PASSING THROUGH BRADFORD (AREN`T ALL PEOPLE GHOSTS, AREN`T ALL PLACES VAGUE- STILL NO QUESTION MARK FOR THE BROKEN KEYBOARD)

It was after the greater part of the day but still before the dusk had announced itself. We had to go north, and made our way. Over the highway and across Greenlane towards Young. We were then headed right to where Young turns into highway 11. The old Lowes, with stores now all built around it. But there is still the long stretch beside it where I used to stop sometimes before shift and give to myself a few long moments. There was all this space and the wild fields that went on forever. They are still there and the imagination, some mytho-poetic movement, can think anything, can feel that it thinks and-or intuits nearly all things there. Some old little shack, perhaps transplanted and disregarded, - sits there. It’s two, less than five minutes away from what they used to call The Hill, or BDS, or Blue Door Shelters. Soon we go past there, and also past the old motel and the little town of Holland Landing, - a place that could be called, though I have never liked and rarely use the word, ``quaint ‘and it’s a town I am not actually enamored of, do not love, - like a person that some people love but that you cannot bring yourself to resonate with exactly, to synch with, to love. Though there is much to it such as little bridges and marshes, unique roads and hills,- old houses more soulful than urban sprawl, it is actually perhaps too small or isolated, and something is missing- maybe industry.

The sign for the shelter appears and on the Hill, and then it is gone. I was a neophyte and my

older peers taught me much in the beginning. I remember doing perimeter checks, - and sometimes alone, - with the cricket sounds in the summer at night, - or the soft silence of the snow falling in the winter afternoon. Many other things. Other stories, other times…soon we are looking on the right at greenery that hides vast and gated communities nobody but the elect can see or really discern. On the right, there was a helicopter training school, but I can`t make it out any longer and its heyday was before my time anyhow. Then large trucks,- vast areas of limestone and maybe shale and ashen dirt,- the type that is getting ready somehow for foundations, to receive what will in months and short years become communities if you could call them that. The highway there is fast, and it leads to the Bradford in no time. I notice on the right, and then on the left, - several if not many places I would like to go back and photograph. There is not time then. I try to catalogue them in my memory. There is some kind of grain or salt mill or storage, - long and scared somehow by time and weather and decades, - and it seems to have some kind soul that is difficult to explain among the cracks in the asphalt and the little weeds. It seems industrial feral, post-modern baroque,- and now a hint of dusk is coming and I can see interesting shadows in the late and last kiss and caress of the descending sun…

There is more of the same and similar. Especially on the left. I shall have to go back- to capture the ghosts that are the vibrational fortitude of those, sometimes abandoned, environs. I want to say- and there is much I am missing- old and large bricks and blocks they don`t make any longer. Old signs but not so old they can`t be read. Bigger than what they make now-solid. A time I drove though, was driven through rather, similar places, - decades ago- a child myself- head securely and most definitely in the clouds, - staring out of back windows on I-75, on I-95, and we passed through a thousand worlds in Georgia, in Jacksonville, in Daytona, in more that I will never remember because places and people are like spirits, - are spirits. Well, Bradford opens up like a mouth and accepts us- it’s like a causeway, a long and calm causeway or runway and these things are far off to the sides. The main light, the first light, - is far ahead still. Those places must have among them some kind of old distillery, a series of abandoned motels, - a broken electronical sign, a boarded up factory but with painted frames and doorways and shipping bay windows. It feels like there is a lake behind, and maybe there is some small type of water area, - but probably not. I need to stand in those lots and look- to somehow frame in photography some angles because the ``angel, ``daemon, `archetype, `essence, `of place and artifact looms large along there. 

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