The Mountains of Instead

    In front of   the concrete-block VFW lodge on the outskirts of town, across the highway where the line of old tall trees screened the dusty fields going away to the west, there stood or lay part of a Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber, one of the only twenty-three built at the plant that had lain just over the horizon and invisible from there.   The Pax was only a carcass C just the forward section, wingless and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from adulthood.   I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it:   examining the mysteries of its lock boxes and fixtures, taking the pilot = s seat and tapping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas windows.   Now all of it = s gone C plane, plant, fields, trees, and children.   There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be taken C maybe it = s a scientific hypothesis C that the past cannot in fact exi