red menace

Writing this up over two eggs over medium and blueberry pie made from scratch at Mom's Place in Brillion, Wisconsin in the final sprint of a road trip to Neenah, Wisconsin for a business meeting.

I would have been there by now if I hadn't decided to take the long way around, skimming the shore of Lake Michigan which ran with me like an endless deep blue horizon to my right, magnifying the expansive fresh tilled fields with their ever present weathered red barns that flew by on my left.

I went the way of Manitowoc so I could stop to see this little metal marker in the road where in September of 1962 a fragment of Sputnik IV lodged itself without much notice, according to Roadside America. Wisconsin folk being honorable folk they sent the steaming fragment back to the U.S.S.R. by way of the Smithsonian, but not before it had cooled and not before they cast it to create a replica that is now housed with honor at the local museum.

I didn't see the replica because I arrived in Manitowoc after the magical hour of 4PM at which it's ordained all museums will close.

And so instead I dashed into and out of the road whenever the traffic ebbed just enough in order to capture a shot of this sweet little halo in the asphalt which uncannily fell dead center onto the dividing line of the main thoroughfare, HWY 10, rather than splashing unnoticed just a few brief blocks away in Lake Michigan, like Bruegel's Icarus.

I believe this may have been the only fragment of Sputnik to survive re-entry.