Category Archives: Factory Road

Factory Road, Maryland, Strange

Strange Finds and Imagined Fictions

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Sometimes people are weird. Sometimes nature is weird. Sometimes it is a bit of both.

Walking along Factory Road and inside the state park lands we’ve found some weird shit. The weirdest we have no photographic evidence of. One day WPT and I were having an intense conversation, as one does in the woods, when two people on an ATV drove up and began dumping a body. We looked at each other and then back at the brazen body dumpers. 2020 has reached a point where very little surprises us anymore.

Turned out they were setting up a National Guard training exercise with a life-size body to be located and recovered. We lived to tell the tale, but regretfully did not get a photo of the body in situ. We also didn’t get a photo of the pregnancy test discarded on the roadside, but we did speculate. Much of what we find tells a story, even if utter fiction…

Some stories, like some people, lack mystery

An entirely too well-loved travel pillow

We found this step in the middle of the woods. No house, no foundation, nothing nearby. There appeared to be tributes left around the steps and the stone monument in front. We still aren’t sure what world this leads to or from.

Next to the steps was a deer skull. We’ve seen plenty of bones in the woods, but these were gnawed on. A gnawed skull should be 2020’s mascot.

Half-pint Hill. Hundreds of 50-60-year-old alcohol bottles, mixed in with Bayer aspirin bottles.
Old house with tires and trees in the foundation.
Toilet lid. No toilet, just a pristine toilet lid, alone in the woods.
I love nature in all forms, but even I found this mass of centipedes face-height in a tree unsettling.
Two skeletons

These structures were super creepy when we first found them. We later learned that kids made them. I liked them better when they were all True Detectivey.

Fully intact pay phone, in the woods. I want to know the story so bad.

Abandoned nitrous oxide canister. How? Who? Why?

License plate from 1955
When I first saw the box, I was afraid it was an abandoned animal. Instead, it was abandoned fruit and veg from Companies that Care from Mayor Jack Young and the City of Baltimore. Why abandon the box way out here? I mean, I hate bananas, but not enough to drive 20 minutes to throw one out.
Unused HIV test
Factory Road, Maryland

Digging Glass

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It began with a few fifths.

Booze, that is; the outdated measurement itself – embossed on the heels of the innumerable bottles we have plucked from the tree line along Factory Road – when taken into account alongside its more modern metric counterpart (750 mL), hints that this area has been a popular drinking spot since long before Old Grand-Dad was a twinkle in your father’s eye.

Even today, the winding little Baltimore County byway – bordered by private and state-owned forest, as well as the handful of homes clustered near Factory’s southern terminus – is an anomalous throwback to an earlier, pre-code time. It’s a two-way street, though its oddly narrow, unmarked width might lead one to reasonably conclude otherwise. A rural cousin of the now-congested horse-and-buggy routes of old east coast cities like Boston and Philadelphia – now paved, but never built with cars in mind. Much like a pre-pandemic world forced to retrofit to a new reality…

Directly or indirectly, COVID-19 has informed almost every decision we’ve made since mid-March 2020: staying home as much as possible, to minimize our chances of exposure; thoroughly cleaning anything that comes into the house; taking regular walks, to counter the inertia of daily teleworking; ordering a reach extender to more safely bag the litter we find along our favorite route – Factory Road. Sometimes, as we collect the trash, I wonder how often (if ever) it crosses the minds of those who so casually toss their half-smoked butts, Wendy’s wrappers, and empty White Claws out their windows, at speed. Also in the regular mix: dental floss picks; used latex gloves; home pregnancy tests; and spent shotgun shells.

Then there are the anomalies, like the rusting cylinder of nitrous oxide in the drainage ditch beside the road, or the pay phone in the nearby woods. Their origins – a great source of speculation – don’t really matter, as these items are today as much fixtures of the surrounding landscape as the gentle hills, the rocks and trees.

Some three dozen trash bags later, and with the roadside now clean enough to draw the occasional encouraging honk from passing cars, we turned our attention inward, beyond the tree line, into the woods. More fifths, and four-fifths, gallons and full pints – the cast-off bones of clandestine late-night benders. The more interesting ones – embossed or easily identified brands; unique shapes, sizes, and colors; unfamiliar names – come home with us.

The rest get recycled.

Digging glass from the forest floor led us to discover several old trash pits – most likely the detritus from a couple of overgrown foundations in the woods and their one-time occupants. I spent a few college summers working for a South Jersey DPW, where I learned to build amateur forensic profiles of people based on what they threw away, how much of it, and how often. Stacks of well-read Sunday papers. A neatly polished-off handle of Myers’s – just like last week’s, and the one from the week before that. Bag upon bag of meticulously landscaped brush.

The glass bones that litter these lonely woods tell their own story. Heavy, green Coke bottles. Car polish. Zinc-lidded Mason jars. A Depression-era knockoff Vaseline. Amber Clorox bottles. Turpentine. A 1940s hair crème. Mustard. Ketchup. Soft drinks. Booze, of course (and nearly as much aspirin). And hundred-year-old bottles from breweries killed by Prohibition. Together with midcentury license plates, a rust-flaked Radio Flyer, and the odd horseshoe, they comprise the long-forgotten ruins of a routine that one day, not so very long ago, left home and never came back.

We’ve resurrected several items from the forest floor. Much of the glass has cleaned up beautifully. Apothecary bottles of all colors, shapes, and sizes now line our kitchen sills like the usual snake-oil suspects. Beside a blue-tinted Ball Perfect Mason jar, a King Syrup bottle holds freshly cut flowers from the yard. Even an ordinary glass salt shaker that would have been at home on any Cold War kitchen table once again fulfills its intended purpose.

Like a flood of cheap, single-use plastic, COVID-19 has upped the ante for our disposable culture. Bits of the old normal will eventually be recycled, repurposed, to be sure. But I sometimes wonder, as I stand at the kitchen sink, scrubbing off the latest haul, what those who will kick about the woods, the riverbeds, and shorelines a hundred years hence will make of what we threw away…

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Factory Road

Bottling it Up

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Some days I feel like I am fighting a war on three fronts. During the day, in front of the unblinking eye of a webcam, I fight a failing economy, trying to protect an industry already made vulnerable by distraction and the exaltation of stupidity. On the rare occasions when I venture out into the world, I fight an omnipresent, yet invisible virus. I am forced into situations where I hope strangers are doing the right thing and my inner cynic knows they aren’t. Inside, like the mortar that holds it all together, is my anxiety. I fight that day and night. I dig in the dirt. I lay awake at 2am playing Scrabble. I take walks. I put things in boxes and take them out again. I think about the complex gender of the platypus. Anxiety and I are at constant war and the tactics are all over the place.

I had to go to a grocery store this week. I go about every two weeks now. I forgot my usual mask and used a spare. It was tighter and heavier. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was having a panic attack. My nervous system decided that my heart shouldn’t be left out of the fun and made it start racing as I hunted for my Beyond Burgers and gluten-free English muffins.

Once home, my body was still buzzing. I had a shot of Writers’ Tears (a very fine Irish whiskey) while I disinfected the groceries. Still buzzing, I suggested to Patrick that we take a walk and go collect the old bottles we had found on Sunday. I proposed packing a flask because the buzzing was relentless.

I accidentally glugged when I should have sipped. Drunk and anxious is a bad combination. I know better. I broke one of my rules about drinking to manage my emotions. That’s one of the problems right now. Normal rules don’t seem to exist. Everything is blurry. Time isn’t even playing by the rules. Like WTF happened to April? March was 300 years long and then suddenly it was May.

We began digging in the old dumping grounds, delighting in our trash treasures. Then suddenly I was sobbing incoherently on a fallen tree. Everything pouring out in a chaotic rush. I cry maybe once a year. I sat there, near the ruins of an old house surrounded by broken bottles, and wondered what the former occupants worried about. The foundation appeared old enough that they could have sat in the same spot and cried about the Great Depression. Or polio. Or a child going to war. The problems don’t really change, do they? In the woods, tears blurred the centuries.

The tears stopped and my mood swung back to looking for old bottles and salamanders. Back to my time and my problems. Back to Factory Road. Somehow, as we clean it up and learn the land it feels both more and less real. We take care of the woods and they seem to take care of us. We went home with a broken terracotta pipe last week that made a perfect tiki torch holder. Monday, we retrieved mounds of groundcover, ideal for a shade garden, that had been dumped along the road. And this week they gave me a place to let go and breakdown. To cry and give voice to everything I had been holding inside. Something that was long overdue given the stress of the last two months. We gathered our bottles, my own now empty, and went home.