Saylor Park, West Virginia, Northern Wisconsin

I'm in an interior lobby of a big chemical plant.  July heat and humidity percolating outside.  Big, noisy A/C unit pumping dry, cool air about.  I'm vaguely discontented.  I have a moderate sized bomb in my briefcase.  Waiting for the right moment.  I kick off my wingtips and shinny up a dilapidated, rusty downspout.  Hanging on with one powerful forearm, I remove my tie and affix the incendiary device to the crossbeam of a critical piece of chemical process equipment.  Sweat pours into my eyes as I pause for a second and watch blood pulse in an engorged vein, sinews and tendons grotesquely distended.  I swing down the gutter with chimpanzee-like dexterity and melt into the gloom.

Ever been here?  Nice people.  Major poverty.  Little towns, dead or dying, hunched in valleys, clusters of ramshackle trailers and huts twisting along the spines of ridges.  There appear to be a fair number of fires - the destroyed buildings are left to collapse in on themselves in a sad, reflective way.  Great mining complexes abandoned, rusting in hollows stripped of vegetation. The houses following the roads share space with rivers or streams and ubiquitous railroad tracks.  Long, long trains pound by, 3 or 4 or 5 locomotives pulling an endless line of coal cars. 

Johnsonville, WI.  The Johnsonville Sausage plant, second shift appointment.  I pull into town well after dark on a brutally cold night after having made my way down narrow country roads pinned between piles of snow left by the plows, heaped 10 feet high - it was almost literally like driving in a tunnel.   Huge clouds of steam billowed out of the plant, the smell of cooking meat, bright arc lamps bathing the facility in a weird, yellow glow.  Johnsonville was small, dominated by the plant.  I paused on the hill above town, looking at the monstrous sausage-maker, looking at the bar across the street with seductive neon beer advertisements glowing in the windows.  There were a few pick up trucks parked in the snow-covered lot.  Nothing else was moving anywhere.  The steam would drift straight up for a while before a gust would drive it down and across the road.

I thought about it more seriously than I would have liked.