Wow, that was boring.
Acting on a tip, James and I stopped in to a small complex of abandoned buildings in the middle of coal country early this morning. The weather was great. We had an hour before we needed to be anywhere. We were confident that we could conquer anything.
At first we scouted, tried to make heads from tails from one corner to the next, got a feel for the geography. When we opened the door, my first thought was that maybe something died in there. A cloud of gnats flew at my face, although I could smell nothing but mildew and old cardboard. Hmm.
Hiking through the greenery in high summer blows. It really does, because all kind of flora and fauna are present. The ones that bother me the most are the ones with more than 4 legs, and even though you can’t really see gnat legs without a microscope, they’re still there. I’ve always wondered if gnats were different from fruit flies. I sometimes miss working with fruit fly genetics, because I thought it was pretty neat putting them to sleep with FlyNap. As if the little buggers are really that happy tucked into bed!
Hmmm? Oh, oops, got sidetracked. So yeah, anyway we opened the door and were met with a veritable blast of gnats. Yuck. I really didn’t want to go in but I’m not letting James down, especially when it’s just the two of us and I can’t be girlish about what I’ve agreed to do. I’ve waited for this chance, dammit! I wanted to be free to risk my own neck and have a new opportunity to prove myself… like a lone wolf.
Argh. OK, back on track to the building I was talking about. Um, we didn’t know what we’d find inside because it was very generic from the outside. One story, low, built probably in the 1980s, shipping docks, nothing interesting. With the help of flashlights it made very obvious that this is some kind of holding facility for recycled goods. Pallets and pallets and pallets of crushed plastic soda bottles bound into cubes were stacked as far as the eye could see. The stench was horrible. Standing water on the floors. Dark. Flies were almost a single solid mass in the air, and I had no idea how I wasn’t breathing them in. James brought up an image of coughing them out later… unnnghh, I feel sick.
That reminded me distinctly of that episode of Itchy & Scratchy when Itchy (or Scratchy?) chopped up Scratchy (or Itchy?) into tiny microscopic bits until he thought he won, until he inhaled the pieces of him and died.
D’oh! Uh, where was I? Right. The air was a solid mass of swarming insects and it smelled like we were in the middle of a trash bin. We did walk around a bit and squeeze between pallets to find some room with a couple of boilers and a pool of old sticky tar, did some light painting but I don’t even think I’m going to bother processing those shots. I’d been up since 4:30 and wasn’t physically tired yet, but in the room that was mercifully free of gnats I was almost ready for my first nap.
…..
What? Oh! Sorry again. Dozed off for a second. To finish my story, that was the world’s most boring infiltration, and I can now boast that I’ve explored coal country’s biggest festering dumpster.
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