H E L P
Green block letters big enough for a football field, just off the
highway. But even then, no one paid attention.
Fifteen years later, I moved back to Syracuse, where I had been
a student and watched those letters fade to brown and die away
along that busy stretch of road. And yet the memory of that
message hadn’t faded for me—I needed to see the place again for
myself.
It was a fine October afternoon and I had no classes. I wasn’t
sure exactly how to find the place, but I’d heard rumors. The lake
was so blue you could almost forget what it was. I drove past the
backside of the fairgrounds, long closed for the season and
desolate. But off a dirt road at the perimeter I found the security
gates wide open and swinging in the wind, and I went in, mine the
only vehicle in a back lot designed for thousands of fairgoers.
It’s not like there were maps for what lay behind the fences, but
there was a lane of sorts heading off in the general direction of the
lake, so off I went, being sure to lock my car in this lonely place. I’d
just be a while, back in plenty of time to pick up my girls after
school.
The lane was just a rutted track through a thicket of phragmites,
the reedy stems so densely packed as to make a wall on either
side. I had heard that every summer the manure from the state fair
barns was dumped out here. The mucked-out stalls of blue ribbon
dairy cows and midway elephants all ended up on the waste beds.
The city later followed suit, dumping tankers of sewage sludge. The
resulting paddy was completely overgrown, plumed seed heads
towering over my head by several feet. My view of the lake and my
sense of direction were lost in the craze of stems, all rubbing and