The Mystery of the Harvey Wallbangers Toaster

For nearly two years, one of the strangest little mysteries in downtown Rockford kept repeating itself in a tiny garden outside Harvey Wallbangers. I would be walking past and notice that somebody had found a discarded household appliance, carried it to the garden, and plugged it in. Not merely dumped it there or arranged it as some sort of joke. They plugged the thing in, and it would be running.

Over those two years I saw fans, heaters, dehumidifiers, radios and even a mini refrigerator. Every couple of weeks, it seemed, another orphaned appliance would appear and be given one final, inexplicable tour of duty in this little patch of downtown Rockford. The strangest part was that I never once saw the person doing it. I walked through this area constantly, often enough that you would think eventually I would catch the mysterious appliance operator in the act, but I never did. I would simply arrive one day and discover that the garden had acquired another machine. It would remain there humming, blowing, heating, cooling or playing until somebody unplugged it or the thing finally shorted out. Then it would disappear, and eventually something else would take its place.

One day it was a toaster. My friend and Hike You! collaborator, photographer Ryan Davis, took the photograph reproduced here. The toaster sits in the foreground, filthy and weather-beaten, with downtown Rockford rising behind it. There is one important detail that isn't readily apparent in the photograph: the toaster was on. Its little indicator light was glowing. There was something simultaneously ridiculous and strangely moving about it—a toaster sitting outside in a garden, nowhere near a kitchen, without bread or breakfast or any conceivable reason to exist there, nevertheless continuing to perform the job it had been manufactured to perform. Someone had plugged it in, so it toasted.

Ryan and I eventually paired the photograph with the haiku, “power outage— / the stars resume / their old jobs.” It became one of the 24 pieces in our exhibition Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford. In some ways, this photograph gets very close to what the entire project is about. For more than six years, Ryan and I have walked Rockford and paid attention to things that would be incredibly easy not to notice. We weren't particularly interested in documenting the city's official landmarks. Plenty of people can photograph a building and tell you when it was constructed. We became interested in what happens when you walk through the same place long enough that the ordinary begins to become mysterious.

That might mean a bicycle dredged out of the Rock River, an abandoned office chair on Broadway, something left in an alley, weeds reclaiming an object, or some accidental arrangement nobody intended anyone to regard as meaningful. They are little pieces of evidence that somebody was here five minutes ago or twenty years ago, moments in which the city seems briefly to rearrange itself into a poem. And sometimes, apparently, the poem is an electric toaster sitting in a garden.

The toaster also illustrates something I've come to believe after years of walking these same streets: familiarity and attention aren't opposites. You don't necessarily exhaust a place by returning to it. Sometimes you begin seeing more of it. That's also an important part of the Prairie Zen idea that has gradually developed around much of my recent haiku. You don't have to travel to some officially designated beautiful wilderness to encounter mystery. The strange, funny, melancholy or beautiful thing worth noticing might be sitting beside a sidewalk you've walked a hundred times. The trick is noticing it before it disappears.

Ryan Davis and I have selected 24 of these encounters for Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, which will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026. The exhibition combines Ryan's photographs with my haiku and short texts, following six years of walking through Rockford and watching the familiar city gradually become new, strange and occasionally magical. The exhibition also offers a preview of our forthcoming Hike You! book.

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, I have a particular affection for the toaster because I still don't know the answer to the most obvious question. For almost two years, somebody maintained this peculiar little ritual in downtown Rockford, bringing abandoned appliances to this garden and plugging them in, and despite all the miles we walked, I never caught them doing it. I don't know who they were, what they thought they were doing, or whether there was any explanation beyond their own amusement.

Maybe that's better. Rockford has explained enough of itself already. It can keep the toaster.