After the Falls
On the loss and return of William W. Slack, architect
Edward Eigen
Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, was once called Littleworth, or a place of little worth, and its annals, perhaps on this account, have received but little attention.
—C. C. Haven, Annnals [sic] of the City of Trenton, with Random Remarks and Historic Reminiscences (1866)
It is no doubt a mere coincidence that Trenton architect William W. Slack went missing in the same month, October 1898, that Clark University psychologist Linus W. Kline published “The Migratory Impulse vs. Love of Home.” In his expansive study of voluntary and compulsive behaviors ranging from thermotropism in tadpoles to truancy in children, Kline wrote that wandering and roving “have been woven into legends and myths, carved upon stone and written upon parchment, ever since the advent of human thought.”[1] Whatever likelihood that people, animals, or indeed things as such are prone to go astray, the indelible tendency was for the act and fact of it to be embroidered, incised, or stylized and made ready to be variously retold. The impulse to narrative is anything but accidental; (in)evitability is its master plot. What makes Slack’s all-too-familiar story remarkable is not that he left home, if that was his design when he went missing, but rather that he came back. The inconclusive reports of his loss and the imperfectly explained details of his return form the tick-tock-like components of the news items that ran during the final months of 1898 in the Trenton Evening Times.[2] The intention here, in hewing closely to the reported facts, is to consider what use, if any, Kline’s contribution to the science of “home-finding”[3] might have in explaining the circumstances of Slack’s temporary (as it happens) absence from Trenton, if not more specifically its planetary significance.