The wind was blowing at the wheat and made the ground a golden liquid. Here, visitors often come up with the same descriptions for how this place makes them feel: the land and sky go on forever, the horizon is flat in all directions, and it feels like being in a pleasant dream. Fall had come, and harvesting time was near. It's not something that you really pinpoint a certain time to, it's more like you just feel it. You can just feel when the ground is ready to pop out its products. You can feel it because you can feel your own death creeping up on you, and the only thing to keep him away is to work.
I had my gloves on and was strolling around the property when that sense of death - not the sense that he would take me, but the sense that he was there - crept up behind and breathed in my ear. It was cold and sharp, but only a fleeting tease. The sun was brightening to everything that it revealed, but this one sense - this one that I just couldn't tack down - remained mysterious and chilling, no matter the sun's protection. It was that crisp sense of mortality that let me know it was Fall.
In the sky, helicopters were circling and I took a break to watch their maneuvers. I took my gloves off and sat in the wheat, the sun shining bright but the wind cold enough to need a coat for. The helicopters were like insects, flying insects that had brains of their own. It was nothing at all to think about them, because they were perfect; they were perfect in the same way that any public technology is perfect, how you don't even have to think about the mechanics and complicated wiring and craft that goes into making it. All you have to do is use it, because that's what it is there for. How often is it really wondered at, or questioned, or graciously thanked for the ease with which it has granted us to live our lives in a modern world that continues to neglect looking back?
I was thinking these things as the helicopters stirred up the sky like porridge. Two were more acrobatic than the third, which was fat like a guppy. Then I realized what they were up to: it was a fueling exercise. The fat helicopter was a fuel helicopter, and the other two were feeding off of it like a metallic breast. A third small jet came in from the west, and still another. Seven small helicopters and one large helicopter did a dance in the sky that had no name. What were they doing? Each copter sucked from the fat one, and then continued spiraling through the air. I squinted at the sight. It wasn't a drill. Something was happening above me, and as it played out, that sense of Autumn kept breathing gently through me.
Hundreds of small helicopters swarmed in a cluster that spanned the sky, and regulating the chaos of the swarm were the fat ones, circling in regular patterns and injecting the small copters with what I had thought before was fuel. Out of one of the large helicopters emerged a portion of machinery that was then ejected, and sent plummeting to the ground. Five copters swooped down and hovered in the trajectory of the metallic mass, and were shooting what looked like blasts of air at the object. The blasts became steady, and the object was suspended in open air! The other large vehicles commenced doing the same, and before long, the sky was a three dimensional game board, each large copter hovering above five small ones which were holding up large fragments of what looked like pieces of an entirely new craft. This had to be on the radio or something. There had to be some explanation for this. I popped on my portable radio and scanned the channels.
"... Our lord is a good lord... he (vssshhhhkkkttt vsshhkt) Today, US military investigated the deaths of at least seven (vvvvvsshhhhhkkt vvshhkt vshkt) ... and I aint got no home in this world anymore... (vvshhhkt vshkt vsh) ... Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's the cowboy in ya that will get ya through this life.... (vsh vsh vssshh vshkt vvsshk)."
Nothing.
As if boosted by a sudden thrust of the divine, the large helicopters, at what seemed like light speed, bolted almost instantaneously to adjacent pieces of machinery and commenced a construction process that made my heart beat fast. I was frightened by the sight, all so clearly presented to me right above me from the wheat field. Sparks showered, and tubing, wiring and piping wormed in all directions as if needling together a metallic appendage. The large choppers seemed to not even be piloted by humans but by a computer program. Each chopper knew its mission, and on occasion, just missed collisions with the others by fragments of a meter or so. Open holes were slammed shut and built onto with connectors, the sound was like a huge city dump crushing cars, only minus the beeping and sped up about twenty times.
The small jets remained in place and caught whatever debris would have otherwise hit the ground. Soon I was able to piece together the behemoth object. It was a spectacular creation spawned by a mankind whose technology said, "Fuck simplicity." The object was suspended miles above the wheat, and all choppers dispersed from the middle of the project to its periphery, as if they had goggle eyes and were admiring their own work. The object was a building, hovering as if by a magnet that was using the Earth as its impetus. "Coming soon," said a neon message on its side. Above the sign was another, visible and spreading its title like seed all over the world, all over my world and all over the wheat and the harvest and the season and life itself. I was witnessing a rape in progress, the choppers hovering like pederasts and the massive building like a horny fat guy and the open sky and wheat like a virgin, backgrounded by the Fall weather that continued blowing steady and ghostlike.
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