What awaited us in the gusting, frigid wind was a blackened hole surrounded by slushy snow, partially filled with architectural wreckage. They burned it down! The air still had a smell of charred plastic, burnt wood and insulation.
There was something heartbreakingly sad about looking into a pit that was the Gobbler's swimming pool, once filled with laughing children in inflatable beach rings and blase hipsters sipping mai-tais, now strewn with relics like theft-proof hotel coat hangers and half a pink toilet.
Pompeii could have been no more tragic. I pictured the building screaming as it burned like some inanimate Joan of Arc, proclaiming its sanctity unto ashen death.
Before we drove away into the sunset on Wisconsin I-94, I made sure to take souvenirs. A brick with two cracked blue pool tiles. A rusted coat hanger with a ring instead a hook...one that no one would ever try to steal again. And, most poignantly, a chunk of semi-precious pink rose quartz the size of my fist - somewhere in that morass was a piece of stone that possessed the power to draw love, peace, and harmony.
Surely, the gods were smiling, to allow me to keep such a gift, since that half a toilet I had my eye on was just too hard to pull out of the rubble.
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