Self-Erasing Drawing
The process of clearing, of chopping, of girdling.
A white piece of paper, with a rectangle drawn on it. The alphanumeric code written in the middle of that.
Where two rivers meet, and the sandbars that come up at that point; and how the sandbars are always being written and rewritten in the water at the same point.
Try to look at an empty shelf, and your eye slides somewhere else. Try to look at an empty lot, and your eye slides somewhere else.
Horses racing on the floodplain.
Horses, right now racing at Versailles, along some tacky stanchions and over false hedges wheeled into place.
The table wants to be full, and people are forever clearing it.
The neighborhood is Franklinton, the oldest neighborhood in Columbus. In 1797 a surveyor named Lucas Sullivant set out to establish a colony in the area. Sullivant was part of an expedition sent by the federal government to document the land, its claim having recently been ceded by Great Britain. Lacking money at hand, the government had decided to grant tracts of what it called the Ohio Country to Revolutionary War veterans instead of back pay. It employed men like Sullivant to define the bounds of the tracts. They did so at odds with the Native people already there – the longstanding Shawnee, and the more recently arrived tribes who had moved into the area from their ancestral lands further east.
Sullivant brought a crew of twenty or so surveyors, porters, and scouts. They went about busily leaving records of themselves – lead plates, wooden crosses, compasses – to prove their land claims. Having escaped a Seneca-Cayuga war party, Sullivant wrote an account of his adventure and left it in a split stick next to a tree he carved with his initials.
While he was there, Sullivant marked the women’s corn plantation at the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers as a prime spot for settlement, and claimed it for himself. While the floodplain would make building and planting easy, the situation would never be suited for permanence. It flooded in 1913, in 1866, in 1862, in 1859, in 1852, in 1847, in 1834, and in 1798, before Sullivant could even offer his plats for sale to other colonists.
Along Broad Street you will see the site of the estate Sullivant came to establish, long since deleted by a Ford dealership, and now helpfully cleared again by a local developer. A banner pinned to the chainlink fence around the lot reads: “The future belongs to those that can see it.”
The settlers made a clearing in the forests to bury the dead and ordered in sandstone markers from elsewhere. The water washed up the dead and pushed them around with their markers. The floods would come every so often and push the houses around on the plain. Someone has a photograph of a horse carried away by the water in a cloud of debris, knocked over, its harnessed head laying to one side.
The lawn says, “Cut me, cut me!” The hedge says, “Shear me, shear me!” A lawn reads as a threat that all the rest of the lot could be, should be lawn.
The plainest facts are hardest to grasp; they can’t explain themselves. They don’t move when you look at them.
Horses leaving hoofprints in the floodplain.