On August 18, 1984, in Bennettsville, S.C., a tornado embedded a 28-foot-long steel beam eight feet into the manicured lawn of Drake Rogers’ house. Two weeks earlier I spent the day at Artpark, near the Canadian border, where Chris Burden was supervising the dropping of numerous steel beams of various lengths from a height of about 60 feet into a rectangular pool of unset concrete. (It took most of the day for the concrete to solidify; it had been chemically treated to slow the hardening process.) Another case of life imitating art—as usual, without the same flair and relentlessness? I don’t