Burnt Oak: The Barren of Giuseppe Spicoli

Restless and hungry.  Two of several persistent qualities in a Wastelander.  Sometimes burning with harsh brutality. Sometimes tempered with calculating patience.  We struggle and strive to survive in the harsh world, defiantly on or own or with the help of trusted allies.  After pushing our borders to the south to encompass both the Great Fissure and Fort Stygian, a few scavengers hungered for more.  With varying motives and under the watchful eye of the metal man, they dared to raid and claim the desolate outskirts to our north and the south… The Barrens.

Giuseppe and the Big Screen
Giuseppe and the Big Screen - Photo by Cutea Benelli

Giuseppe Spicoli was among their numbers.  The half-mad hermit of games.  The tech-shaman of moving pictures.  With a puff of his pipe clenched in a wry grin he spent a day in the Wastelands…going about his structures and stuffing this or that into an enormous backpack.  With that flair for entertainment we’ve witnessed at the Chaoseum, he gathered folks to the Burnt Oak intersection.  He glanced around the gathered throng, holding a strange levered device in his hand.  Most watched the big screen since one of his films was playing.  Few took little notice or care to the wires spilling from the device.  The strands twisted into the sand around us.

A wink and a chuckle.  A twist of the lever.  Raised eyebrows.  Bored looks.  Another twist.

Burnt Oak Demolition - Photo courtesy of aston Leisen
Burnt Oak Demolition - Photo courtesy of aston Leisen

Chaos.  Fire.  Raining metal and stone.  The screen erupted in flames as it shattered and soared in pieces.  The Motor Lodge imploded with smoke.  The soaring Drive In sign crashed to the ground.  The Cemetery buckled, the desert sand swallowing it whole.  Wastelanders dove for cover from the destruction.  Giuseppe laughed maniacally as he danced among the flames and ruin wrought by his hand.

With no hesitation, he hoisted up his backpack and staked out the northwest Barren.  A few followed and watched from a distance…gazing where few risked travel.  A windswept region of sand and hills where tumbleweeds danced and the haze of heat played tricks on the eyes.  Giuseppe soon gave this place, his new home, a familiar name:  Burnt Oak.

Illusion and reality at the Death Bowl
Illusion and reality at the Death Bowl

The most subtle (and yet prominent) trick of Burnt Oak was a teasing mirage of brilliant blue.  An illusion of delicious water to sate one’s thirst.  Many Wastelanders, crazy from heat, have quickened their pace upon seeing it.  They rush to an illusion that fades and disappears, leaving them with dashed hopes and gasping breath at the banks of a dry lake bed, its deep bottom marked by thick pools of mud.  The Death Bowl. Giuseppe laughs and waves off the parched-throat scavengers that speak of such things, claiming never to have seen it himself.  That notorious wry smile and gleam in his eye suggest otherwise.

On a few occasions, Wastelanders coaxed their battered vehicles over the sand-choked roads skirting the Bowl’s perimeter.  They guided their heaps between ruined shacks on the depression’s banks and tumbled into its depths to play another of Giuseppe’s crazy games of tech-magic…Car Soccer.  Spicoli would arrange two opposing goals on the Death Bowl’s upper banks…separating drivers into teams.  With growling engines, the drivers waited for the hermit to drop a tremendous sphere of unknown origin between them, challenging the assembled contestants to batter and push the ball with their vehicles along the steep banks and into the waiting goals.  Wastelanders laughed and grumbled, coughing on smoke and fumes, eating sand tossed up from spinning wheels, as they chased each other and the ball around the dry lake bowl until the sun set and the moon rose high above…and when they ran out of gas.

Hill of Death, Ridge of Reels - Photos by theblackcloud Oh & Contumacy Singh
Hill of Death, Ridge of Reels - Photos by theblackcloud Oh & Contumacy Singh

By no means were the Death Bowl and its sport the only feature of Burnt Oak.  Giuseppe Spicoli managed to haul the ruins of his old stomping grounds from the Wastelands to this place.  The top of a lonely hill in the southeast marked the new home of the eerie Burnt Oak Memorial Cemetery.  The Motor Lodge was rebuilt as the Motor Shack, stone by stone and brick by brick, on top of an old auto-garage in the northwest corner.  The beloved Burnt Oak Drive In reappeared on a terraced hillside in the northeast, the broken screen reassembled and raised before us, its movies continuing to cast their spell upon any gathering.

Power and Speed: the Motor Shack reconstruction - Photos by Aki Shichiroji
Power and Speed: the Motor Shack reconstruction - Photos by Aki Shichiroji

Meanwhile, Giuseppe busied himself in and about a low level ruin of empty storefronts found in the southwest corner of Burnt Oak: the Oak Promenade.  Visitors saw him setting up shelves and strange tables inside the corner storefront.  Preparing for visitors perhaps?  A few of us would stop and gawk at the grisly but amusing skeleton seated in an old chair on the sidewalk, the wind rattling the bones in its boots.  No one knew who it was.  Probably some doomed soul waiting, camped out with unmet expectations or simply bearing witness in death to the slow crawl of time.

Rubbles: The curious games of Giuseppe and friends
Rubbles: The curious games of Giuseppe and friends

Wastelanders didn’t have long to wait, however, for Spicoli’s next trick.  The mad hermit acquired the help of Benjamin Bigdipper, a crafty mortician of the Wastelands, and several other friends to fulfill his scheme.  Rubbles! A store full of interesting trinkets and fun gadgets.  Shelves stocked with small portable strategy games like Blackout and miniature versions of Fight Night and Taunt The Mutant!  Tables featuring board games and card games like Slotten Totten and Khet.  While some stop by to try out these games before taking them home, others tap on glass terrariums to tease scorpions and snakes captured by Benjamin.

Fascinated by such things, I’ve also walked out of Rubbles with arms full of these strange games.  Perhaps I’ll set them around a campfire or store them in a dark cave for days when the desert winds whip up a major storm.  I’ve witnessed the great sandstorms tumble and roll on the southern horizon from a rocky plateau where I’ve been working and exploring just as Giuseppe did in the north.  I have heard them roar in the night and awake to find great stretches of land stripped clean by the harsh sand.

Approaching storm?
Approaching storm?

Standing before the big screen of the Burnt Oak Drive In, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck tingle.  The wind is shifting here in the northern Barrens.  I do not know if storms descend from this direction.  If so, it’s difficult to anticipate what changes, if any, they would bring upon Burnt Oak.

Surveying the Barren and all it contains, I know I will not be alone to remember, forever grateful for all Giuseppe Spicoli accomplished here and elsewhere.  Wastelanders will proudly speak of it around campfires and the salvager in tall tales and stories…his story and our story…legend and fact…strategy and humor.  All of the above woven together for the entertainment of any willing to listen, watch, or participate.  Truly, that was the spirit and inspiration behind everything Giuseppe created in Burnt Oak.  Regardless of any changes in the Barren, that spirit of entertainment is and will always be present in our most notorious Wastelander, Giuseppe Spicoli.

Giuseppe Spicoli and Burnt Oak - Photo by Cutea Benelli
Giuseppe Spicoli and Burnt Oak - Photo by Cutea Benelli

So let the storm come.

These are the Wastelands.  We’re accustomed to change.  Survival demands it.  The rise and fall of structures.  The unpredictable twisting of the land.  Wandering scavengers arriving to stay or leaving after only a day.  Such is the way of things.

So let the storm come.

Giuseppe Spicoli, the half-crazed showman, may just laugh at the stinging sand and dance with the turning winds.  When the dust settles, we’ll look upon Burnt Oak, waiting for new secrets revealed.  Meanwhile, Giuseppe will probably strap on his pack and wander beyond the ruins and sand and swamp.  He’ll certainly reappear from time to time, rolling in with the tumbleweeds.  And when he does, Spicoli will most certainly possess many more tricks under his hat for our laughter and applause.

Thanks Giuseppe.  Thiuseppe.
Thanks Giuseppe. Thiuseppe. - Photo courtesy of Malsain Infinity

((The Wasteland Developers, the Post-Apocalyptic Press, and the Wastelands community express our extreme gratitude to Giuseppe Spicoli for his many venues of entertainment for the Wastelands community and last but not least, for being an amazingly creative person inspiring us all in addition to being a good friend to so many.  The Wastelands wish you the best in RL and look forward eagerly to any future fun you fashion for our enjoyment in Second Life.  Thank you, Giuseppe!))