The Tyee

Shortly before Arthur Erickson's Graham House was claw-hammered to death last month, a few wily activists and reporters -- including this one -- snuck onto the property to pay their last respects. As rain trickled in through the shredded roof, the site approached a wry exaggeration of the Ericksonian ideal: the boundaries between inside and out were dissolving -- literally. The sodden carpet felt like moss-cover beneath one's feet, and the shards of drywall looked like powdered foliage. The interior was pretty much atomized, except for the carcass of a wall oven that you could identify as such only by its strangely unsullied Jenn-Air logo, shining out like the smile of a Cheshire cat after the rest of its body had vanished. The sole other identifiable human artifact was a white plastic toilet brush strewn casually in the main corridor. Perfect. Something to whisk away the skid marks of the matter that we long ago digested and is now being disgorged as waste.