"Today , we've got an easter egg hunt for orphans and then visits to the State mental institute - We're kept real busy!  30 hr. drive home - blah!     Love, Jane"

  On Thanksgiving Day last year, I drove the full length of Devil's  Hole Road to see what I could find.  In truth I was looking for the Hole, or at least evidence that some sort of a portal once existed in this part of the otherwise unremarkably flat and vacant landscape. But I couldn't find it. I'm still not fully attuned to the voices of the landscape. Sometimes they whisper in a tongue that's unintelligible. Other times all I hear is the traffic.  What I did find is a place in which all context and interrelationship has been stripped away. Open  fields  flat as the sea , cloudscapes, all motion stilled and far off.   A swamp drained and denatured and that exists largely in name only. A past that's as muted as the colors of a late afternoon in late November. If there are clues about the Hole in this topography, they are gridded to almost nothing. Roads slice straight through bioregions and habitats, cutting through the sinews and tendons of the land. There's

I drive  northwest from the Crystal City,  out past the pet resort,  on the road General Hull hacked through the swamp to the Maumee Rapids two hundred years ago. Nowadays the road flees arrow straight through dry corn fields, a chalk sky as still as the landscape itself, vanishing to a horizon punctuated by the spidery fingers of cell towers and pylons. Dark copses of trees and blank houses wait for winter.   I am looking for the Devil’s Hole. I’ve heard the name for years and often wondered. What is it? Where is it? Who first called it the Devil’s Hole and why? Is it an actual place or a figment of some unknown author’s imagination, a story written now in the wind and the silences? All I know is that I heard somewhere that the county highway department has stopped worrying about the disappearing road signs—college kids looking for dorm decorations most likely. Best surrender to the invisible.   Other than this, my knowledge is as two-dimensional as the map on my phone. I drive into t

  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