I am the curator of the Petaluma Road Kill Museum. My
artifacts are unique, gathered by bicycle from the streets of Petaluma. I
display them on gray metal shelves, above my desk.
My co-workers are fascinated by the Road Kill Museum. How
could they not be? Each specimen bears not only the form it carried to the end
of its days, but the patterns and patina gathered from its time on the pavement.
Each specimen has its story. Some of my friends, having specialized knowledge,
tell me the origin of these species. Tom says this hexagonally shaped specimen met
its end when it fell off a trailer. He marvels at my personal favorite, which
has taken the shape of a horse’s head.
When I look at this museum of mine, I’m given to thinking
about design. Who decided to make these creations just this way; and why? What
did they look like before they were cast across the roadway? Most
significantly, did their demise on the street represent a design failure, or bad
luck, or merely the arrival at the end of their natural lifespan?
If there’s one thing I truly hate, it’s bad design: designs
that reflect a designer’s unwillingness or inability to care about how
something works. You know what I mean: products that break only moments out of
the box; products that don’t even begin to live up to their claims; that cheap
plastic crap.
In case you were still wondering…the pieces in my Road Kill
Museum are all man-made. They are manifestations of metal and plastic that
traveled, served, or simply landed on the road; got tumbled along by a stream
of who-knows-how-many cars and trucks; and finally escaped into an eddy near
the curb, where I could safely retrieve them. It’s chrome-plated pot-metal wing
window latches. It’s winch spools and mechanics tools. A trailer’s lug nut. A
tin can flattened, rusted, and buffed to create an equine bas-relief. It’s
spark plugs, chipped up and ground down. (Did these cars go motoring around
missing a plug? No, says Tom; most likely it was left on an air cleaner after a
plug change.)
The most interesting object in the PRKM is a four inch milled
alloy hose fitting, with a charred remnant of flex hose. It wasn’t found in
Petaluma; it wasn’t found along a road. I picked it up near Lake Tahoe last
October, 9500 feet up on a boulder-strewn slope of Mt. Price, 12 miles from the
nearest road, 2 miles from the nearest trail. Far too large to belong to a camp
stove. It’s “sky kill”, all right.
My wife wondered if didn’t fall off the space shuttle
Columbia. I searched the web and found a map of Columbia’s final trajectory. It
passed *directly over Mt. Price.* But I further read that the breakup didn’t
begin until east Texas. Still, perhaps this was the first piece to go, the one
that triggered the eventual disintegration. Another co-worker suggested Googling the part number stamped into the fitting. We did,
and it brought us to a military aircraft supply company’s online catalogue, to
a specification for what looked like a later version of that very fitting. Maybe
I should send some digital pictures to NASA.
Twenty two years ago I saw Godfrey Reggio’s
stunning film Koyaanisqatsi, a wordless portrayal of
the contrasts between the industrial and natural worlds. It ends with a most
spectacular display of flawed design, the explosion of an Apollo rocket shortly
after take-off. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi term for
“life out of balance.” It can also mean “a state of life that calls for another
way of living.”
I sometimes wonder if humanity was designed to fail, to explode
and disintegrate, scattering the face of the earth with the remains of our
civilization. Or will we hear the call for another way of living, a better
design.
My 1982 Honda died last week, caught in a freeway batter and
jam sandwich. Twenty two years, two hundred thousand miles. That was a good
design, for a car, for its time. Now it’s time to move on.