HER NAME IS RIO AND SHE DANCES ON THE SAND

Lake Michigan Diary 61

The trick-or-treat decorations are out, black and gray and orange, but the lake and sky have their own palette. For some reason, the prevailing colors over the water in early October are the pastel pinks and blues favored in the 80s, a hangover or echo from all that Southwestern Jeff-Ham-Blue-Coyote Taos-love.  Nagel put it into his posters, and it’s the favorite faded blouse Kate McKinnon’s alien abduction alter-ego, Colleen Rafferty wears on Saturday Night Live in those sketches, probably picked up at a Goodwill for a bargain. I have some cloth napkins that match the sunset.

What is it about these two colors, predominating, when the neighbors feel the need to spooky-up with blacks and oranges and cobwebs and goofy tombstones (“You’re Next!” on a grave is only funny when you’re an immortal kid). Meanwhile, to the last minute, the light purple asters pop, trillion on the hill, and behold the gentian here—closed gentian blooms only this week and only bumblebees are big enough to pry them open to pollinate them--and it takes hours. There is a metaphor here. Enjoy your giant skeletons and spiders, children!

My Halloween decoration, then would be something out of this 1880 book, The Language of Flowers, and I’ll make you an “Insult Bouquet”, or a Posy of Rebuke, with the proper floral vocabulary.

Halloween is no country for old men. As the pastels fade into the dark that starts at 6:30 now, it’s time to sail to Italo Calvino’s fabled city of Despina.

"Despina,” writes Calvino, in Invisible Cities, “can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea...Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts."

The sailor sees a city on the edge of an endless desert, the camel driver a city on the edge of an endless sea.