A Postcard from Where?

A


celeryhenge.jpgA Postcard from Celeryhenge

Deep in the forests of a rainy northern isle, far beyond the cities and the moss-choked walls, lies one of our most enduring mysteries: the world’s largest primitive megavegetal site.

Who or what piled these stalks in such deliberate patterns, and why? Was it an observatory to track the movements of the bowels? Was it an ancient site of worship? Was it just a giant culinary make-work project? What the hell was it for? We’ll probably never know for sure.

There’s a strange energy about the place; a fork in the road of reality. It’s like a hunger. It just sorta grows on you and scours you out … You relive your salad days in a crisp series of lucid flashbacks, but they fade and leave a bland taste in your mouth.

The wind as it whispers through the stalks sounds like voices. Animals become uneasy. The back of cat’s necks bristle. I feel I’m being watched — as though the Vegetalista or some other herbaceous spirit were hovering just over my shoulder.

The weirdest thing is that the monument changes. During a dry spell it almost seems to wilt and go limp. Then, as if overnight, it seems to stiffen and regain its shape — almost as though it knew it had rained…

 

 

 

 

About the author

Ryan Murdock

Author of A Sunny Place for Shady People and Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America. Host of Personal Landscapes podcast. Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Canada's Outpost magazine. Writer at The Shift. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

3 Comments

Leave a Reply to Jeanne G. Cancel reply

  • Lettuce now praise infamous prose, peppered as it it with a garden variety of jokes. This piece of your turnips right at lunch time. I wouldda written it, but you beet me to it.
    (At least you don’t call yourself a “locavore”!)

  • Ohhhh…. that was painful! I shoulda known you’d jump right in there.
    “Locavore”?? Hell no! As my good friend Jason George is fond of saying, I’m an opportunivore. 😉

  • Loathe “locavore” (I call ’em “loco-vores”), but opportunivore is good! If you were eating dorado, would it be opportunitunavore?
    (In Geology, see, what you like is a nice look at the rocks without a bunch of junky vegetation in the way, which of course, is also feeding off the rocks, which is why we call trees & whatnot “lithovores”. Or sometimes “lithosites”: rock parasites.)

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