Mosaics

Reading about an artist who makes mosaics led me to seeing the scenery here differently.  The trees are starting to look like mosaics.  In some cases, the artist has, so far, added only a few brightly colored pieces to the existing greens of the leaves.  In others, the artist has indulged a fantasy, using liberal amounts of maroon—a color not generally noted as autumnal.  And in other cases, the tree mosaics have gone practically monochromatic in yellow or crimson. 

     At Gallup Park along the river, yesterday, I saw that the artist had used all scarlet on the tallest tree in the area.  The effect was exuberant, joyous.  The artist had also sprinkled the river liberally with white pieces shaped like swans in repose, resting before the big migration south. 

     Year-round, the park is full of public art, one piece of which always startles me:  a large, lifelike sculpture of a Canada goose.  Time after time, I come daydreaming out of the trees, catch sight of it walking away from me, and go, “Whoa!  That is one big goose!”  It’s somewhere near five feet tall.  The park has additional art right now, too, billboard-sized pieces on the theme of diversity, prize winners from a contest for high school students near and far.

     This morning’s walk expanded on the mosaic theme, applying it to the bark of trees.  Locust and hickory trees were obvious contenders for mosaic treatment.  Their bark is particularly three dimensional, with extra bits that extend outward from the trunk.  Of those two, hickory would be trickier, as shagbarks would need curved pieces.  If the artist can do swans, though, hickory bark should be a snap.

     My husband and I went to the Yankee Air Museum last night, for a presentation on the history of Willow Run Airport.  I had hoped, given that the talk was a “pictorial history,” that I would leave the museum knowing more about the planes that have flown out of Willow Run than I did going in.  Alas, I was not the target audience.  The target audience seemed to be pilots, both present and former, and aircraft mechanics.  The people who came to see and hear the talk didn’t need Airplane Identification 101.  They’d learned that material in their youth—a long time ago, for most of them.

     The names of the planes that have flown out of Willow Run went by in a blur:  DC-2s, DC-3s, DC-6s, DC-8s, Lockheed’s Electras, various Boeings, some Convairs, and a bunch of others.  The passenger airlines that flew out of Willow Run after WWII also went by in a blur, but included at least Allegheny, American, Capital, Delta, Eastern, Mohawk, North Central, Northwest Orient, Transworld, and United.  The passenger airlines moved to Detroit Metropolitan Airport when it was built, and now Willow Run serves primarily as a base for cargo airlines.

     The Big Three automakers did their best over the years to keep planes flying out of Willow Run.  According to our speaker, Tom Livesey, the worst thing for automakers was to have to shut down a production line.  When an automaker faced this eventuality due to lack of parts, planes would be sent from Willow Run to get them.  My favorite story of this ilk had to do with tie rods.  Necessary tie rods would be collected from their source, flown back to Willow Run, and delivered to a nearby company that specialized in painting them.  Once painted, the tie rods would be flown to whatever plant required them.  A woman in the audience said helicopters used to land on the lawn of the automaker where she worked, to bring parts to keep the line going.

     Cargo airlines don’t just move auto parts, though.  Our speaker said the rule is, “If it fits through the door, we fly it.”  One day, he said, he flew a tiger to a zoo in New York.  He also said he’d been asked to fly a bunch of rats to a lab that wanted them, but that he’d ended up refusing—they were too smelly.

      While the target audience for the talk paid close attention as Tom talked, the talk went by me as bits and pieces of a mosaic.  Lacking the perspective of the aircraft types around us, I couldn’t make out much of the big picture. 

     Sometimes, looking back at our lives, we see only flashes of color and long for a glimpse of the whole mosaic.  For now, we have faith in the artist’s hand.  We perceive it in those flashes of color.  And we look forward to seeing the whole mosaic in the fullness of time.

7 October 2022