Time Travels

I confessed last week that I wanted to use my new time-travel machine to effect the murder of Jane Austen, but I don't want you to get the notion that I'd only use if for nefariously violent purposes. I'd also just like to visit, take in some historically significant moments (to me at least) in a you are there sense. I'd like to see the then Cassius Clay throwing his Olympic Gold Medal into the Ohio River. I'd like to accompany Walt Whitman as he visited injured Civil War soldiers in Washington, D.C., and stand with him on a street waiting for Lincoln to pass by just so he could wave at the President. I'd like to see Babe Ruth pitch. I'd like to accompany a runaway slave as he made his way along the Underground Railroad. I'd like to sit at the dinner table when the Marx Brothers were all kids, things like that. I guess if I had to pick one or two Big Moments in U.S. history to witness, I'd say just being at Appomattox and watching and listening to Grant and Lee, or standing behind the wooden fence at the top of the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza as JFK rode by.

Religiously, I'd have to go with the pick of a guy I used to work with, who said he wanted to be there on Pentecost because whatever happened must have been amazing for those scared apostles to emerge from there ready to risk their lives to go out over the world and evangelize.

But for sheer whimsy, I want to go to the Tenere Desert in Niger in February 1960. I'll just quote my 1989 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, page 122:

The tree most distant from any other is believed to be one at an oasis in the Tenere Desert, Niger Republic. There were no other trees within 31 miles. In Feb. 1960 it survived being rammed by a truck being backed up by a French driver. The tree was transplanted and is now in the Museum of Niamey, Niger.

Oh, those French drivers. I don't know, but something about this "record" and its absurd anecdote, whenever I think of it, which, believe me, isn't too often, makes me giddy with delight in human nature, humans in nature, the human comedy, fate, absurdity, and just life itself, I guess. To actually witness this little quirk of life would amuse me for the rest of my life. To read more about the desert and the tree, click here. That's all.

Pere Ubu-Flat