Fishing Roads of America

Rogers Pass: Source
Amid the fishing roads of East Cuhain, Albert Amber stakes his claim on a two lane dust off where traffic is occasionally dangerous enough to do your fishing for you. He only fishes Sunday afternoon – it's the only time he gets, when and if he gets it. And if he doesn't get it, don't even think about talking to him at the store or he may just make you regret it. His dog Samuel does not seem smart enough to be in on the escapade, he just knows, that when a fish is caught he gets his share. And all for a lousy four hours sitting idly by. Easy money.


Highway 1: Source
There are over 4,00 fishing roads in America. Some are signed, Most are not. If you find one, don't expect to know it, expect to feel it. The road fishermen know when to keep a good thing good. And a good thing good is a thing you have to find. For road fish traverse that inescapable confusion between liquid and solid. Between the habits of distant mountains and those of dreaming journeymen.


Nevada: Source
There are wild fisheries where road fish can be bought without so much effort, but most people in the know will tell you they don't taste as good unless you've caught them yourself. As Albert himself puts it, 'pull a line with a fish on the other end of it and you pull in a little piece of heaven.'


Highway: Source
However, the days of the big fish run are long gone, as road fish become rarer and rarer. So too do the fishermen themselves and the days when motels would be filled with eager fishing groups, swapping tips and trading exotic lures. Back then You can find everything fishing was the catchcall of the Universal Fishermen, a group that expanded the techniques of the common fisherman to something of a unwritten science. But as many have discovered the mathematics of fishing provides few solutions, only more problems.


Road to Prairie Rose State Park: Source
Albert prides himself on keeping alive the memories of those fishermen who previously fished at this same spot for many years. A small memorial by a cottonwood tree marks their names. Yet their catches live on, stuffed and decorating houses where the wallpaper is oily to the touch and dreams come in threes.


Highway 280: Source
Today, more often than not, highways are where the big game hunters prowl the night time air with long fiberglass rods that are hard to see, stretching as they do anonymously out of the trees and bushes. But Albert and many remaining like him still prefer to sit in the shade by a quiet road of a Sunday afternoon and wait for that one good bite. And if it doesn't come, well that as Albert would say raising a beer matter of factly, 'is why it is called fishing.'

Geology of Memory

Diploria strigosa: Source
In 1875, when the wife of geologist Arthur Cybelene died he sought to have her body fossilised and added to his vast fossil collection. His request was denied but created enough curiosity and interest to spark the popular trend of imitation fossils created in a loved one's likeness, something that became especially popular incorporated into headstones as a design feature. A kind of solidification of love in physical form.

The wish to preserve a loved one is a hidden natural instinct, but during the Victorian age mortality was constantly on the mind. Post mortem photographs of deceased children were a popular memento mori, a side effect that came with the rising popularity of photography, replacing the painted portrait and the death mask with a trapped frame of time that must surely have unnerved when it first arrived on the mantlepiece. It is perhaps no surprise that the fossil also became a powerful, less direct, symbol of this perilous mortality.

Death portrait: Source
Victorians began to concider earnestly for the first time notions of how they would themselves be remembered and their legacy to the world. Philanthropic societies and humanist writing were on the rise. Egyptian mummies shipped back to England as souvenirs were unwrapped in elaborate party games to uncover trinkets and stare back at the past. Their new found craze for fossil hunting was less about the search for a species of animal or plant than a species of memory.

Fossils acquired an aesthetic power that was akin to holding frozen objects of time itself; time, death and immortality being constantly on the mind of the age. There was alternate speculation that fossils were traces of the future, not the past. Future creatures awaiting birth, hiding in stone until released and birthed into the present. Dinosaurs that awaited us fully formed to be faced by some distant future generation. Stone could no longer be looked upon without an air of trepidation at what lay inside. Only geologists held the key to understanding what dangers might be present. Fanciful newspaper articles by dubiously credited geologists became ever more prevelant that mixed superstition, fire and brimstone with the fresh science that only futher befuddled the ordinary public.

Heck's Pictorial Atlas: Source
New thinking was also burgeoning in the shift from the local church graveyard to notions of a new secular cemetery, where the dead could at last be kept beyond city limits and allay fears of spreading disease and devouring precious space. Before the Victorian gridded cemetery we know today became the standard, many other experimental graveyard prototypes were being concidered. The Burial Commission of the British Government sought submissions from anyone with ideas. Many still exist to this day, hidden is quiet copses or abandoned quarries, or left as merely archived plans. One example involved bodies being buried in trees that created a form of forest cemetery. Another involved the reconstitution of body parts to form building material for sculptures and a 'death wall'. Other burial experiments abounded with less orthodox results.

Victorian cemetery: Source
Arthur Cybelene was one among many others who sought out alternatives to the graveyard as a physical afterlife, and was keen to experiment with systems of Taphonomy–or means by which the body decays and eventually becomes stone. In order for an organism to be fossilised the remains need to be covered by sediment as soon as possible. His initial research uncovered the Lanesbury Pit, where successive generations of a small town community had sunk artifacts and dead ones in its muddy pits to create a fossilised vertical cultural record that was an alternative to the horizontal system of the new Victorian cemetery design; free land in Lanesbury being in such short supply due to its narrow coastline. A future age would uncover this pit as a complete vertical cabinet of wonders in stone, assuming the geology of the region remained stable.

Louis Daguerre, Arrangement of Fossil Shells: Source
In 1889 Arthur Cybelene founded the Gorgonian Foundation that would offer fossilisation on demand, for those that wished to add themselves to the vast geological record of life in stone, rather than disintegrating slowly in an empty box underground. He also claimed to have reduced the fossilisation process to mere hundreds of years. Unfortunately by this time burial experimentation had gotten so out of hand the Burial Commission was left to enforce a strict decision that the traditional grid cemetery was the only sanctioned design. No doubt a response to rumors of a cemetery said to contain twenty six people that were buried alive, held in the contorted shapes of letters of the alphabet, and many other aberrations of cemetery design rumored to exist.

Arthur Cybelene died in 1898 from typhoid fever. His body was cremated and his ashes moulded into a pseudo fossil of a common ammonite, and added at his family's request to his extensive fossil collection.

Fountains Of Dissent

Architectural drawing: Source
In 1932, the quiet Italian town of Ridona's sanitation works were unexpectedly re-routed to its system of ancient mannerist public fountains. For five days the public squares were abandoned as they became displays to the residents very public ablutions.

It remains undocumented what triggered this malicious action but there were speculations of a dispute between the town's Mayor and its fountain engineers who were unhappy with the prevailing right wing local government policies.


Fountain head: Source
Despite the inconvenience however, tourists from surrounding areas came to the small town in such vast numbers to see the vulgar displays that the Mayor decided to continue the activity in a select few fountains in a square away from market stalls, and prevailing winds. During festivals the local community had even come to agree a timetable of food choices known for their unique coloring after effects - bringing added spectacle to the fountains unsightly appearance.


Map of Rome detail: Source
Historically it is not uncommon for towns and cities to become well known for the notorious reputations they gather through time. The favors of respected towns are more easily waylaid than one would imagine, and likewise many a wayward town's reputation has been restored after long distant atrocities slip from the collective memory, either with the passage of time or through deliberated plotting. In the years before the birth of the independent tourist guide, it is after all often mayors and town fathers that more often than not would set the agenda for what posterity would curate.


Composite image: Source
Many of the first tourist guides found themselves persecuted and manhandled or worse tricked with an illusionary presentation of town life that would return to normality after they had left. Tourist guide writers were forced to go to such lengths to review a location unnoticed that they became many of the earliest adopters of crude cosmetic surgery to reshape their appearance convincingly. Despite elaborate tourist guide tracking services that were engaged in by cities and towns it became harder and harder to follow their movements. It was only then that the first true tourist guides emerged. The first identikits were doubtless those designed to annotate the characteristics of the average tourist guide.

It is unlikely in any case that Ridona's tourist guide will mention what became of that rebellious water engineer, whose remains to this day permanently flow around the city's water system as punishment.