PIRATES
By Philip Gelatt
Photos by Ansel Smithee

Confession:

The only things that make me laugh these days are death and deviant sex. It’s not yet a problem, but I know it will be sometime soon. Women don’t like to laugh at either of these things, at least not too often. If this doesn’t change, I see myself growing old and dying alone, an angry old man sitting on his porch, shotgun loaded and eager, only leaving my post long enough to yank off into a rusty old Campbell’s soup can.

And the worst part of it is, that idea makes me laugh too.

Directions:

That being written, recently the clouds parted if only briefly. I’ve seen something that made me laugh and smile and it doesn’t even charge for admission.

Now, you have to get to central Wisconsin. You’re going to have to tell people that you’re going to city called Baraboo. Get used to saying that out loud. Baraboo, Wisconsin. People might think less of you, but that’s part of the experience. And really, home state prejudice aside, I have to tell you all Wisconsin is actually a breathtakingly beautiful place.

Once you get close to Baraboo, you’re going to have to look very closely, because honestly if you don’t know it’s there (and actually even if you do) and you blink, you’re never going to see it. Only a wrought iron heart and a few metal birds with oddly, inanimately curious faces herald its entrance.

The Forevertron:

Like I said, it’s free. You just pull in past the heart and the poised metal sentry birds. And then you are in a junkyard; kind of a junkyard, like a junkyard where the junk has taken over and made itself in the hybrid mutant image of a half-mad futurist.

I think maybe words will fail me here. It is hot when we walk in but I feel one of those uncontrollable smiles; one of those smiles that won’t be put down because it is so genuine; a smile like a heart attack: inevitable and unstoppable once it starts.

It’s all junk, the entirety, junk in the purest sense. Not junk like the shit you keep under you bed, this is America’s junk: crane seats, abandoned cars, forklift blades, saw blades, treads, bolts, smoke stacks, tires, and all the detritus of a century of industry. It’s all turned brown with rust and age.

In the middle of it all is the Forevertron itself. Huge, covered in walkways, with strange hanging bits that droop still in the summer heat. You can’t touch it, or climb on it, but it does look so inviting. I feel that if I could climb into the control room something wonderful might happen. It might be the end of Repo Man all over again. I feel I might vibrate out of existence. These things are yearning, waiting for something to come down, or trying to call something here from somewhere else.

And there is so much of it, abandoned half finished metal monstrosities hide behind skeletal Winnebagos, iron peacocks poke heads out of the tall grass, and alien insects await their creators return, await the final welding. There are two London style phone booths, one on either end of the park. In the distance, across a field of dry, man-height grass, you can see the shop. From beyond the field, from, perhaps, inside the shop, a strange music and voices waft and drift. I never see the source but it’s the perfect soundtrack, strange half-heard tunes, impossible to remember anything about them but that they were.

Just go. Go to Baraboo, the turn off is just across from an enormous downsized military facility. That’s right. There are tanks across the road and the story goes that the ground on which the Forevertron was built was leased in some unheard of deal with the military. That makes me smile, too.

The Pirate

In the back of the park, close to the overgrown grass, there is a pavement patio, attached to nothing. Sitting in the middle of it is an old man. He sits in a severed crane control chair, bolted to the concrete of the patio. There is no crane just the chair. He is a large man, a crutch rests against the back of the chair and whenever he swivels in his metallic throne he seems to be in pain. This is Dr. Evermor (self-named) and this place is his.

He has a real name. I’m not going to tell it to you. He has an actual biography, I’m not going to tell that to you either. When we speak to him (I’m not going to tell you who we are), he is coherent but speaks with a strange slur and he speaks as if through a haze. He starts talking about pirates and energy points. On his hat (you see it in the picture but you don’t see this) there are cobwebs and a dead fly. His wife totes and teases him. As we sit down (also in crane chairs) she flies off to make lunch for him.

He leans forward. “That’s what I am. A pirate.” He is proud of what he has done, you can tell. “The authorities don’t know what I’m up to here, they could never really understand it.” He gets a little conspiratorial: “One day they might catch on, but I doubt it.”

If you look around the park, and really analyze, you can see that he sits in a different area every day, there is a gazebo with bottled water, there are the implements of aged movement strewn about, a wheelchair in one corner, a jagged steel walker in another, canes hide in corners like one legged rippers.

“You have to find the energy points.” He’s talking about photography. Later on, one of us suggests he’s talking about focal points. I myself doubt that that is what he meant. “This place is full of energy points. It flows with energy, I don’t know what it is about it here. But if you find them, your pictures will always be beautiful. Sometimes you can feel them, just walking around.”

He talks more, the conversation strays to a favorite topic of old men: beautiful young women who speak to them. We happen to have one with us, which makes him think of another woman who came and visited him a number of times. She was a stripper with mob connections, he wowed her with his workshop. The memory makes his lips curl up, it’s a lecherous and mischievous smile.

We don’t talk very long. A middle aged woman and a group of children approach the throne and the mad king. He starts talking to them. We move to the guest book. I sign my initials and the word “intoxicating.”

The Piracy

This place is subversive. I’ve said that of other roadside attractions, that they are underground and somehow outside the system. I feel cheap saying it again. But fuck it, it is. Hardcore. It isn’t on any map, it does not vie for attention. It plays by its own rules and it asks nothing of its visitors but that they come and see. In Dr. Evermor’s accumulation of trash and his transformation of it is stunning remaking of what gave America its might.

This place has little to do with political rebellion or revolution. Something else can be born here, though, something smaller but no less important. I don’t know what it is, just as I don’t know exactly what the Forevertron is or what those squirrels made of bolts and scarp are doing staring at that bird made of a trombone and a trolley cart. The lesson has something to do with order and chaos, something to do with modification, with reuse and the redefinition of beauty, its opening. It’s revolutionary like if you could take a nuclear mushroom cloud and drag it into a warehouse and come out with… I don’t know… a golden flying condor machine that fires ripe mandarin oranges from its eyes.

Irreverent, anarchic and powerful in a way that can’t be systemized or brought into the culture at large, it is a testament to personal, imaginative apocalypse.

The doctor and his park are pillagers of the 20th century. That is the saddest thing about this place, it is a mirror, anti-reflection, of the 20th century but there is nothing of the 21st century in it. It is time bound, ephemeral, and set for extinction. The mind races, wondering if the 21st century will find its own forevertron, where the misfits and forgotten of the digital age can come to play and pay homage.

Outside the gates

“I’m not hungry. Let’s burn something.” The van trundles down the road away from Baraboo and towards The House on the Rock. Nobody laughs when I say it (I’ve tried this line before, nobody ever laughs). But it is true.