Maybury D.O.A.
Apr. 9th, 2004 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafocSince I went on vacation from writing I've written I don't know how many little screeds here, plus fifty-two large, closely-spaced pages in my Dead Journal-- I suppose if this is my LiveJournal, that's what my paper one must be. Even when I was at my screaming worst I knew I'd never be able to stop, or even slow, my writing.
All sorts of little articles in the paper journal, including this one:
"Cities just smell bad," Mark observed as we fueled the Statemobile somewhere alongside the freeway. "We're used to that fresh air up north."
Not completely true. Maybury State Park didn't smell bad, and near some of the places we deal with the air stinks badly enough to peel paint, sometimes. But what he said is more true than not. Most everywhere we went down in The Burbs, I smelled diesel fuel, gasoline, tar, and burned rubber, all in some kind of conglomerate Transportation Funk. Call it Eau de Superhighway.
Our training was at Maybury State Park. This park would have seemed so far out in the sticks that the city could never get there, back when I survived two miserable years in Plymouth. Even now there's some open land in the area, but landrape has pushed out that far, and in earnest. Developers rape and run, and it's all one hideous, shoddy, malodorous suburb all the way from the Detroit River to Ann Arbor, from Toledo to Flint.
On the side roads, which are still gravel (probably only because the residents want them to stay so to discourage traffic), you see on one side little houses, double-wides, single-wide mobile homes, on two, five, or ten-acre lots. These were the cheap homes in the country twenty or thirty years ago. On the other side, the forest is gone. Somebody is putting up a hundred four or five-thousand-square-foot neo-Victorian particle board McMansions around the dyed, sterilized turf of yet another golf course.
In the middle of this you find the park. It occupies most of two sections. (Sections are blocks of land one mile square, part of our township-and-range surveying grid, for those of you who Aren't From Around Here.) We're talking about a significant chunk of real estate here.
Mark said it was once the site of a state lunatic assylum. Then it became a park, and housed a historical farm I remember hearing about. The State ran this farm to give the Burb People some vague idea of the way of life they had destroyed.
It must have been nice. They had pigs, sheep, chickens, and draft horses, more pets than anything else. They'd put on demonstrations of old farming techniques; hitch up the horses to plow, reap with scythes, thresh wheat, and so on.
But their barn burned down one night. All the animals died in the fire. Nobody told me what caused the fire; I get the feeling Mark thinks nobody knows to this day. But I have a depressing, sinking feeling that it was arson. It's one of these spooky hunches I used to dismiss as unscientific, but have gradually learned to heed.
I hope I'm wrong. And I may well be.
But the whole place gave me the creeps for some reason I can't explain. I mean, a barely suppressed case of the shuddering horrors. I was there on a spring day that started gray and cold, but became sunny and warm before noon. It was as cheerful a day as I could wish. But.. well, there aren't any campgrounds in this park. It is in the middle of what has become a city, and I suppose with the homeless people that must be around, and the tight-fisted college students I know are around, and all the criminals the radio says are around, campgrounds would cause far more problems than they'd be worth. But if there were campgrounds there, Maybury State Park would not be a place I'd consider camping. There is no way I'm going in there after dark.
Of course, before I have someone calling the guys in the white coats on me, or grabbing their silver bullets and holy water, I have to admit the problem may just have been Burb paranoia. I do not LIKE the Burbs. I never have. Nothing good in my life has ever come from the Burbs. A lot of bad things DID.
Let it pass, let it pass.
The day turned warm and sunny. And as I passed my test early, and someone else took longer than expected, I had time for a bit of paperwork I'd brought with me. Then that was done, and I had even MORE time. So I took a couple of short walks in the woods.
It's hardwood forest. I noticed beech and hickory, probably because I don't see them up here. I think there were oaks and maples too, but I'm not so sure of that; to my shame I'm not so good at identifying them, until they leaf out.
I watched birds and squirrels. I especially liked the pair of cardinals I saw, and the mallards in a little pond about the size of my house. The mallards seemed to think I hadn't seen them-- I kept my eyes straight ahead and watched them from the corner of my eye-- so they just stayed quiet, hunkered down at what is probably their nest site, and waited for me to move on.
It was quiet in there. Down in the hollows near those little ponds you couldn't hear anything from the outside at all, and the air was oppressively heavy. As if it were hot, without the heat. Another pond was the same except it had so many peepers and bullfrogs in it you could hardly hear yourself think.
Other than two people walking dogs and a few runners-- in trios, for some reason-- I had the place to myself. Creepy feelings or no, I enjoyed it.
The honeysuckle was starting to leaf out. When I'm from Gaylord and I still have snowbanks out front, that came as quite a surprise.
It's good to get downstate and see how different things are down there, for better and for worse.
All sorts of little articles in the paper journal, including this one:
"Cities just smell bad," Mark observed as we fueled the Statemobile somewhere alongside the freeway. "We're used to that fresh air up north."
Not completely true. Maybury State Park didn't smell bad, and near some of the places we deal with the air stinks badly enough to peel paint, sometimes. But what he said is more true than not. Most everywhere we went down in The Burbs, I smelled diesel fuel, gasoline, tar, and burned rubber, all in some kind of conglomerate Transportation Funk. Call it Eau de Superhighway.
Our training was at Maybury State Park. This park would have seemed so far out in the sticks that the city could never get there, back when I survived two miserable years in Plymouth. Even now there's some open land in the area, but landrape has pushed out that far, and in earnest. Developers rape and run, and it's all one hideous, shoddy, malodorous suburb all the way from the Detroit River to Ann Arbor, from Toledo to Flint.
On the side roads, which are still gravel (probably only because the residents want them to stay so to discourage traffic), you see on one side little houses, double-wides, single-wide mobile homes, on two, five, or ten-acre lots. These were the cheap homes in the country twenty or thirty years ago. On the other side, the forest is gone. Somebody is putting up a hundred four or five-thousand-square-foot neo-Victorian particle board McMansions around the dyed, sterilized turf of yet another golf course.
In the middle of this you find the park. It occupies most of two sections. (Sections are blocks of land one mile square, part of our township-and-range surveying grid, for those of you who Aren't From Around Here.) We're talking about a significant chunk of real estate here.
Mark said it was once the site of a state lunatic assylum. Then it became a park, and housed a historical farm I remember hearing about. The State ran this farm to give the Burb People some vague idea of the way of life they had destroyed.
It must have been nice. They had pigs, sheep, chickens, and draft horses, more pets than anything else. They'd put on demonstrations of old farming techniques; hitch up the horses to plow, reap with scythes, thresh wheat, and so on.
But their barn burned down one night. All the animals died in the fire. Nobody told me what caused the fire; I get the feeling Mark thinks nobody knows to this day. But I have a depressing, sinking feeling that it was arson. It's one of these spooky hunches I used to dismiss as unscientific, but have gradually learned to heed.
I hope I'm wrong. And I may well be.
But the whole place gave me the creeps for some reason I can't explain. I mean, a barely suppressed case of the shuddering horrors. I was there on a spring day that started gray and cold, but became sunny and warm before noon. It was as cheerful a day as I could wish. But.. well, there aren't any campgrounds in this park. It is in the middle of what has become a city, and I suppose with the homeless people that must be around, and the tight-fisted college students I know are around, and all the criminals the radio says are around, campgrounds would cause far more problems than they'd be worth. But if there were campgrounds there, Maybury State Park would not be a place I'd consider camping. There is no way I'm going in there after dark.
Of course, before I have someone calling the guys in the white coats on me, or grabbing their silver bullets and holy water, I have to admit the problem may just have been Burb paranoia. I do not LIKE the Burbs. I never have. Nothing good in my life has ever come from the Burbs. A lot of bad things DID.
Let it pass, let it pass.
The day turned warm and sunny. And as I passed my test early, and someone else took longer than expected, I had time for a bit of paperwork I'd brought with me. Then that was done, and I had even MORE time. So I took a couple of short walks in the woods.
It's hardwood forest. I noticed beech and hickory, probably because I don't see them up here. I think there were oaks and maples too, but I'm not so sure of that; to my shame I'm not so good at identifying them, until they leaf out.
I watched birds and squirrels. I especially liked the pair of cardinals I saw, and the mallards in a little pond about the size of my house. The mallards seemed to think I hadn't seen them-- I kept my eyes straight ahead and watched them from the corner of my eye-- so they just stayed quiet, hunkered down at what is probably their nest site, and waited for me to move on.
It was quiet in there. Down in the hollows near those little ponds you couldn't hear anything from the outside at all, and the air was oppressively heavy. As if it were hot, without the heat. Another pond was the same except it had so many peepers and bullfrogs in it you could hardly hear yourself think.
Other than two people walking dogs and a few runners-- in trios, for some reason-- I had the place to myself. Creepy feelings or no, I enjoyed it.
The honeysuckle was starting to leaf out. When I'm from Gaylord and I still have snowbanks out front, that came as quite a surprise.
It's good to get downstate and see how different things are down there, for better and for worse.
