wanderings, mapping and junk treasure

Generally speaking, it's been years since I've spent any real time in the river "flats" near where I live. It's an old area that used to be populated (suprise, suprise) by Native Americans before white folk moved in and began exploiting the area. The white folk turned it into a shipping center, and I'll leave the history mostly at that. It currently is a rather dead area, in a sense. Lots of vacant and broken buildings; some that may be open? It is clear from all the treasure I've found that things must still happen down there, and it still has that vibe I romanticize: blue collar, industry, change and revolution, ghosts of the Salt of the Earth, stripped of the harsh reality that they were real people.

I stood by the river, and watched one of the little tugs I can hear late at night into the early morning moving a barge. Across the canal, a group of people were sitting, fishing maybe. They hollered at me "hey bag lady," as I was carrying a tote and a plastic bag for my finds. Afraid of people, and wondering what they could possibly have to say to me, I ignored them and kept walking.

My sense of direction has never actually been very bad: in the dark of night I can usually tell you the direction we're going by the sun. It's almost creepy, as those who have seen to believe can attest. I don't know how else to explain it. But my faith in my own abilities has been beaten by the devaluation of me by vampires that I let get to me. I dumbed myself down to appease some, and in other instances, the repeated abuse just got to me. Now I am tired, but still I pick myself up and slowly but surely I am regaining myself.

My adventure today is part of this recovery process. Today was about finding my sense of direction again, as well as treasures. It rained a great deal, but walking feels good. As I walked, I found spots that were familiar to me. One nice thing about areas with deep and long histories is that sometimes one can be away for more than a decade, and come back and so much hasn't changed. The graffiti is never cleaned down there; the layers of paint are not dissimilar to rings of a tree. While very, very faint, I am fairly certain that i can see the flecks in the background behind more recent artwork on some of the cement walls. These flecks are warm and familiar to me and remind me of friends who are now gone. Broken windows everywhere, and I wonder if the homeless folk are allowed to stay here, or if they have been pushed out. Random acts of violence by fools keeps me from going back this late to see.

Rusty metal pieces, smaller and more interesting in shape, can be harder to come by than one thinks. I found a few, though, including one heaver piece, about seven inches long, that looks like it could be a shuttle for a weaving loom were it not so large and heavy. Smashed cans; aluminum I pick up. With the current threat to my job I will recycle these for whatever little bit of money I can get. Two spoons I examined carefully for scorch marks that may have been washed off by long, hard rain. (I think of C., strangely close in proximity, but put away for a bit longer, and how he would criticize these large spoons.) I kept them to cut and file down and use as jewelry findings.

Two wine bottles in off shades, waiting to be reused, and many bits of cobalt blue glass and electric blue pottery shards waiting to be further broken down and put to another purpose.

The clouds cleared up, the sun peeped through just a little before it started to set. Rains have disturbed the water sources, causing them to give off the putrid stench that is so familiar around here. I worry about the health of folk who eat the fish they pull from this water; but if that is all they have between here and death, I will spare them lectures about illness. Instead I'll push as I can to clean up these resources which fed those here before us, when the land and water had not yet been brutilized. Other than that, I'll turn offcasts into art for the sake of healing.