Bulldozer

There is this construction site near my house that I keep meaning to take photographs of, but it's changing too fast for me to catch up. For years, it was an impenetrable fence of Douglas firs and blackberry thorns off a highway offramp, with a creepy, winding path blocked by a gate. On evening walks I've passed it hundreds of times. Sometimes, inexplicably, the gate would be open, and I'd take a few steps onto the path. In a little grove of bushes was an abandoned, waterlogged gray couch, that was somehow inviting, but in a gates-of-hell kind of way. I was sure if I ventured toward it and sat down, out of site of the road, that some meth addicts or rabid raccoons would take me down to Hades in a chariot. And so I walked on.

One day I walked past this little forest and became disoriented. There were acres of bleak, blue sky where the trees had been. I was inundated by the violent pine odor of a hundred bulldozed trees, now lying in stories-high mountains of crushed branches and mangled trunks. The couch lay broken, upsidedown, on a mound of trash. Toward the back of this vast lot was an imposing, gutted building with a moldy roof. It looked like a rec center or club house that hadn't been used in decades. The windows were blown out, and the doors were gone. I had never known it was there; it had previously been well hidden by the now-dead trees.

NOTICE OF CONSTRUCTION, read an imposing aluminum sign. 38 SINGLE FAMILY DWELLINGS, TO BE COMPLETED AUGUST 2008. Although it was a big lot, the thought of this many houses being shoehorned into it, like boxes in a storage unit, seemed improbable. And yet it's already happened nearby a dozen times: the bulldozers come, scrape a modest greenbelt off the land, and replace it with multiple rows of narrow, three-story town homes, separated by a foot of space.

I passed the construction site a few times over the coming weeks, kicking myself each time for not bringing a camera as the dilapidated club house appeared one day with its Southern face entirely torn away, and then one day, it was not there at all. Why had I never walked down the path on the days the gate was open, and sat on the moldy couch?

All this got me thinking about roadside ruins, those remnants of abandoned Americana we've all passed on road trips, that are each a micro-apocalypse of a certain irretrievable time and place. You're lucky if you catch one in any state of decay before the bulldozers arrive, and pave it over with condos or chain stores.

If you do, take a picture before it's too late.