Although the Point is notoriously hilly, and leads up into even higher country, the highest spot in Port Outreach is actually located in the Elms. The next time you take the #8 ‘bus along First Avenue, note where it crosses the street called (as of this writing) Onoris Way. On one side you’ll see the broad, curved pavilion that houses the Fiberart Cooperative and the Machine Tool Lending Collection; on the other side is a gently sloping tree-lined park with a pond in the form of twin ovals, like a fanciful stylized heart. The top of this slope, represents, at 873 pyks, the highest spot within city limits. If you go there, you’ll see an old, crumbling stonework wall.
Though not in good condition by any means, the wall, about one and half pyks high by two and a half decipyks wide, is still mostly in place. It is all the remains of the original location of the Elms Gate. It was here, in the time between the ninth and tenth cycles, that a barbarian invasion was beaten off in a battle that lasted three days, and in the end was fought with stones and bare hands. About fourteen pyks from the east end of the wall, you can still see the cracked, indented stone from a missed blow by Lilia Twistedleather who fought with a hammer in each hand when the Flux arrived on the last day to help defend the city. The bloodstains where she fell are long gone, but standing there, beneath the hiss of the whispertree, it is easy to imagine the scene.
This is the place where the Conkleshell Collective wants to build an abstract sculpture representing, so they say, the spread of culture within the Elms and so out to the rest of the city. I look forward to seeing this work, as the Conkleshell group has done fine sculpture in the past. I look forward to seeing it, I say, but I think there must be a better place for it. I don’t think this work, however beautiful and even profound it may be, can ever take the place of being able to put one’s hands on the place where so many died to protect our city.
Do you?
