REMINDER Last summer I looked for the bridge whose enormous piers cast the swirl of water in the river where Hobie Johnson drowned. Found a road that dead-ended between the railroad and the river, a track wandering through the brush to the muddy bank, a rope hanging over the water. But the bridge was gone, piers down, and next day over the river I saw that even the hole in the mountainside that the bridge led to was sealed up. The guy who owned a pizza place near where the whole mighty thing and its traffic of trains had once existed had saved newspaper articles and pictures of it being built and later being made to go away. In this part of the world, every- thing vanishes without a trace, and then the without-a-trace is forgotten. Plug a hole, let the frail paper yellow, words blur, the whole thing gradually crumbles. True pain and scandal once safely in the past, we can establish some kind of tourist zone nearby. Put the graveyard on the hill so the dead get the best view of the whole thing, while mourners are too distracted by grief to notice. Maybe some piece of Hobie broke off, changed form, drifted down the river system--Ohio in its giant crease between states, juncture with the Mississippi, Mississippi down to the sea--experiencing the whole phenomenon of half a continent empty- ing itself of rain, dirt, trash, the question of origins forgotten, that piece of Hobie lost forever in the Gulf.