PILGRIMAGE
They say the crickets out at the Buddy Holly Crash Site are magic (or maybe just lucky), and people drive from Des Moines and St. Paul and Omaha (and sometimes as far as Denver or Laramie or Reno) with their trunks (or else the cabs of their pickups) stuffed full of mason jars. There are holes cut in the tops. They save their grass clippings (sometimes from watered, deep-green lawns, and sometimes from those patches of dirt and weeds that like to hang around near trailers) to spread along the bottom, and some even have these big, fancy terrariums that (in addition to probably costing a fortune) look like dioramas of the pioneer Midwest, complete with little sod houses and corn stalks and (in at least one case) actual fragments of cow shit, and when they all arrive in mid-summer and on coordinated “picking days,” they compare notes and talk about textiles and techniques for prolonging insect lifespans, and there’s an artist from Chicago who’s out there for days at a time, and she’s got this wall of crickets set up inside a tent on Michigan Avenue, and they say when you enter (and after she zips the flap) all you can hear are chirps. Not traffic. Not shouting. Not trains, and she plays Don McLean outside (and at full volume), but you can’t hear that either because there must be a million crickets, and the whole tent feels like some meadow off a gravel road way outside North Platte, NE, and the only problem is them little suckers keep dying before she has the chance to replace them, and she’s had to (successfully) petition the county tourism board for help, which means, on any given day, maybe a third of the place is hers. It’s volunteers collecting bugs. They bring them to her for inspection, and everyone who helps gets a free t-shirt, and it’s bright pink, and Buddy Holly’s on it, and behind him are actual crickets (though one volunteer (a crusty old man from Mason City) once told her they looked more like grasshoppers, and the consensus was he was right but who else would notice, and changing it wasn’t worth the cost of a second printing)). Sometimes a protester or three will show up, and there will be arguments about animal cruelty and ecology and the relative value of arthropods or mollusks or chordates, and once a whole chain of folks drove down from the PETA chapter in Lincoln and shut down picking for a few hours. Random tourists got caught in the middle. Some of them took pictures, and most of them show people with signs and people with jars, and they’re all mostly just staring at each other, though one (picture (which happened to go viral)) shows a man (who’s bald and wears a beard and has these massive, four-inch holes in his ears) on his knees and half-surrounded by dust (and you can see the makeshift guitar memorial in the background), and he’s holding a cricket up to his mouth like he’s about to swallow it whole. You can practically hear it. Pretty much everyone is looking on in horror (albeit for different reasons), but it’s also clear that nobody’s planning to stop him, and there are people who think someday the print will show up at the Art Institute of Chicago (right next to that famous Grant Wood), and maybe it will fill everyone who sees it with a kind of nostalgia, a fondness for big, empty spaces, for homespun shrines and undeveloped land, and some of the folks down at the Hy-Vee (and also the Fareway) think that one picture (or maybe the soul of the cricket it shows) might be enough to save the site from the inevitable commercialization. The advance of progress. The building of a hotel or waterpark or convention center, and maybe it will make people want to be surrounded by ghosts. Maybe (though most of us know this is pretty much just wishful thinking) they’ll want to hear nature. Chirping and mating calls and wind running through the backroads instead of elevators. Air conditioning. Waterslides and ice machines and flip-flops and all them dead echoes of the Great American Vacation.