For ages, our little techno~park had no cafés, no dépanneurs, no tabagies of any kind; it was a wasteland of rentable office space.
We still have no dépanneurs or tabagies; but some bright young entrepreneur finally wised up to our basic needs, and now there is one small café.
And it was thanks to the café that I discovered, hidden deep in the heart of our techno~park:
The Trailer Park That Time Forgot.
So, here we are, then.
It's one of those rare mornings when we we're all locked out of the office because no key~holding employee has yet arrived. It's usually on just such a morning that I'm running so late I grab a cab and show up just in time to wait another hour. As I have just done.
It's a dark grey morning, air so humid you could wring it out; and there's a far away electrical storm, I can see lightning in the distance... like you might see on the Serengeti if, instead of acacia woodland savanna and migrating ungulates, it was covered in low~lying office buildings and herds of night~shift employees waiting for the next bus.
It's gonna rain, and I figure if I'm gonna be caught outside in the rain, it might as well be for a good cause.
It's on my way back from the café that the rain starts.
It's time for a short~cut; so, hunched over my coffee to keep it dry, I walk between buildings.
And if it hadn't've been for a lightning flash making me glance up, I swear I'd've missed it.
To my right, there are the hindquarters of office buildings; to my left, there is a residential trailer park.
To either side of the trailer park are the backsides of more office buildings. Within the trailer park is an old road, cracked, crumbling & weedy; and down at the end of this road are overhanging trees obscuring the newer street with which it intersects.
At this stage in the electrical storm, there's that peculiar twilight glow in the air. And, as if that weren't already surreal enough ~~ at this moment, too, there is a big~bellied man walking a teency~weency dog in the rain. A Miniature Pinscher, I think ~ you know, the kind of dog that looks like a doberman trapped in a chihuahua's body.
The trailer park looks as if it had been built up back in the '50's as a sort of retirement haven, and, some forty years later, our techno~park has grown up around it, like a tree growing up around an old, slowly rotting stump.
It occurs to me that someday all these people will have passed on in one way or another, nobody will want to own a crummy trailer with a techno~park view, and it will be gone. More office buildings will go up in their place, and people will be left wondering why the urban planners designed this weird little gap in the street grid.
But until then, it remains a curious little oasis of the unexpected.
Posted by edgar at September 10, 2004 09:27 AM