11″ x 14
There had been a murder. No one knew what happened to the boy, but a group of conspiracy theorists had gotten in trouble for trying to sneak out to the bottom of a swamp where they said a couple of renagade cops were holding the child at an underwater roadblock.
All the tv crews came out to document the quarrel between the local police and the conspiracy theorists. The sheriff finally decided that it was his jurisdiction and not against the law for them to go under the water to look for the underwater roadblock.
So we were all there at the edge of the swamp, and getting in the water to see what would happen. The newsmen were chest deep in the still water with dress shirts and microphones describing the scene as the preacher who led the group disappeared into the water with a flashlight.
You could see the light of the preacher’s flashlight go further and further out and before we knew it we were all following him.
Someone in the crowd said, if you go too far into this, you’ll hit the Mississippi River and there’s no way you’ll survive. The water was still, but the further we went, it became clear that what we were sloshing through was not a swamp, but the overflow of the Mississippi and that eventually we would come to the River itself.
I was travelling with two newspeople and I saw that ahead the water was not still but raging and screaming. It’s the River! Grab something! And just as our bodies were going to be pulled into the current we grabbed a concrete pylon and pulled ourselves onto what turned out to be an escalator. It was a down escalator, and still functioning, though at this point it was pouring rain, and the three of us looked up the escalator with water cascading down its steps. I was imagining how difficult it would be to go up this eascalator, with its downward moving steps, and how I desparately wanted to. One of the newspeople said: there is always something creepy about an escalator. I said, yeah, I know.