eBay Land Fantasies

by Anonymous

When I’m afflicted with a certain blend of depression, restlessness, and overarching feelings of futility, I find my ideal respite in the listings of eBay Real Estate. I visit the Land category, sort it by price from low to high, and working my way upward, but not very far upward, I search among the remote and desolate parcels for my perfect terrestrial counterpart.

Century, Fla.
With the way things are going, this seems about right. There’s a roof, and hopefully some plumbing. Good enough. Oh, wait. The lot is empty, and that building is adjacent to it. Well, as long as the bidding stays under $1,000, that’s fine. I could build a lean-to.

Timberon, N.M.
$1,399. I have $1,399. I could build a hut there, or, screw it, just sleep on a pile of fir needles. Yeah, I’m gonna do this. No. I can’t subject my cat to this. I’ll have to wait until he’s gone. The little guy probably has five or six years left in him. I’ve gone on this long. I can go on a little longer. Time flies. Where is Timberon? It’s very far from everyone. Perfect. I wonder if I could befriend those deer in the photo. Probably not. I wonder if they’ll eat my corpse when I eventually succumb to exposure. No, deer don’t eat meat. Or do they? Let’s see. No, I didn’t think so.

Maricopa, Ariz.
There’s no reserve on this auction for one Arizona gold mine one hundred miles from the Mexico border. If no one else bids, then snatching it up with an $11 down payment is a no-brainer. What better place to wallow than an abandoned gold mine? I wonder how much of that gold wound up in the hands of the miners, versus how much wound up in the bank account of some cold-blooded tycoon. I could spend the rest of my life in that denuded, godforsaken shaft. If it’s the type of mine with carts that roll around on rails, then I could ride one now and again, to pass the time. Coyotes eat carrion. I think this is the one.

Christmas Valley, Ore.
I once saw a curious thing on the Oregon coast. Walking a sandy path through dune grass and shore pines, I spotted a patch of Amanita muscaria. Each member of the patch was a perfect, platonic mushroom form, young and firm with a white, unblemished stem and a bright red, white-specked cap. I stepped off the path for a closer look, and was startled to find a seagull sitting among the fungi. The seagull was upright, placid, with eyes closed, wings tucked by its side, and clean, grey feathers fluttering in the sea breeze.

I clapped a couple times, loudly, to see if it was sleeping. It wasn’t. A few steps closer, I could see that it was perched squarely on top of a pile of ragged mushroom chunks. The beak-marked trunk of an Amanita stem, still white and undecomposed, poked up from the soil by the seagull’s breast. It must have been freshly dead.

In my uneducated and anthropomorphic estimation, there are two possible explanations for this scenario. In the first, the seagull ate the mushroom, very messily for some reason, and died of muscimol poisoning right there on the spot. In the second, the seagull was already suffering from some painful and terminal condition, and used the Amanita to construct a soft, spongy death bed.

Whatever the circumstances, it was a plain case of matter reacting to matter, as everywhere, but without humans around to heap meanings onto it. Maybe in Christmas Valley I could escape such heaps.

William Foster lives in Portland, Ore.

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