Start with an overview of the surronding area. Far to the north, an airport. To the south some distance away, the decaying center of an urban city in decline, a once thriving downtown filled with small, now replaced with employment centers, nightclubs and graffiti.

Closer to the north, suburban sprawl - small streets with cookie cutter homes, mono-culture lawns, weeded and mowed, SUV filled driveways, 2.5 kids and a dog and a cat.

To the east, a minor league baseball field.

Closer to the south, huge tanks of oil and natural gas.

Almost immediately to the west, the most polluted fresh water body in the United States. Once the heart of a great Indian nation, the surface water is contaminated with mercury, the sediments contain PCBs, VOCs, poly aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides, creosotes, lead, cobalt, and mercury. It's actually quite pretty, although it does smell at times. It's regularly visited by bald eagles and other birds, and has an assortment of fish, and wild plants growing in and around it.

Surrounding the ultimate object of our attention, swarms of motor vehicles. The intersection of two major highways is right near by, and the cars are everywhere. Buses, trucks, SUVs, sedans, sports cars, convertibles, compact cars, motorcycles - red orange yellow green blue indigo violet - beeping, humming, belching, squealing, stopping, going. It would be dangerous to get here by foot, possibly illegal, maybe even impossible.

At the obvious center is the mall. At least 150 feet tall at its middle, it is the largest object for more than a mile. It is by my eyeball's estimate, about a third of a mile long itself (don't quote me on these sizes). It is pristine white, except in the center where it rises an extra four levels into a cathedral like peak, covered in green glass and topped with a huge antenna.

It has two main levels running the north to south length, each perhaps 30 feet high, the upper level with a large open area down the middle so that the lower shops are visible when walking up above, and the upper shops are visible when walking down below. At the mall's center there is a lower level with some shops and an underground parking lot, and a large open area with glass elevators that lead up to the cinema and offices at the top.

Off the center on the second level, to the west, is the food court, featuring fast food from around the globe. They serve salty, oil dipped meat and starchy vegetables Italian, Thai, Chinese, Cajun or just good old fashioned American Mickey D's and Wendys style.

At the far western end of the food court looking out stained glass windows onto the polluted lake is the carousel - the focal piece of this particular mall. Flanked by a steak house and a bar on either side, it is gold and white and beautiful. At the top, on the wood siding facing the outside are hunting scenes - a young boy shooting a goose, and a lion eating its prey. Stepping inside the carousel and looking up, the wooden cross beams are painted as beautiful reclining women in Grecian dresses, each with one exposed naked breast pointing upwards. Down from the cross beams extend gleaming steel poles which pierce the centers of dozens of wooden steeds, each steed a multicolored work of art, frozen in the act of leaping or striding.

According to Wikipedia "the word carousel originates from the Italian garosello and Spanish carosella ("little war"), used by crusaders to describe a combat preparation exercise and game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen in the 1100s. In a sense this early device could be considered a cavalry training mechanism; it prepared and strengthened the riders for actual combat as they wielded their swords at the mock enemies. European Crusaders discovered this contraption and brought the idea back to own their lands, primarily the ruling lords and kings. There the carousel was kept secret within the castle walls, to be used for training by horsemen" It was a training device for the ring tilt, "consisting of wooden horses suspended from arms branching from a center pole. Riders aimed to spear rings situated around the circumference as the carousel was moved by a man, horse, or mule."

So who built this modern mall? This cathedral shaped monument to consumption with its bizarre carousel at the center, surrounded by symbols of capitalism, next to the most polluted fresh water body in the country? Look at the back of a dollar bill, at the symbol on the left: Pyramid Corporation.

I had a friend who worked in a local hospital while it was being constructed. He told me about the water from the lake kept leaking in to the bottom, and how they would sometimes get people at the hospital who were injured on the construction site.

In 1991, about a year after it opened, when my daughter was two and a half, I went Christmas shopping there with her. I remember walking through the high halls in a state that was almost trance like. The mechanical big band music from the carousel filled the mall over the sounds of talking and shuffling feet on faux marble floors, and, while I walked watching the people shopping and eating, there were times when everything seemed to slow down and enter a suspended state.

I remember paying two shiny quarters to put my daughter on one of the wooden horses and ride the carousel; seeing the snow flakes and the lake whirl by outside the glass windows, the people eating in the food court, and my daughter's wonderful, beautiful smiling face.

In the movie AI by Steven Speilberg, there is this point at the end where the robot boy is recovered by aliens from his frozen tomb, where the aliens fulfill his one greatest wish, and that wish is to be with his mother and to share the love with her that little children have for their parents, and they stay that way forever. For me, that moment on the carousel in 1991 is like that. The memory of my daughter's smile and her happiness in that strange, mystical yet real place are permanently and forever on my heart. It was a strange slice of perfection where everything seemed to resonate and connect and echo in a timeless fashion. I don't know how else to describe it.


(7/31/07 Additional note. I really can't help but think that this symbolism must be more than coincidental. The architects or somebody must have known what they were doing. Why put a carousel at the center with such controversial figures like the lion tearing apart its meal and the women with their breasts exposed? What leads me to believe this even more is the expansion they have planned. They are calling it DestinyUSA)