If you walk past the southern barrier of Forest Park Lakefront Facilities, scramble down boulders into the ravine between the park and the hilltop estates, you can read the writing on the wall. In the shallows, creek running into lake, the broken base of an old monument leans into the mud, inscription too illegible to proclaim Ozymandias irony. If you take a picture through the barbed-wire on the mansion side of the creek, so long as the flash on your camera is fire-bomb bright, you can just barely make out a bridge hanging in the forest, dead-ending into a tree on both ends.
A bridge and a monument base; little hints of a world destroyed. Eliot said the world wouldn't end with a bang but a whimper, but these might not be mutually exclusive categories. Perhaps there was a bang once, and the bridge and the monument are the last whimper of the city that was, the last styrofoam cup the earth can't co-opt.
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