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.

 

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford

For more than six years, photographer Ryan Davis and I have been taking walks through Rockford.

That description is completely accurate, but it doesn't really explain Hike You!.

We began with a simple idea. We would start our walks from essentially the same place near the geographical center of Rockford and head in a different direction. Sometimes we had a destination in mind. Often we didn't. Ryan brought a camera. I brought the habit of looking at things as a poet. Then we walked.

Over six years, those walks accumulated into thousands of photographs, hundreds of haiku, a record of a friendship, and a portrait of Rockford that neither of us could have deliberately set out to create. This fall, a selection of that work will be exhibited as Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, a collaborative exhibition by Ryan Davis and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026.

The City at Walking Speed

There is a Rockford you experience from a car, and there is another Rockford you discover on foot.

Mt. Fuji mailbox 7th Street

Walking changes the scale of a city. Places that seem unrelated when you're driving between them turn out to be connected. Streets have transitions you don't notice at thirty-five miles an hour. An alley becomes as interesting as a major road. An abandoned building stops being part of the background and becomes an object with a history. You notice old signs painted on brick, strange objects caught in trees, flowers growing through concrete, forgotten staircases, railroad tracks, utility poles, river debris, vacant lots and the remains of businesses nobody has thought about for decades.

We walked past the Rockford everyone knows: the Faust Hotel, the Midway Theater, the Times Theatre, the Rock River and the old Register Star building. But those landmarks became only part of the project. We became equally interested in the things that weren't landmarks at all.

A discarded office chair in a window on Broadway could become a poem. A bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building could become an image about transition. A fading ghost sign on the side of a building could briefly become the most important thing we saw that day.

The ordinary kept refusing to remain ordinary.

Photography and Haiku

Ryan and I weren't trying to make photographs illustrate poems or poems explain photographs. That distinction became important.

Photography and haiku are both very good at paying attention, but they pay attention differently. A photograph can preserve an instant with enormous specificity. A haiku can take that same instant and move sideways into memory, association, humor, absence or something that can't actually be seen.

Sometimes Ryan would photograph something and a poem would occur to me immediately. Sometimes I wouldn't understand why an image mattered until much later. Sometimes the photograph and poem seemed to be looking at entirely different things even though they came from the same place and moment.

We learned not to force them together.

The best pairings created a third thing between them: something that belonged neither entirely to the photograph nor entirely to the poem.

Six Years Changes a City

When you repeatedly walk through the same city for six years, you also begin documenting time whether you intend to or not.

Buildings disappear. Businesses close. Murals appear. Trees come down. Construction fences go up. Something you photographed because it seemed mildly interesting one afternoon becomes historically interesting three years later because it no longer exists.

This sign for Mera's has since been painted over. 

But the walkers change, too.

That became increasingly important to Hike You!.

The project began during one period of our lives and continued into another. Some of the places we encountered began to feel symbolic of that movement without either of us intending them to. The bicycle that came out of the Rock River is perhaps the clearest example. It was simply an object Ryan encountered and photographed, covered in river mud and standing improbably in front of the old newspaper building. But over time it came to represent something larger to us: an object emerging from one existence into another, battered and dirty but still recognizably itself.

That is part of what these walks became.

They weren't an attempt to escape Rockford. They were an attempt to see what was already here.

The Rockford We Found

There is a tendency to believe that discovery requires travel. We imagine that interesting things are elsewhere and that familiar places have already revealed everything they contain.

Six years of walking around Rockford taught us almost exactly the opposite.

The more familiar the city became, the stranger it became.

We found hidden murals and remnants of old advertisements. We found architecture we'd passed hundreds of times without actually seeing. We found animals, weeds, industrial ruins, religious objects, graffiti, abandoned furniture and things neither of us could satisfactorily explain. We watched seasons repeat themselves over the same streets while nothing ever repeated itself exactly.

There is no exotic destination at the center of Hike You!.

The destination is attention.

The project is about what happens when you return to the same place often enough, slowly enough and openly enough that familiarity begins to break down. Eventually you stop seeing what you expect to see and begin noticing what is actually there.

That was when Rockford became mysterious again.

Hike You! at Fall ArtScene 2026

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be exhibited at RevHaus, 1023 Harlem Road in Machesney Park, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.

Fall ArtScene takes place Friday, October 2, from 5–9 p.m., and Saturday, October 3, from 4–9 p.m. ArtScene is presented by the Rockford Area Arts Council and is free and open to the public.

RevHaus describes itself as a creative automotive space where craftsmanship, design and art come together. For Fall ArtScene, the venue is bringing together artists working in photography, poetry, mixed media, reclaimed materials, woodworking and metalwork. Along with Hike You!, the venue will feature reclaimed metal and wood artwork by Oscar Pagles of Foraged and metalwork by Shayne Pagles of VinGogh, LLC, as well as live metalworking and woodworking demonstrations.

For Ryan and me, the exhibition is also a preview of the forthcoming Hike You! book, which will bring together photographs and haiku from the larger six-year project.

What Hike You! Is Really About

I suppose an artist statement is eventually supposed to explain what the art means.

After six years, I'm not sure I can reduce Hike You! to one meaning, and I'm glad I can't.

It is about Rockford. It is about friendship. It is about walking. It is about photography and haiku. It is about aging and time and places disappearing. It is about discovering that an object pulled out of a river can suddenly seem like a self-portrait. It is about looking at something you've seen a thousand times and, for reasons you can't entirely explain, seeing it for the first time.

Most of all, I think it is about attention.

A city doesn't have to be beautiful in the conventional sense to deserve attention. A moment doesn't have to be important to deserve preservation. A place doesn't have to be famous to contain mystery.

For six years, Ryan Davis and I walked through Rockford and paid attention.

Hike You! is what we brought back.