Wild Maybes

We interrupt our regular “Wise Women” programming to bring this special report of the “Wild Maybes of the Long Green Between.”  The polymath maker, Chris Miller, has struck again, siting “visitors from an ancient Earth, as unknowable as the far future,” on the grassy knoll of Levine Park, in Waterville, Maine.  

The Wild Maybes are “honorary crossing guards where the deep past and far future meet.”  The public welcomed to roam “…in the richness and vastness of time beyond reckoning.”  The four Maybes face the cardinal directions of North, East, South and West proudly beside the mighty Kennebec River as it flows ever to the Gulf of Maine.  

Modeled upon the earliest mammals, just post the dinosaur age, Chris conceived this public art installation as “a puzzle…based on shaky assumptions about dusty old bones.” They were made using a welded steel armature, foam, and structural concrete.  I am honored to have been mere fabricator: building forms, cutting and stacking foam, mixing mud, troweling concrete, helping to load and then install: 15,000 pounds hauled 96 miles north.

There are four Maybes:

• Uni, the Uintatherium, a beast of the herbivorous Dinocerata mammal that lived in the now United States during the Eocene period;
• Eo, the Eocondon, of the triisodontid mesonychian genus that existed in the early Paleocene of Turtle Island (North America);
• Cory, a Coryphodon, named from the Greek “peaked tooth” an extinct genus of pantodont mammals, also local, speaking in terms of continents;
• Barry, a towering Barylambda, also of the pantodonts, from the middle to Late Paleocene era.  

Tick-tock clock time is of man’s making, while Natura moves in other orbits.  Chris wrote, “When 2.8 billion seconds ago (in 1934), historian Lewis Mumford pronounced that ‘…the clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,’ he went on to point out that there are still many other ways to mark time, and surely better ways to experience it. This long, narrow strip of grass, for instance, is a between place. It is the perfect kind of place to escape from the kind of time that is measured in seconds and minutes. Here in this long green between, time flows in seasons and eons, in eras and generations.”

And so Waterville is transformed, and kudos to them for stepping up, underwriting the permanent installation. What a marvelous life unfolds along the rocky coast, Northern terminus of the lower 48.  

For more information about the Wild Maybes, click here: https://npdworkshop.com/wild-maybes