It started with the one in the Museum of Science in Boston,
the one called Archimedean Excogitation.
We could have stayed there for hours. Langston studied the balls,
rolling down tracks, dancing over xylophone keys, falling into the fork of a
mill to be pulled up, up, up. Langston
has always been fascinated with chain reactions. I remember his love of the
water cycle model at the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire in Dover. There,
you turn a crank and this apparatus allows balls that represent drops of water
to be lifted up, rolling down a Rhoads-ian track to collect in several places.
A push of a button and the “precipitation” is released, balls ricocheting down plexiglass
panels to accumulate at the bottom of a ramp.
Every science museum has some display of the physics of Rube
Goldberg-type contraptions and chain reactions, and it is to these places we
are drawn, always.
When I asked Langston about his favorite part of our Boston
adventure, which included a hotel stay, a trip to Legoland and the New England Aquarium, and more, he describes the George Rhoads sculpture as one of the
greatest highlights. Looking up Rhoads
online, I learned that he has made some two dozen kinetic sculptures, flung
across the globe from Japan to Spain to Oklahoma. And two are in Massachusetts,
so of course, I thought the perfect rainy day plan would be to visit the second
one.
We planned our trip, but one thing or another always got in
the way. Then, one perfectly overcast day this spring break, we hopped in the
car and drove to Logan Airport to see George Rhoads’s Exercise in Fugality.
None of the airport maps indicated where the art piece was to be found, so we
looked it up online and learned that it was down on the arrival level of
Terminal E.
If I were the administrator responsible for placing and maintaining
Rhoads’s creation, it would have been placed in the middle of departures,
something to walk around, to marvel at, to get lost in as we do with a good book,
endangering our punctuality, so precious in transit.
Instead, it is tucked away against a wall, behind a luggage
carousel, no curious arriving travelers willing to expend a last ounce of
energy circling the glass which encases its moving parts as my son did that
day, noting the infinity of travel it houses.
And it was broken.
There was a little plaque on the side of the glass with a
number to call in case of malfunction. I dialed it immediately, to hear a bored
and indifferent male voice tell me he would “send one of my guys down when I
can.” During the half hour or so that we lingered, he didn’t.
The
disappointment did not dampen my son’s fascination with the sculpture, however.
For minutes, he walked around the large glass cube, following an imaginary ball
on the paths it could take through wire tracks, down ramps, up pulley-drawn
hooks. Rain pelted the windows and I watched him through glass, watched his
intellect dissect the structure and its possibilities.
I thought of my students, and their similar processes in
play, how they build things that break and fail, and then try again. The other
day a kindergarten girl made a spinning propeller, with one long rectangular
block placed atop of a pile of shorter, differently-sized one. “Can you video
this?” she asked me, getting ready to launch the propeller’s precarious spin. I
wished now that I had.
I don’t know what chain reactions my son’s mind will invent.
I do know however, that I would make a pilgrimage with him to visit every one
of George Rhoads’s sculpture, if he wished it, if time and resources allowed
it. His fascination is fuel for invention, for creativity, and in the movement
of the objects and events of his life, it will allow him to connect with
people, which is the greatest challenge of all.
Langston asked to go back to the airport “tomorrow,” and
sadly, I told him it was unlikely that the sculpture would be repaired by then.
We will write a letter. But in the meantime, we have sculptures of our own to
invent.
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