[Black volcanic sand desert in Iceland, via flickr user meiburgin.]

Back in August, while on vacation, I read David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.  A pair of geographies he invented, the suburb of East Corinth and the Great Ohio Desert, particularly fascinated me, as they demonstrate how ordinary ideas (the urban plan as figure and landscape as moral coercion) can become utterly alien, when stretched to extreme scale:

The ant was torn off the windshield by the wind when Lenore hit the Inner Belt of I-271 and started going seriously fast.  The offices of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous were in that part of downtown Cleveland called Erieview Plaza, right near Lake Erie.  Lenore took the Inner Belt south and west from Shaker Heights, preparatory to her being flung by I-271 northward into the city itself, which meant that she was for a while with her car tracing the outline of the city of East Corinth, Ohio, which was where she had her apartment, and which determined the luxuriant and not unpopular shape of the Inner Belt Section of I-271.

East Corinth had been founded and built in the 1960’s by Stonecipher Beadsman II, son of Lenore Beadsman, Lenore Beadsman’s grandfather, who was unfortunately killed at age sixty-five in 1975 in a vat accident during a brief and disastorous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Foods Products to develop and market something that would compete with Jell-O.  Stonecipher Beadsman II had been a man of many talents and even more interests.  He had been a really fanatical moviegoer, as well as an amateur urban planner, and he had been particularly rabid in his attachment to a film star named Jayne Mansfield.  East Corinth lay in the shape of a profile of Jayne Mansfield: leading down from Shaker Heights in a nimbus of winding road-networks, through delicate features of houses and small businesses, a button nose of a park and a full half-highway extension and tract housing, before jutting precipitously westward in a huge, swollen development of factories and industrial parks, mammoth and bustling, the Belt curving back no less immoderately a couple miles south into a trim lower border of homes and stores and apartment buildings and some boarding houses, including that in which Lenore Beadman herself lived and from which she had driven up over Jayne Mansfield to the Shaker Heights Home this morning.  Families and firms owning property along the critical western boundary of the suburb were required by zoning code to paint their facilities in the most realistic colors possible, a condition to which property owners in the far westward section near Garfield Heights (where the industrial swelling was most pronounced) particularly objected, and as one can imagine the whole East Corinth area was immensely popular with airline pilots, who all tended to demand landing patterns into Cleveland-Hopkins Airport over East Corinth, and who made a constant racket, flying low and blinking their lights on and off and waggling their wings.  The people of East Corinth, many of them unaware of the shape their town really lay in, a knowledge not exactly public, crawled and drove and walked over the form of Jayne Mansfield, shaking their fists at the bellies of planes… To the south, 271 gave way to 77, and 77 led down through Bedford, Tallmadge, Akron, and Canton before stretching into the Great Ohio Desert, with its miles of ash-fine black sand, and cacti and scorpions, and crowds of fishermen, and concession stands at the rim.

…

Transcript of Meeting between the Honorable Raymond Zusatz, Governor of the State of Ohio; Mr. Joseph Lungberg, Gubernatorial Aide; Mr. Neil Obstat, Gubernatorial Aide; and Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, Vice President, Industrial Desert Design, Incorporated, Dallas, Texas; 21 June 1972…

Governor: Guys, the state is getting soft.  I can feel softness out there.  It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall.  Too much development.  People are getting complacent.  They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness.  There’s no more hewing.
Mr. Obstat: You’ve got a point there, Chief.
Governor: We need a wasteland.
Mr. Lungberg and Mr. Obstat: A wasteland?
Governor: Gentlemen, we need a desert.
Mr. Lungberg and Mr. Obstat: A desert?
Governor: Gentleman, a desert.  A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio.  A place to fear and love.  A blasted region.  Something to remind us of what we hewed out of.  A place without malls.  An Other for Ohio’s Self.  Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down.  Desolation.  A place for people to wander alone.  To reflect.  Away from everything.  Gentlemen, a desert.

Mr. Obstat: Just a super idea, Chief.
Governor: Thanks, Neil.  Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas.  They did Kuwait.
Mr. Lungberg: Hey, there’s apparently a lot of desert in Kuwait.
Mr. Yancey: You bet, Joe, and we believe we can provide you folks with a really first-rate desert here in Ohio.
Mr. Obstat: What about the cost?
Governor: Manageable.
Mr. Lungberg: Where would it be?
Mr. Yancey: Well gentlemen, the Governor and I have conferred, and if I could just direct your attention to this map, here…
Mr. Obstat: That’s Ohio, all right.
Mr. Yancey: The spot we have in mind is in the south of your great state.  Right about… here.  Actually here to here.  Hundred square miles.
Mr. Obstat: Around Caldwell?
Mr. Yancey: Yup.
Mr. Lungberg: Don’t quite a few people live around there?
Governor: Relocation. Eminent domain.  A desert respects no man.  Fits with the whole concept.
Mr. Lungberg: Isn’t that also pretty near Wayne National Forest?
Governor: Not anymore.
(Mr. Lungberg whistles)

Mr. Obstat: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.
Governor: Hits home, eh Neil?  Part of the whole concept.  Concept has to hit home.  Hewing is violence, Neil.  We’re going to hew wilderness out of the soft underbelly of the state.  It’s going to hit home.
Mr. Lungberg: You’re really sold on this, aren’t you, Chief?
Governor: Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything.  It’s what this state needs.  I can feel it.
Mr. Obstat: You’ll go down in history, Chief.  You’ll be immortal.
Governor: Thanks, Neil.  I just feel its right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold.  A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness.  ‘Course there’ll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in…
Mr. Lungberg: Why white sand, Chief?  Why not, say, black sand?
Governor: Go with that, Joe.
Mr. Lungberg: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast, otherness, blastedness, should I say sinisterness?  Sinisterness is the sense I get.
Governor: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.
Mr. Lungberg: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here… What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand?  Talk about sinister.  And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too.  Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect…

…

Mr. Lungberg: What about a name, Chief?
Governor: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe.  I never thought of the name issue.
Mr. Lungberg: May I make a suggestion?
Governor: Go.
Mr. Lungberg: The Great Ohio Desert.
Governor: The Great Ohio Desert.
Mr. Lungberg: Yes.
Governor: Joe, a super name.  I take my hat off to you.  You’ve done it again.  Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.