I shifted from fourth gear to third as I ditched a Santa Fe strip-mall street for the steep grind of uneven asphalt that split a west-side mesa into two snowy halves. My young son, 9, leaned against the door, sketch pad on lap. His hand knew the routine, knew our unkempt roads meant his spaceships sported jagged edges. His eyes didn't waver. I didn't have to check the rear-view mirror to know this, to know my son's vision sprayed inward, watered vein and synapse, a whirlpool of hidden message only the raw shuttle of charcoal pencil against paper could decode.
Just like Stonehenge, I thought. We may tag heavy stones with intention, set them into wet earth, try to channel the core. We can't reach that center. Not with stones, not with art, not with sheer will. We are the same as our mesquite bees; busy, noisy, mindful of our next meal, our position in the desert hive. Who watches the center?
It wasn't Stonehenge I sought, but a cryptic circle of dead refrigerators called Stonefridge. Ten years ago conceptual artist Adam Horowitz fought city and vandal, placed 140 forgotten fridges in "atomic alignment" meant to spit on the Los Alamos Laboratory. He gathered local volunteers - the poor, the hip, the Santa Fe Barbie, the Ken - more than he needed, made them wear loincloths in a statement of consumer slavery. They hoisted hefty food box upon box using teepee poles and donated rope. He lost his freon palace once to bulldozers, then twice. He rebuilt. Discarded appliances come easy.
I shifted to second as my car groaned over the ridge. A steady gust of frigid air blew over the car, into the open vents and my legs felt January, felt cold and alone. The small stucco subdivisions lay behind us, the city fourteen blocks forgotten. I counted a rumtumble shack, a wind-scarred mobile home, until they, too, disappeared. We turned with the road and the mesa turned to red mud covered in heavy splotches of crystalline snow, turned to a deep dip in the earth, and I slowed to ten miles per hour, kept the car from sliding too fast down the steep hill.
"Mom! Mom! Stonewhatever! The fridge tower!"
9 saw it first. Stonefridge stood alone, stood cranky, uneven. I pulled off the road and my car cycled silent. I grabbed camera, notebook, keys. We stepped outside, into twenty degrees farenheit, into crusty snow covering the good red clay that defines New Mexico. The formation looked unfinished. Half the 100-foot diameter circle eyed the landscape, eyed the distant hill protecting Los Alamos; proud, defiant, its watchful columns reaching eighteen-feet above the mesa. The rest lay shattered, pushed back to earth.
9 shivered, the hood of his ski jacket tightly pulled past his forehead. We were alone. A few old bootprints led the way, but the thin layer of ice covering them told me it was weeks since anyone else visited. My long coat cracked around my legs in the unrelenting wind.
I stopped to snap a photograph of the vandalized portion. Fridges littered the ground as if some perverted god cast a mana fury of coil and cupboard, every appliance, here in winter's silence, as chilled and ready as the cool gleaming state-of-the art models gracing every Santa Fe yuppie home. A lone pigeon escaped an open cabinet, westing, house filled with bird pitch and a thousand cigarette butts. 9 turned to me with a grimace.
This wasn't the spiritual treat I promised. I snapped another photo, this time of 9 peering between the legs of a tower, his hands stuffed in his pockets for warmth. What is this strange place? We build these places, capture picture, give story, tell the world we pull energy from the earth. It all lasts a moment, a month, perhaps, a year. Then we fall, we forget, we set jackal upon our work. Is our vision that fragile? I could smell a faint whisper of pot, as if some stoned ghost general, electric cord in hand, watched us with suspicion.
"Mom?"
9 ran between the fridges, ran past me, until he reached the curve of solid henge, the "good" part of Stonefridge still steady and true. His shadow played with the unhinged doors half-covered in winter mud. I pictured my own refrigerator, the way it rules my kitchen, aids us with yummy treats, its double doors, the magnets supporting my son's art so much like the constant graffiti etched and spray painted on every visible surface here.
"Mom? Is the real Stonehenge like this? Is it tipped over? Is it in the middle of nowhere?"
I laughed, realized he knew a secret message I couldn't see myself.
"Yeah, it's just like this. Only made of stones. If the stones weren't so heavy, I bet more of it would be missing or tumbled over just like this. I wish people wouldn't mess up art, though, don't you?"
9 took his hands from his pockets for the first time. He threw them in the air, twirled like a figure skater, a silly grin across his face.
"Mom! It's our nature! It's the same as Legos. We just like to make stuff and then we just like to take it apart. Remember when you told me nothing lasts forever?"
The wind shifted. Thirty-six days past solstice. I nodded. 9 leaned against an avocado wonder. Almost a month into the new year and I've touched secrets. I sat on a horizontal fridge, traced gang graffiti with one finger. A hawk circled overhead, traced the formation with the dip and spread of his wings. We didn't move for a long time.
----
A few weeks ago Stonefridge unexpectedly fell in the heavy spring winds. The City of Santa Fe hauled the remains away in open-backed trucks. I was the last journalist to visit the metallic stones, the last to capture it's presence on film. My young son turned 10 the week after our visit, and this morning he told me he would build something like this someday. I know he will.
I hid the names of eight fridge manufacturers in this article. Can you find them?
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Comments: 21
I love glimpsing your relationship with your son as well.
I found whirlpool, westinghouse and kitchenaid
Great article Birdie--but then, it's yours, that almost goes without saying. I'm sorry Stonefridge is gone and nothing beside remains, round that colossal wreck, boundless and bare... ;) but that's how it's supposed to be.
Thanks, Birdie.
You are preserving history with your pictures and this story. Thanks for sharing this, Birdie. It's probably the only image we'll see of that place and time.
I love word games! Here's the list of manufacturers I found...
Whirlpool
Kenmore
Farenheit
Amana
Westinghouse
Frigidaire
General Electric
Kitchenaid
Gotta confess ~ I cheated... I copied your whole article into Word and did a search... I found all eight names that way. :-)
Good read and good Friday fun.
George Vreeland Hill
Here you really do justice to this typically gargantuan American ¨earth art¨type piece Stonefridge , both postmodern in its copying of the ancient idea and in a sense neopagan in its execution. Your Nabokovian playfulness starts with the title and ends with a race through the article for brand names, I truly admire your inventiveness as I did the Russian master.
Your piece made me dwell on the notion of refrigerator as icon for the kind of late American capitalism that was both a false ¨tomorrowland¨as well as a harbinger of the nanotechnology that will soon replace it. I was reminded of the Charlie Kaufman´s brilliant script for the film about Gong Show Host cum CIA agent Chuck Barris Confessions of A Dangerous Mind, where he evolves the TV game show from handing out refrigerators to newlyweds in the Sixties to handing them out to game show survivors who don´t blow their brains out on live TV in a telegenic Grand Guignol. My, how we´ve evolved beyond Stonehenge.
Anyhow, your prose is both accessible and also multilayered that enables both a quick read and a thoughtful second and third reading: That is a sign of great writing. I enjoyed this perhaps even more--and this is hard to imagine!--your Avon Lady pieces.