Welcome to Tales From the Crystal City.   It’s a nickname that was bestowed on the town in which I live sometime in the 1880s, not long after the discovery of natural gas reserves led the city fathers to offer it up free to those who wanted to do business here. The place thrived and by the end of the decade, the east side of town was home to several glass companies with names like Canastota, Lythgoe, and (of course) Crystal City [ 1 ].   All too soon, the natural gas ran out, and the Crystal City’s burgeoning glass industry was consigned to a footnote in local history. But the name remains, as a sort of ghostly reminder of a place and time that lives on in the stories that pile up dream deep, sedimented like the wetland mud and glacial clay that lies beneath the parking lot blacktop.   I’ve come to think of the Crystal City as a sort of invisible landscape [2], a spectral twin mapped on top of the present day town, an unseen topography of magic and dread , longing and promises and lo