struggling to make sense of the political process.

Lost on our way to something else.  On the wrong Osborn Road. A name with two places.

The newspaper team had driven an hour west of Phoenix to check out a wolf rescue operation, but our cell phone mapping technology brought us here instead.  The pre-noon light is pale bright white. The dry air is still and country quiet.  No wolves or human habitation in sight. Only two wrecked mobile homes.

Photo by Morgan Jacobs

“I’m going to take some pictures of this,” says Morgan Jacobs.

He’s the photographer.

“Sure, why not,” I say.

We jump out of the truck.  The trailers are skeleton ruins.  The rectangle roofs are bowed down towards one end, their supporting walls gone or decayed.  Sun-bleached remains of things are scattered in concentric circles of declining probability moving outward from the second trailer.  It looks like the trailers were dropped intact from medium height.  There’s an Atari joystick.  Here’s a rusted hammer.  Plastic bags and plywood are everywhere.

I circle the ruins slowly and let my attention linger.  Abandoned dwellings have a kind of residual human energy like an office building’s nighttime emptiness.  I find it foreboding and alluring.  Jacob’s camera clack-clacks in staccato bursts.  He’s looking for the right image.  I’m looking for a ghost story.

Other human beings lived here.  They must have had stories.  Those fragments of living that compose life:  moments like eating with a friend or taking out trash.  Sometimes it is not clear how these relate to a larger narrative.  Sometimes it is.  Sometimes you fall in love with the friend, or the trash is the last you take out.  But often it is only in hindsight that the linkage between events becomes visible.  Rarely does one know, while doing the living, the banal from the dramatic.