The Day Dawned Auspicious...

My nose was against my handlebars, my weight was pressed down on one foot, on that pedal, but it would not go down an inch. The sinister growl of a gas machine approached. Too steep. The bike and I hung for a moment on the roadside, not moving, then the handlebars lurched and I plopped straight over into the ditch just as the truck passed. The truck braked, backed up, and I heard a laugh. It was kind of funny, so I started laughing, too. "Just throw that bike in the back and get in," he said. He drove me two hundred yards to the top of the hill. Now that is what I call neighborly.

After this adventure on the winding French Broad jungle road, I arrived at the job interview location. "All the way at the end of the business park, in a little white building beside the river," he had said. I rode through the warehouses, between big striped tents and men buzzing by on colorful motorcycles, past a heap of kayaks, across mysterious rails that zigzagged through the road and ran straight into a building. I looked and looked, but in all this gypsy circus I could not find a little white building. I stopped and got off, puzzling. Then I looked up, and there it was. A white shoebox shack on long legs like Baba Yaga's hut, with a rusty steel ladder climbing to the door. And on the door: "Cinema Preservation." A youngish man came out and waved to me. I climbed up into the office-nest. The walls were papered with huge maps of the states, spangled with rivers, cities, and county names. An enormous nautical map of some islands hung over the desk.
"This place is weird," I said.
"It used to be a coat factory," he told me. "The people who made all the knives for the Last of the Mohicans movie are right over there, and upstairs is the warehouse for the biggest used book store around. Anytime I want a book, I just climb up."

I knew he would hire me. Very few people do. It takes a special type. I knew when he opened up a google map to demonstrate the job, and found the town-speck of Cameron, Louisiana, and zoomed in and in and said, "My God, just look at that place. I bet the hurricane wiped them out... Look at that river... And right on the border..." and nosed around aerially until he remembered that I was still there. "Sorry, sorry. I really like maps..." Here was a man who could appreciate my long-distance romance with the place called North Mud Lumps, LA, initiated through just such idle mapping.

So this is my new job. There used to be little theatres that showed all the latest moving pictures in nascent American towns. These theatres are mostly demolished now, but some remain, maybe as churches or restaurants or bait shops, but they are still there, in disguise. And sometimes in certain of these theatres, someone did not remove every last vestige of the old equipment. Sometimes there are wires left there in the attic, all crusted with bat droppings and wound up in pigeons' nests. The goal is to locate these odds and ends via telephone, by calling anyone in the town who may have a memory of the old theatre. Nothing is off-limits: the library, the nursing home, the truck stop. Find someone, somehow, who will remember. And if someone remembers something, even if it's just a little something, then these guys go there and look for the bits. If they find anything, they buy them and send them to Chicago to be reassembled and restored. I have been assigned a large chunk of the state of Louisiana. Where the money comes from for this bizarre project, I have no idea. It's just weird enough to have a rich madman behind the curtain.