The Uncanny Preserve

The fifteen acres of artificial nature is covered by a geodesic dome. There’s corporate sponsorship, but the branding is subtle and integrated into the bark and rock formations. A sex doll company in Japan won the contract to manufacture the rubber beavers. 

Ranger apps conduct virtual hikes. Drones take footage of stuffed porcupines mating and remote controlled eagles making nest. A Norwegian director once streamed a month of Grizzly bears hibernating for slow TV. The bears were animatronic and their cave had been fabricated on a 3D printer. 

The grounds are closed from 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. That’s when the sprinklers wash down the plasticine scat and robotic caretakers repaint the foliage. 

Our town won the Uncanny Preserve in a lottery. The pieces had been stored at the Smithsonian for decades. Originally, the National Park Service planned to install the acreage in an ark and shoot it into space. But before the project got off the ground, NASA went bankrupt.

The drawing was on Arbor Day. Each county seat sent a Campfire Girl to Washington. They pitched tents on the Mall. Told ghost stories. Made s’mores. Played Marco Polo in the Reflecting Pool. The drawing was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Secretary of the Interior spun a Bingo cage. Our delegate won Lot B34, the contents of a storage cage in the basement of The Air and Space Museum.

The convoy arrived without fanfare. There were plastic oak trees strapped to flat bed trucks; mechanical butterflies fluttering inside unmarked, black Suburbans; water tankers filled with cloned salmon. Elon Musk converted a livestock semi-trailer into a holographic deer containment vehicle. Some of the more sophisticated environmental components were sent via FedEx.

Jack and I watched the unearthly wilderness flicker by on the highway. We were parked at that rest area with the vandalized historical marker: Sacagawea with a spray-painted cock, shooting arrowhead jism at Lewis and Clark. Our beater was piled high with trash bags stuffed with clothes. There was a car seat I just couldn’t bear to get rid of and a paisley tie stuffed into the cup holder just in case Jack had a job interview. Every night I asked God to tell me what I did wrong, but there was no answer.

It was easy to feel hopeless back then. Democracy was dying — and Jack and I were breaking up for the thousandth time. We rehashed the same tired issues. How Jack wanted more sex. How much I wished for quiet. But Jack can’t shut off his brain. And I can’t cuddle. Not since my baby died. And Jack’s mind’s been fighting off a toxic cacophony ever since he served overseas.

The construction of the Uncanny Preserve temporarily kept my mind off the despair I was feeling. Technicians in hazmat suits assembled the ecosystem in an abandoned strip mall parking lot. There was a Command Center set up inside a FEMA doublewide. There were pelts of native species tacked to the walls as exemplars. Blueprints of biomes were spread out on illuminated drafting tables. 

A demolition crew tore down the empty K-Mart and terraformed a hillside out of the rubble. Environmental engineers built aquatic habitat with chicken wire and cement. They borrowed a field marking machine from the little league field and used it to chalk in a nature trail system. Diorama artists tried to give the Uncanny Preserve an untouched, virgin look, but there were repetitions in the pond rushes and seams in the oak trees. Even the morning dew felt designed. 

When the park finally opened, Jack avoided it. The Uncanny Preserve reminded him of one of those old cowboy movies filmed on a sound stage, with the bogus cactus and painted buttes on the back wall. He said the styrofoam clouds especially creeped him out. I wasn’t triggered by the counterfeit landscape. To me, the world already seems like a cheap reproduction of a masterpiece.

I first discovered evidence of the forgery on a road trip Jack and I took. This was back when you could still travel without papers. We were headed to the West coast, to scatter my baby’s ashes in the last Redwood grove. As we drove across Nebraska, the passing scenery reminded me of a cheaply made 1970s cartoon — like Scooby-Doo when the meddling kids are being chased by a bogus monster. Shaggy runs past the same chair, table and door combination over and over again. 

Originally, I thought this repeating pattern in the here and now was evidence of semi-intelligent design — of a slapdash reality cobbled together by a lesser deity who was either too lazy or lacking the skill set required to create uniqueness in every detail. What I’ve come to understand is that this dumbing down of the diversity of my life experience into a handful of bland, generic categories is a symptom of my own isolation. The numbness I carry is a perceptual filter that reduces the marvelousness into a lifelessness redundancy.

Each life lived is an experiment in healing. So what has been the hypothesis of my suffering? And were the results worth the pain? I’ve always kept my mouth shut about my mental condition, as some of the nearby villages burn freaks of nature. But I am willing to take the risk of revealing my darkest secrets to you in the spirit of collaboration. You came to visit me in this caretaker’s shack in order to record my oral history for a school science fair. I’m willing to participate in your project — but are you willing to tend the Uncanny Preserve when I’m too rusty to rewind the honey bees? The maintenance logs are in my tool box along with the warranties for the toads. 

If you agree to the terms of this compact, you may reduce this story to a trifold display board in your middle school gymnasium. My life experience will receive a participation prize. Overhead, the fluorescent lights shall hum — the ones with the cages around them, designed so errant basketball shots don’t shatter the bulbs.