After the train with it's mystery man went by we started up the 4-wheelers and headed for the old campground about a half a mile away. My younger brother and I used to ride our bikes over there in the summer to get fudgsicles and revels for ourselves and then bring an icecream treat home to Mom and Dad as well. We'd pedal as hard and as fast as we could on those old bikes. Banana seats and one speed and to brake you pedalled backwards. I tell you the 4-wheelers were alot faster than our little legs were.
And Mom really gave it when she crossed the highway. I was impressed. I would've waited but she just put her thumb to the handle bars and I had no choice but to give it to. Well I had a choice but if my Mom could do it then I could do it too!
The campground was a wreck. It was sad to see it like that. The windows were all broken and boarded up on the office but there was one that was smashed and hadn't been boarded up. So we went inside the old campgound office to look around and it was so sad to see that the vandals had completely trashed the whole thing.
I used to be such an nice campground and if the government had kept it up it would be amazing now because the trees have grown up. The roads were all paved and alot of the sites had electricity hook-ups. Now it's all overgrown and alot of the paving is getting pretty rotten.
But we did see this mysterious sign before we went into the park that said :
CAUTION
Enter at your own risk.
It wasn't on the main gate. It wasn't in the spot where the vandals cut the fence and go in. It was in it's very own spot.
And then when we came out of the old office we saw a fluorescent orange dotted line painted on the pavement.
"Let's follow that," Mom said.
I nodded and we tracked it down to a spot where it led off into what used to be bush but now had been largely cleared of the trees and had all of these odd orange posts with hinged tops and lengths of orange bailer twine tied to them.
We opened one of the tops. They weren't locked although the top did have a spot where there should have been a padlock to prevent prying eyes. Inside was a PVC tube with a screw cap on it and the bailer twine was attatched to that and the outside of the metal post around it.
Someone had thrown down a pair of surgical gloves beside one of the orange posts.
It was very strange.
We took pictures.
We felt like we were investigating some strange scene.
It was like a TV show or a movie.
It felt like a combination of CSI and the X-Files.
We went back to the paved road and kept following the dotted line out a back road that was no longer paved.
And saw even more of those orange posts.
They were all around the old dump from the campground.
We took more pictures.
When we ran into Dad after our fence fixing later on we told him all about it. I found the pictures on my camera and showed them to him. We told him about the bailer twine. He asked if there was a PVC pipe inside. I showed him that picture. Mom and I wondered if they were natural gas test holes or something like that. Mom told him that they were even out by the old dump.
Dad pointed out that they were probably test holes drilled to make sure that the old dump hadn't contaminated the ground water.
My Dad could beat both Gil Grisolm and Mulder with his eyes closed.
Me, maybe not so much....
No comments:
Post a Comment