Dear, Uncle Nathan,
Several years ago, you casually mentioned that a place exists where free range kids can climb old city rubble to the top of a building, hang off the top of the building on a school bus, slide down an 11-story slide, and its all made from recycled junk. I mean, seriously, that’s too good to be true, but we thought we’d peek in if ever we were in St. Louis.
You have no idea what you got us into.
This might be our new favorite place on earth!
We had breakfast in the cutest little town of St. Clair. Pretty sure they have no idea that its 2019 in this town. And they make a mean breakfast there. You would have liked it.
So, because you didn’t come with us on this trip, and you should have, I will take you on a tour of a place that might just beat Disneyland.
This is what you see at first:
Now, all that junk puled up outside? You would soon realize that there is order in this chaos. There are people climbing around in that stuff waaayyyy up in the air. And then it hits you. This isn’t a museum, or an art piece. It’s not even just another tourist trap. This is the life passion of a person who took notice of the beauty in the crumbles of his city. Then he saved those crumbles and made new beauty with them. This place is all the power of the divine to speak creation,& mirrored in the favored thing, humanity. See, this building was once a shoe factory, and when it shut down, someone saw an opportunity to build something new from what was old.
Like this grand staircase railing. It’s made from the rollers of a conveyor. 
And these bits of steel collected from all over the city. What does one do with old rail road spikes and rebar and wrenches and angle iron?
I guess you could throw it all away. 
Or you could weld it all together in spirals and curls and bows and unexpected passageways to somewhere. Never nowhere. Every opening a portal into a new world.
Nathan, I can imagine you building this. All those bank vault doors, that wire mesh leftover from the foundations of the city, bread pans from mass baking of bread to feed the city, those stone buttresses…just toss them all high into the air for the brave and adventurous to climb through. 
I imagine the builder walking down the street after the fair and realizing that this ferris wheel had more than one last ride left in it. He crowned his entire creation with its commonness, hoping it would raise children to the heavens in their joy or allow that one corner of space where tired parents could steal a quiet moment and a kiss. He succeeded.
And why not provide stairs and an elevator for the horribly boring at heart, but for those who have always wanted it, take those cast-off pipes from that water main replacement job and build a spiral slide all the way from floor 11 down to the first floor. Maybe build two such slides. And at the bottom, let the people relax in chairs that spin and wobble and dip around like tops. Why not?
And you climb through everything. There is no place that cannot be climbed or crawled or slithered through.
Deep in the heart of this shrine to play and the fearless, we came upon a beat nick bar. We had drinks in a gypsy caravan hidden in a maze of low streamers and heady lights. Disco was playing on the speakers, mingling with circus music. I decided to live in that caravan alone for the rest of my life. Then the kids found us. Ha!
And there was circus music because there was a tiny circus, put on by children, for a packed auditorium.
Then St. George showed up riding a train through the psychedelic universe just outside our caravan window. The gypsy caravan was the bridge. 
He was the only one small enough to fit under the train bridge and through the culvert tunnel. The engineer had to lay down while driving to avoid decapitation.
WHERE ARE WE???????? I don’t know, but I love it!
Then into the mouth of the sea monster to the underbelly of this place with the crazy Magpie. In that dark place under the sewers, the answer to the questions, “Is that a tunnel? Can I go into it?” is always yes. 
We came across this long man stuck in a tunnel. He said something about eating too many donuts for this kind if thing. I know what he meant, and I had already marked the wisdom in working out and passing up seconds and sweets. I hadn’t been stuck once. 
Nobody wants to die a tunnel cork or impaled on construction site drills welded into balcony railings at the City Museum. They must send small children through the squeeziest places each night to clear the flesh and bones of those less narrow folks who thought, “I can fit through that hole.” No. Not you can’t. Your attempt to escape the underworld has failed. 
Our only hope was to army crawl through an impossibly curved and slippery tunnel sloping upward, or to slither on our backs, our faces scraping the roof of this maybe grave. Then climb the wire cages and step, sure-footed and perfectly balanced, to avoid falling through to…somewhere. 
And only the fool believes the stairs lead to the easy path. At the top may be a smaller hole to squeeze through, a longer maze to navigate. No, choose the narrow way. It leads to a several-story slide that dangles your body over the expanse of a universe before you shoot out onto smooth concrete. Your clothes begin to rip and tatter. 
There is the false relief of coming out into the open, finally upright again, and the slight horror at the realization that you slid out of the roots of that tree on your belly. Mangled and cast-off metals from other demolished buildings grow into the spiraling tree tops you have escaped into. You climb every one if those soaring branches and slide down re-claimed culvert hollows to more welded tree houses. And, Nathan, you will be happy to know that all of the nieces and nephews survived, as did Miss Spare child. 
Ah, back to our good friend the forest whale. Didn’t his friend just eat us? He is asking why you sent us here without meeting up at the entrance. You would love it here. Next time, we will drag you along with us.
The symbols we hardly noticed upon entering the building seemed important now. Enter, if you will, the gates of hell, but return to the light of the cross when all hope is gone. 
So, Nathan, I don’t believe you meant to mislead. This is the kind of experience for which qualia emersion is both the necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge. You told us it would be fun. It wasn’t fun. It was intricately soul-changing.
Hey, Nate, also, buy me a gypsy caravan in a psychedelic universe.
You will also be happy to know that we topped off the day by visiting good friends and my favorite squishy babies. You know the value of friendship far better than I do, and I was aware of the fact that a Nathan Day cannot be complete without experiencing intense relationship. My beautiful friend glows with the chaos and perfection of motherhood, and she allowed me to drown in her beautiful newborn, and to snuggle with her wiggly toddler, who was just a little nibble shoving handfuls of wood chips and sand into his mouth the last time I saw him. It is good to see folks who are woven into your best memories.
So here’s today’s road trip song for my mom and dad who taught me never to pass up the adventure of a cave or a tree top:
https://youtu.be/m2uTFF_3MaA
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