design concept: the “panorama of thorns” steered by environmental architect Mike Brill.
The concept is simply because the title implies; a horrific, unnavigable subject of brutal towering stone spikes, hopefully intimidating any future residing creature who dares wander too shut. The design was handed over—I assume on account of its audacity. One thing designed to warn of essentially the most evil and villainous underground lairs ought to kindle worry into the center of any hapless being. But when somebody advised you there was a freaking subject of 20-foot stone thorns bursting out of the desert, you’d wish to see it, wouldn’t you? I’d. You then’ve bought your self a vacationer attraction whose sole objective was to maintain of us away. Anyway, what authorities company desires to construct a shocking sculptural monument to commemorate, “Right here lies some harmful proof of how we actually screwed up. Keep out of our fucking enterprise”?
Does MNDOT acknowledge the visible message they echo with their very own pasture of limitations? Equally, the limitations discourage lengthy stays on the remnant plot, however additionally they spark curiosity and creativity. We curious people are going to do precisely what our ancestors did 400 generations again once we got here throughout unusual new landscapes. We’re going to discover it. We’re going to mark it. Which is what occurred subsequent.
Picture by Dan Ibarra.
Some consider graffiti as lawlessness, breaching fences, property harm, cops catching delinquent youngsters carrying balaclavas within the shadowy bowels of trainyards. However the first type of visible artwork by people was graffiti. Sixty-thousand years in the past, throughout cave partitions, we spat and sprayed floor charcoal and purple ochre clay over our outstretched prehistoric fingers, and left an indelible image of our five-fingered existence. My god, somebody’s mother should’ve been pissed! Who was going to scrub that mess up? However, if we will agree that the primary kind an concept takes is arguably essentially the most genuine type of that concept, then graffiti is the one genuine type of visible artwork, and all the pieces after is imitation.
Graffiti goes again farther in human historical past than that subject of thorns is supposed to mission ahead, however like repurposed tenting tents, and repurposed Jersey Obstacles meant to remove the tents, up to date inventive people repurposed the transportable permanence of spray paint to be used in trendy artwork. Darryl “Cornbread” McCray is credited with the unique concept of utilizing spray paint to tag his title throughout Philadelphia within the late Nineteen Sixties. Like our mystical homeless Frank Lloyd Wright first conceiving of a tenting tent as a method of sensible shelter, Cornbread noticed this new innovation of everlasting transportable paint in an easy-to-use can, and had a superb concept.
Atop the remnant, road artists found and started portray upon the present anti-human inhabitants. Final fall, on my means dwelling trudging again over and down the remnant to my automobile, I caught one new piece, or extra particularly a set of items. They portrayed a pair of lounging rectangular robots. They had been rendered like Thirties cartoon characters, with puffy white gloves and toaster-shaped oxford footwear connected to tube-like legs and arms. Painted subsequent to the primary robotic had been the phrases, “The times are getting shorter.” The opposite robotic, on a second barrier, stationed barely decrease into the embankment, learn “The nights are getting longer.” The items offered like a diptych. Strolling down off the sidewalk and thru the herd, one might see the primary picture, then partway by the limitations, the second picture.
It was a method of graffiti I hadn’t seen earlier than. The artist used the arbitrary faces of the limitations like cells in a comic book e-book, or scenes in a film. A time-based road artwork set up. The piece additionally labored as a type of robotic Cheshire Cat, showing as we move by the uninviting panorama, and once more to tease us as we proceed. Checking in, glibly reminding us there’s no escape from the darkish impending Minnesota winter, or possibly the looming winter of our humanity. I regarded ahead to different artists taking the trace to create extra space-based graffiti on the limitations. Then within the early spring I discovered the limitations in a state which nonetheless confuses me. Save for his or her black MNDOT manufacturers, they had been as soon as once more clean. That they had been buffed.
Picture by Dan Ibarra.
It appears not everybody discovered the graffiti lovely or progressive. Somebody from the Division of Transportation took it upon themselves to rid their hostile crash cradles of those and different graffiti and painted over them. I’m impressed at how properly they color-matched the nice and cozy 20 p.c grey of the concrete. At first, I couldn’t inform they’d been buffed, they only regarded clear.
I perceive why somebody may take away graffiti from their property. The logic goes: graffiti can scare away prospects, and scale back property values. Graffiti can typically signify a rise in felony exercise, and eradicating it could assist scale back crime. Spray paint may also weaken exterior paint. Lastly, merely eradicating graffiti displays a type of delight and look after an funding which others could observe.
Sure, sure, all properly and good. However I can’t determine what any of that has to do with buffing out the graffiti on the limitations in our remnant. There aren’t prospects to scare away, no property to devalue, no worries over weakening exterior paint. Is MNDOT making an attempt to speak their delight and care for his or her funding in 200 brutalist limitations? Admittedly the crash cradles are MNDOT’s property to handle. However MNDOT has deliberately created an uninhabitable panorama, but someway nonetheless wishes to take pride and care within the consideration they’ve given to this funding. I’ve questions. And as quickly as I determine which quantity to name on the Minnesota Division of Transportation, I’m going to ask some.
Picture by Dan Ibarra.
The remnant at the moment nonetheless exists as a sea of Jersey Obstacles. I nonetheless weave by them each day. They proceed to collect particles from the folks speeding previous them. Paper, sweatpants, a plastic bag with a crumpled Elevating Cane’s emblem, syringes, bottles of orange juice, pints of liquor, and stolen rifled backpacks collect within the weeds day by day. The rising refuse communicates greater than any graffiti may. It says that no one cares about this place. However that’s not fully true. I nonetheless care about it. Her face appears to be like dramatically totally different in comparison with her church days, and even in contrast to a couple years again when she was much less pockmarked, extra pastoral. However the remnant nonetheless deserves love, utility, magnificence.
Spring is right here and though the stands of pines are lengthy gone, the heartiest of weeds have begun to sprout up from the gravel and across the limitations. Much less grows than did earlier than, nevertheless it’s not desolated. I step up over the curb, by the 2 opposing yellow diamond arrows, previous the rusted road barrier, and up into the Jersey Obstacles. I attain into my yellow hoodie and pull out two well-packed Ziploc baggage. On the again of 1 a black-and-white, laser-printed label reads, “Twin Metropolis Seed Firm – Bee & Butterfly Native Seed Combination.” A folded paper label stapled to the second bag reads, “Drought-tolerant Wildflower Combine.” I unzip each the baggage and wind leisurely by the embankment, intermittently dipping my hand into both bag, broadcasting the specks of seed throughout the face of the remnant.
It’s too late for the earlier inhabitants of this remnant plot of land, or possibly it’s simply too early for the brand new ones. This fall, and subsequent 12 months, or possibly 5 years from now once I stroll alongside my daughter to her first day of school, or possibly one other 10,000 years from now, when the automobiles are gone, and the freeway fills in, when the skyscrapers are coated in vegetation both by design or decay, and the mammals have grown big or miniature relying on what local weather dictates, and the richest of the post-humans have blasted themselves off to Mars, this may increasingly nonetheless be only a remnant plot. These limitations should still be right here. Now not barring something anymore, I think about future inhabitants will step over the concrete nubs and rubble, relics they will ponder as they reduce a well-worn path throughout the shallow embankment, by a perennial yellow way forward for black-eyed susan, partridge pea, orange coneflower, and golden Alexander.
Dan Ibarra is a seritypographipedagogephemeraudioscribist. He’s a Grammy-nominated graphic designer, an Worldwide Poster Biennial silver medalist, recipient of the Augsburg College Honorary “My Laptop computer Was Stolen” Award, and the 1992 Dane County Battle of the Bands First Place winner. He lives in Minneapolis along with his daughter, his canine, her cat, and their 39 crops.
Header picture of the Remnant throughout an autumn sundown by Dan Ibarra.
