Saturday, January 10, 2009


There's a great Bodine photograph of a manhole cover in the center of a street, with the double line painted over it. Some workers had clearly removed the cover for some resaon and then replaced it with the lines now running parallel to the rest of the road. It's titled "To Hell With It", and it's an elegant commentary on a certain kind of work ethic. The kind that would, say, make a plastics company dump tons of raw plastic refuse from their factory, for decades, along an abandoned railway next to the Patuxent River. So much plastic that eventually the trees grow around the materiel, like weird neon fruit .
It's also the kind of work ethic that when the county decides to transform the abandoned rail line to a recreation trail, a good idea, somebody decides that nobody needs to actually clean up the area, just to lay the trail directly through the debris field. No need to bother with informing the public about the pollution either, who is going to notice? The hell with it.
When newspapers are gone, these are the kinds of stories that the community will never get.