Driving River Road

I want Hopper here with me riding shotgun. He’d know, like Walker Evans, to look for the past inside the present: to be keyed into the dilapidation and see it, like I do, as a form of beauty. And I am not talking some knee-jerk nostalgic impulse—though I have enough of those—but truly beautiful by being so lived in, so ignored, so resilient. Even as the riverfront rapidly gentrifies closer into town, out here it moves slow. The biker bar has a hipster makeover. Kayak manufactures move in alongside plastics warehouses and sewage treatment plants. If I had Hopper along for the ride, I’d let the man meander, give him time to spy just the right plein air. This morning I found a postcard from my father at the bottom of a moldy box. He'd gone to see a Hopper show and so wrote: "Hopper had the draftsmanship early; what took time was that sun-washed American melancholy, those big-band solitaries, that Texaco station about to be swallowed up by the gloom of the woods."