Ambrose watched one video. That's the thing you have to understand. One forty-minute YouTube video called "Systems Thinking for Everyday Life" that he found at 11 p.m. on Friday while I was trying to ask him what time we were leaving in the morning. He watched it twice. He took notes on a Chipotle napkin. By the time we parked on Marconi, he had produced a handwritten flow model on the back of a festival schedule and was explaining it to me with the energy of a man who had just discovered fire.
"It's not a map," he said, very carefully. "It's a decision tree."
I looked at it. There were arrows. There were boxes labeled things like SHADE NODE and DIGNITY CHECKPOINT and one that just said FOUNTAIN (CONFIRMED). There was a branching path for "if snack line > 8 people" that led to a secondary route he called The Bypass, drawn with a dotted line and what appeared to be a small star.
"Confirmed by who," I said.
"I could see it on the satellite view," he said. "Probably decorative. Big. Central. Perfect anchor point for the whole system."
It was 78 degrees and climbing. The festival was beautiful — Genoa Park packed and glittering, the Scioto behind it doing that summer-morning shimmer thing, the smell of food coming from every direction, someone's speaker already working through an outline of joy. I was happy to be there. I was less happy to be handed a laminated-adjacent piece of paper and told I was entering a flow model.
Ambrose gave out four copies before we'd gone fifty feet. An older woman accepted hers politely and immediately used it to fan herself. Two teenagers looked at it for a long moment and then took a photo of it, which Ambrose interpreted as enthusiasm. A dad with a stroller took it, squinted at DIGNITY CHECKPOINT, and said "what does this mean" and Ambrose said "that's where you stop and reassess your load-bearing decisions" and the dad nodded slowly like he was being spoken to by something not quite human.
The fountain did not exist.
There was a flat concrete area where Ambrose had projected the fountain, and it was occupied by a vendor selling what appeared to be handmade jewelry and one extremely tired-looking dog. Ambrose stood at the edge of it for a full thirty seconds. I watched him try to reconcile the satellite view with the lived reality. I watched him choose not to.
"The jewelry is in the fountain zone," he said. "We route around it."
The snack line he'd built The Bypass for was gone entirely. The booth had been replaced with something selling natural hair products. Ambrose stared at the gap in his system like a man who had arrived at a door and found a wall. Then he took out a pen and made a correction. He was annotating in real time. He was patching the model.
By noon he had given out eleven decision trees. Most people were kind about it in the way Columbus people are kind, which is genuinely and with a little curiosity, like the city runs on good faith and mild puzzlement. One woman asked if she could keep it. Ambrose said yes and looked like he might cry a little.
Then the clouds came in, which he had anticipated. He had built it into the model — there was a whole branch for "storm buffer window, recommend 2:15–2:45 drift toward pavilion." He'd watched the forecast. He'd done the math. He was, on this point, not entirely wrong, which was somehow the most dangerous outcome possible.
"See," he said, watching the sky with the expression of a prophet.
The rain started at 2:20. We were under a pavilion. His model had a small box in the corner that said VINDICATION? with a question mark, and I watched him quietly circle it with his pen, just the once, while the drops hit the river and people ran laughing toward cover and the whole festival shook itself out like a dog and kept going.
I didn't say anything. He had gotten one thing right and he knew it and I wasn't going to take it from him.
He did give me a look, though. A very specific look. The look of a man with a napkin and a theory and exactly enough evidence to be dangerous for the rest of the summer.
I should have taken the video off his recommended.