Happy Earth Day
23 Apr
I guess Earth Day was technically yesterday. No matter, Andy and I stumbled on a lovely toxic dumping ground a couple of hours ago, just east of Cut Bank, Montana. I shot with the 5DII, but I shot these with the Hipstamatic app on my phone. I rather like how they look, so here you go.
From afar it was an interesting visual trope, but up close it was a mess of mud and snow, with bits of crunchy plastic and rusty metal sticking out.
A leaning and long neglected sign identified it as a recycling yard, but we were in the middle of nowhere. It was sandwiched between the highway and a pair of railroad tracks. A solitary pickup truck passing by and a jogger who looked to be having a very long run were the only people we saw.
Empty drums of who knows what horribly toxic petrochemical lay in piles, some rusted, some horribly dented. “Caution: corrosive” was legible on many of the labels.
A slow moving freight train broke the depressing quiet and we decided to get back in the car and keep making our way East. Andy picked up a broken shard of plastic and used it to scrape the thick mud off of his shoes before tossing it back into a rusty pile of appliances and tires. “You’re a part of the problem” I said sarcastically. We both knew that there wasn’t anything we could do.
