Crane Shed

The day Tanya’s dad was found dead and our dog ran away while we tried to pack, and we thought maybe she was dead too I wondered if there would be a third death. I was watering a shrub outside, a little mountain mahogany that doesn’t really need it when I heard a huge explosion somewhere from the south. It was a big noise but I was watering the cercocarpus. Had it been another day I might have thought more about it.

It turned out to be the old red timber crane shed in what we call the Old Mill District. We say it like that—like it’s capitalized—because there’s no mill there now, it’s just ice cream and pottery and expensive underwear stores and so forth.

It was a huge old red building built on the scale of the big yellow pine that once covered this area. Entirely made of wood. The lumber crane inside was so big it needed buttresses on the outside to hold up its supporting trusses.

The developer who had bought it was tired of arguing with the city over whether it was historic. They had a plan to tear it down and build an imitation of it filled with shoe stores, condos, that kind of thing and give it a name in memory of what they had dismantled. So they just took it down with dynamite one day when no one was looking. Let the bureaucrats sort it out. That’s how we do it here.

They paid a hundred thousand or so in fines and resold it for several million more than they paid. Probably had a good laugh over a hand-crafted beer, a round of golf, something like that.

People were outraged about it, then less outraged. People remembered it then forgot about it. The state told the county to use some of the fine money to build a memorial to the shed.

Really, they said that.