Where else would ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ be but outside Vegas, in the desert where nothing else will grow? It is an oasis, of sorts, the sort of place a man might crawl toward if he had been lost, wandering for weeks on end, desperate enough to topple cacti for their scant liquid, suffering the pinprick wounds of its needles. It is lush green and perfectly manicured: a bonsai of short grass and carefully placed flowers.
The perfection conceals a raging war between man and plant and insect and desert.
The plants are not allowed to breed with one another, for starters. Perfect specimens are bred elsewhere and transplanted only when ready. In order to inhibit breeding, local insect populations are killed and repelled by a cocktail of aerosol poisons so potent that visitors must wear a mask if they wish to trod the stone pass that bisects the greenery- so potent, that a mesh is drawn over ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ to prevent birds passing overhead from dying and splattering themselves on this pristine and captive nature (that is, it doesn’t prevent the birds from dying- it only catches their bodies before they land).
The land is dry and unforgiving, salted in the formation of the Earth. For this, a massive industrial plant works day and night nearby, pulling water from the next state over, purifying and then re-poisoning it with a specialty mix of weedkiller.
‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ has no attached house, no living space whatsoever, though it is home to a motley collection of lawn ornaments, each fashioned by the sort of artist who is inexplicably rich and successful and completely unknown except to those who devote their lives not to art, but to the artists themselves. The result is a series of pink ceramic triangles that its creator describes as ‘a flamingo, deconstructed.’ Horrible gnomes peer out from sculpted bushes, each an homage to the artists highly abusive family. In December ‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ sports a nativity scene compromised of living children in expensive costumes, these children being trained at great expense to remain still for extended periods of time and to ignore the gawking tourists, each of whom paid more for entry than these children will see for their work.
‘The Nation’s Perfect Yard’ is more a mirage than an oasis. A man crawling toward the grass would be shot before he was allowed to drink the chemical water that sustains it.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
