From Here To Alaska: 11. Take Me To Your Monument

LOOK AROUND ALL THE great cities of the world, and almost without exception, they will have one thing in common: Water. And lots of it.

Because of the principles of shipping costs, and the obvious need for settlements to have access to water, any group of people looking to establish a permanent civilization will take up shop around water, preferably the fresh, moving variety, what we call rivers.

New York, of course, is fed by the Hudson and East River. (Which isn't so much a river as a tidal strait, but I digress.)

Paris sits on the Seine. London on the Thames. Baghdad sleeps in a nook of the River Tigris.

Delhi feasts on the Yamuna. Cairo has the Nile.

And then there's the great city of St. Louis, sitting right on the Mississippi.

ST LOUIS WAS FOUNDED in 1763 by colonial French fur traders and sold to the United States by Napolean Bonaparte in what we call the Louisiana Purchase.

The young city figured prominently in America's expansion west, an era now commemorated with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, where the world-famous Gateway Arch now sits.

Jefferson, of course, was the president that bought the territory from Napolean.

The arch was designed by Finnish-American architest Eero Saarinen (who appears regularly in crossword puzzles as either "______ Saarinen," "Architect Saarinen," or "TWA Terminal architect"), and was originally intended to be a perfect parabola.

Unfortunately, the parabola proved too difficult an engineering challenge to be completed, and the monument was modified to a catenary--the shape a chain makes when it hangs according to its own weight.

The Arch's shape can be expressed in a simple mathematical formula, something about the ratio between sines, cosines, tangents, and other ratios of triangles I was too depressed in high school to properly learn.

I FIND MYSELF irresistibly attracted to the Arch. I love its shape. The way sunlight glistens off its base. The way it doesn't look like a building or even a monument--which is bizarre, since it is a monument.

What the Arch feels like to me is math. It's as if we, as a civilization, constructed the Number 1. Not an actual giant Number 1, but the pure, abstraction of the Number 1, and turned it into steel and glass and tiny little elevator carts than can take you up to centrally-placed observation desks.

Christians have the cross. Jews the star of David. Muslims the Crescent.

And we that worship in the halls of Science, that believe in Constants and Forces and Parsimony and Principles, we have this catenary.

If aliens beamed down to a WalMart parking lot, woke me up, and asked me to take me to our leader, I would skip the White House, clean out the back seat of pretzel debris and motor oil stained napkins, and drive them to the Arch.

"There," I would argue, "our leader is science and reasoning and logic and philosophy and law."

"Really?" the aliens would respond, genuinely impressed. "Is that all true?"

"Yes," I would say. "Just look at the arch. We worship math."

They'd nod to each other, and conclude that an intelligent species does inhabit this planet, and I'd hope they'd skip over the civil wars in Eastern Europe, the famines in Africa, the tyranny in North Korea, and the Republicans in America violently opposed to public health care, and deem us worthy of life.

THE GREAT SHAH RUKH, he of Washington University School of Medicine, in the great city of St. Louis, and his young flame, Chevre, took me down to the Arch at night. A bank of high-powered search lights illuminated the bottom edges of the Arch.

The lights are so potent that they cast a shadow of the Arch on low-flying clouds.

We ran up the steps that double as an amphitheater in the summer months when Jimmy Eat World is in town, and catapulted full speed toward the spotlights.

They are strong and blinding. If you look right into their bulbs, your eyes will hurt and soon will your head. Better to stand over them and let the light hit the back of your head, like you do in the shower, when you need to take a second and relax.

You'll be immersed in light and watch the rays stream out to the sky, bouncing off the bottom-facing hull of the Arch, and your head will be a gray shadow on its skin.

Take pictures with your friends while you're at it. All the stupid things you'll do when presented with a giant spotlight beneath a world-famous monument.

All the things you would have done in Paris if they put the lights on the ground and not on the Eiffel Tower itself.

You will run around the legs of the Arch and play in its grasses and laugh about its ways, and then a police office will roll up in his patrol car and announce through his megaphone in a timbre usually reserved for Shakespearean soliloquies: "The park is closed."

"THE PARK CLOSES at 11pm. The park is closed."

So, like any educated, young citizens, we turned and left.

"Where are you going?" asked the voice.

We screamed out that we were leaving the park. We were returning to our cars and heading home. We walked in the opposite direction of the patrol car. The direction of home.

"Come here and tell me where you're going!"

Excuse us?

The voice demanded, "I said come here and tell me where you're going!"

We obeyed. We turned and walked toward the squad car. Our shoulders slumped with the nuisance.

"The park is closed," it barked at us. "The park closes at 11pm."

Yeah, we know, we screamed out. We're leaving.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm."

We turned around. We left the park. It was past 11pm. It was closed.

"The park is closed."

Down the steps, we paused one last time to turn and take another picture of the arch at night. As I framed the catenary, the patrol car rolled in front of us, and barked at a group of teenagers to our right.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm. The park is closed."

IT IS UNFORTUNATE to me that the municipality of St Louis decides to close the Arch at night, when it can be enjoyed with so much delight. Paris never closes the Eiffel Tower's park.

You can sit under it at three in the morning with a bottle of wine and no one will tap you on the shoulder and ask for ID.

What if aliens landed on Earth?

What if we had one chance to prove to them our merit as a modern civilization? What if we had one stroke in the night to take them to our monument of science, if, with their Sonic burgers in one hand, they hopped on the spotlight to make funny shapes and were greeted, in a moment of intergalactic peace, with the gruffy statement: "The park is closed."

Is the last chance of saving mankind then going to be an spaceship parked for the night outside a 24-hour WalMart?

God help us all, St Louis.