An Urban Wood, and Mysterious Bits

Don't you love it when a weird little bit of mystery wanders into your life?

First off, one of the great things about postmodern city living is the empty spaces that open up even in the middle of dense development, and the way the woods creep and sneak back into the gaps.

And from something neglected or overlooked comes something cherished.

A couple of miles from where I live is a busy intersection--there's a hospital and a nursing home and a Greek Orthodox church and the intersection of two major parkways, and on one side, the turn that takes you to the beautiful Arnold Arboretum, which is a famous park that is well-designed and carefully curated and heavily used, and I've been going to it all my life.

On the other side, you can glimpse a little woody ridge that runs up behind the church but with all the clutter of traffic lights and a busy bus stop and turning cars,  I have never given it more then the most cursory glance.

Until the other day I came across a reference to the Allandale Woods, a city-owned "Urban Wild" that I had no idea existed.

 Almost invisible to the passer by except for an extremely low key sign, you have to wander behind the church and its parking lot, away from the traffic sounds, and through some low scrub.  Then with a strange rapidity, you find your self in a dense little forest of intense quietness. The fallen leaves are incredibly thick.  Someone loves this place enough to clear trails and line them with small stones and drift wood, and drag aside fallen trees. An oddly formal and finished wall, the boundary of some old estate, runs smoothly through the forest, with that slightly surreal feeling of leading to somewhere or something that no longer exists.

And then you come upon this, right in the middle of an old clearing.  The ruins of …something.  Mysterious urns. A door with brambles growing through it. The wreck of a McCormack tractor.

 And this.

And this.

What is going on here?

There are people to whom this is all self-evident and mundane. It's a quiet neighborhood on the border between Boston and Brookline, between big city and citified village. Some folks' back yards back up on this in-between space, and presumably other people living nearby, better than I at searching out unpoliced spaces to watch birds or light up a joint, have always known about it, just as thousands of us streaming by have never noticed it.

It's like some little morality play about competing cultures.

Somebody loves these woods--so they can shoot paintballs and scrawl graffiti and embrace the sweet pleasure of spray-painting "suck c*ck" on the rocks and dropping crunched beer cans on the grounds.

Somebody loves these woods--enough to leave the surreal beauty of cast-down classic fragments instead of carting them off to their own garden.  Enough to not want bigger signs at the entry ways. Enough to tend the paths. Enough to print out creepy warnings and leave them scattered through the woods.

Somebody is watching, each for different things.