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Forgotten Friday: Corporate America, circa 1978

May 30, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

What images does your mind conjure when you hear the term, “corporate park?”

Do your thoughts jump to soulless financial machines: adult Lego bricks available only in greys and browns, photocopies of similar buildings plopped down into populated parking lots, unblinking logos like electric gargoyles perched on feckless facades?

Or do you imagine an actual “park,” a living, thriving, gathering place for a community of professionals, a bustling ecosystem of admins and executives sharing lunches and lessons on a Tuesday afternoon?

I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit sawing at the invisible fetters of McLean, Virginia, and I recognize the suit and tie mentality permeating every porous inch of the concrete towers that rise like well manicured mausoleums from the DC Metro marshlands. I’m fortunate to not have to spend all my waking hours walking that tech corridor, but I’m still a denizen of a different corporate park, one whose history I’m fascinated by, and have written about before.

I fear I’ve developed an unhealthy cathexis for Corporate and Garden City drives, come to know their presiding dryads well as I’ve built the base of my career. The “park” borders I-495 (the infamous DC Beltway), its air polluted by the sounds and smog of seven hundred and fifity thousand daily commuters, but signs of nature remain. Freshly gnawed trees betray a local group of beavers; fat, ornery Canadian geese turn the little creek into a personal nesting ground every Spring; honey suckles and several other wildflowers sneak to bloom between discarded trash from Metro riders moving from train to office.

It’s here I run, usually after work, usually in warm weather twilight. Doing some quick writer-math, I’ve run approximately 1500 miles in Sisyphean circles around this place over 6 years, giving me ample time get to know it.

And yet, it still surprises me.

On days I’m feeling particularly energetic, I’ll stop to do pull-ups on a set of bars just east of the Metro station. There is a sign there, worn white print on aging blue fiberglass, surrounded by algae stained splintering wood that I’ve noticed many times, but never really paid attention to:

The sign was planted here by the Southwood Corporation, a group that since the 1970s has made giant, custom signs for locations just like corporate parks. Fit-Trail creates an outdoor gym, where any person can move between stations, getting a full-body work out by following the nifty directions on the strategically oriented placards. Or so goes the theory.

I’ve never seen anyone else use the bars to do chin-ups, and have never seen anyone tempt fate by rubbing their back against old, weathered wood to do an isometric squat. Despite my hours pounding the local concrete, I’d never noticed another flash white and blue, anywhere. But this station is 21 and 22 of some indeterminable number; there have to be others, elsewhere, right? At least 10 more with two exercises each, and at least one more down the line, since the instructions on this one say: “Pace to next station: Jog.”

So I jogged. And jogged. And jogged. Heaved and sweated and walked after giving into my asthma. Put my hands on my knees and cursed the Eastern shore humidity. I went around the whole 1.3 mile loop two more times in my search, but didn’t see any other signs. I’d lost the Fit-Trail before I even got a chance to find it.

Returning to the chin-up bars, I was determined to learn more. Upon closer inspection, I found a date that explained a lot:

1978. The year Southwood launched the Fit-Trail line (they’re still making them today for children’s parks and retirement communities), meaning this random corporate park in the middle of Maryland had been one of their first customers. Other than the brief terror of realizing I’d been doing pretty rigorous pull-ups on a thirty six year old metal bar and wooden frame, I felt sort of sad. This piece of signage was older than me, the only reminder that its brethren had ever been here to begin with, the last bastion of a time when this corporate park was more than just a shell for contract vehicles and short-term tenants.

The New Carrollton Metro station also opened in ’78 (not a half mile from Corporate drive), and I imagine some real estate developer spending top dollar to create a vibrant place to work at the then-new (and still) end to the Orange line. An all inclusive vocational vacation with restaurants and social draws and accouterments to made working seem as unlike work as possible.

As I run on the decades old sidewalks, I picture a different, distant version of Corporate drive, one where beautiful afternoon sun showers brought people out of offices regardless of deadlines, one where many people ran this trail to stay in shape, moving from each station to the next, past coworkers who were chatting away about that new movie, Grease, or the crazy situation in Love Canal, New York. I step back into a place come to life with employees who cared and a community that teemed, thirty years before the whole place grew thick with trash and unkempt overgrowth.

But that version, if it ever existed, is gone. Replaced by nothing and instead trimmed down, personality faded and weathered by time. A few echoes do remain, tucked behind the buildings, but with no one to use or maintain them, they’ve lost their luster and appeal.

If history is a cycle, the moves by Google and other progressive companies to create corporate environments where people actually want to go to work might be a full 360 spin of the wheel, returning us to sometime near 1978. I’m too young to know what it was like then, but if these few dwindling symbols are even sort of representative, it’s a time I’d like to experience again, for the first time.

Volleyball, circa 1978.

Introducing: Deertography!

April 1, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Next to wielding a keyboard, wielding a camera is my favorite way to expend mental energy. I take all of my own pictures for this here blog, which slowly, shot by shot, adds up to many hours in front of cans and bottles and glasses, and many odd looks from my wife. There is little else I enjoy as much as focusing a lens, framing a shot, forming a momentary mental image of the one I’m about to forever capture.

But I like to take pictures of things besides beer, too. I like nature and its glorious splendor, from rock to river, from flowers to fjords. So, today, I’m very proud to introduce a whole new series on my blog: Deertography!

Deertography is exactly what it sounds like: photos dedicated to, and always featuring, deer. There are few megafauna as majestic and austere as Odocoileus virginianus, and since I’ve already started down the road of beertography, moving two letters down the alphabet seemed to make perfect sense. I mean seriously, who doesn’t love deer? They are like the mystical steeds of the wood nymphs or something.

While I’ll be starting with the white-tailed variety (or whatever happens to wander into my backyard), the great thing about deertography is there are so many styles of deer to potentially capture. The are light deers and dark deers and deer that look different in different light. There are deer from all over the country, even international deer! Maybe we can even start trading deer, so that people on the East Coast can get deer from the West Coast without having to drive all the way out there just for deer. I’ll ask the USPS what their policy for mailing 400 pound living, antlered, creatures is.

The possibilities are endless for #deertography. The only limit is your imagination (and how big your zoom lens is; seriously don’t get too close they might charge).

Check out some of my recent shots. I can’t wait to get this series stomping its hooves defiantly and aggressively to declare its territory on the blog!

free-whitetail-deer-wallpaper-8-1024x576

Beer Review: Sam Adam Blueberry Hill Lager

April 12, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

“Have I ever told you about Blueberry Hill?”

Edgar sat as Edgar liked to sit, in the almond slices of afternoon that came through his window like a star forced through the slats of a wooden park bench. The light caught him, processed him, and charged him. The verdict: guilty of age. It glanced off his head, peeked through his little white hairs, those few near-translucent hangers-on, stubborn and unwilling to finally just give up, poking up from his saggy head-skin like defiant sign-waving protesters.

His eyes fixed on the sterile room’s only window, he went on, his voice an anachronistic skip like the hand of a record player stuck in the same groove, repeating the same sounds, desperately needing to be reset.

“Sheila always reminds me of the hill. She comes to my house to get me, loitering at the end of my drive. From my front door she looks like a tiny flower dancing on the wind. My dedicated daffodil.”

Despite the medication and the careful care from his well-trained and well-meaning attendants, earthquakes still raged through his nerves, the epicenter his cracked and faulted brain. As his hands involuntarily rattled against the wheels of his chair, his eyes remained still but squinted, shielding themselves from the barrage of rays.

“She sure is something. Those sun dresses she wears…” he closed his eyes, savoring the memory, chocolate on the tongue of his mind, “…the wind catches the fabric and her hair and blows them all around, and she giggles. She likes to wrap as much of her hand around mine as she can, and then we walk towards the hill, just the two of us in love, not a care in the world. Yes sir, she sure is something.”

A cloud passed between man and sun and the stream of light flickered like a memory captured on film, replayed so many times that the vivid colors of youth faded to grainy black and white. The cloud lingered a moment longer and the room showed itself true: not haven or refuge or sanctuary, but a grey and gruesome headstone. It was not here that he lived, anyway. Edgar resided in a Massachusetts that no longer existed, a home remade perfect and pristine by those few fleeting snapshots that still remained intact. It was a place of another time, one he could always, and never, return to.

“You know why they call it blueberry hill? ” A few-toothed smile climbed up onto his face. “The blueberries bushes! Dozens of them, randomly growing on the side of the hill. In summer, they’re packed with so many of those juicy little things. They look so nice, sometimes I feel bad about eating them and ruining the perfect scene. Everyone always says that wild blueberries are too sour to eat but, oh, not these. These are perfect. Just like my Sheila.”

Leaning forward in his chair, trying not to let the wheels slip out of his achy grasp, straining against the ichor in his bones, Edgar longed to see a little further out the window.

“That hill, let me tell you, it isn’t just a hill. That place is love incarnate. I stole my first kiss there, a few years back, but Sheila didn’t mind. I was lying next to her, laughing that we forgot a blanket again, and as she smiled, staring up at all that blue and white, I rolled over and kissed her cheek. She didn’t pull away, didn’t laugh, just turned and looked at me with those eyes and I knew. That grass and those bushes. That’s the place.”

The hill. Sheila. April blueberries. Teenage love on a spring day. The world he saw out that window was an invisible paradise.

“Can I go outside? It’s such a beautiful day, I’m sure Sheila’s already waiting on me.”

It was an involved process to get him ready; his lungs couldn’t muster any defense from the onslaught of pollen and pollutants, and he could barely move under the weight of the oxygen tank and UV blanket. He was proud, but in his protective suit, looked more machine than man, more artificial than real.

He blinked, staring out over the poorly kept courtyard, staring at the lone gnarled stick that masqueraded as a tree and the dozen bluebells that struggled up through the sun-scorched ground. After surveying the landscape, his shoulders sagged and he rolled his head back slightly, blue-green eyes looking into mine past the molded clear breathing mask of the respirator. Those eyes, with longing spilling out as tears, flashed for a moment, his computer rebooting as if it had hit some unrecoverable error upon seeing this ruin of nature.

“Have I ever told you about Blueberry Hill?”

Forgotten Friday: I Hear the Train a Comin’

October 5, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I remember the exact moment I found the decaying remains of some old abandoned rail road tracks in the woods of Gaithersburg, Maryland. It was a monumental event for me; a 13 year old luckily finding a physical remnant of the past buried so carefully by time that it could only be found by literally tripping over it. That day in the woods near Hanson and Sons farm and those rusted pieces of twisted metal may have been the very thing that spurred my obsession with things forgotten.

At the end of my street are some not-abandoned railroad tracks. A nightly symphony of trains accompanies our homework/TV/veg-out time as loud horns and whistles punctuate the still night air like verbal exclamation points. When we first moved in I was concerned about the noise. But now that I’ve lived there for a few years the parade of trains is soothing, almost peaceful, as they saunter on to destinations unknown.

The tracks are littered with detritus from passersby; school children cut across the tracks to reach the nearby middle school and local hoodlums smoke pot and drink malt liquor in the darkness of the nearby thickets. But the tracks themselves are shiny and well kept; freshly placed gravel carpets the area between the ties, making it feel like a weird, skinny white-sand beach in the middle of the woods.

Even straight tracks meander.

But it’s not the tracks that intrigue me; they’re clearly still in use, maintained, lovingly polished by a mysterious man in a conductor’s hat while the rest of the world is sleeping. The ties are new(ish), the signs are modern fiberglass and metal things; painted with distances and other cryptic railroadology signs that a layman like me does not understand.

Except one.

Nestled on a small hill, in the middle of several nasty-looking brambles is a sign post much older and more interesting than the others. It it falling over, only held in place by the wild overgrowth that creep up its sides. It looks like it belongs to a railroad that existed in this same spot seventy five years ago.

Lo, a marker. Not like a Sharpee, but like a land-marker.

One side says, “Baltimore 23” and the other says, “Washington 17.” I too, concluded the obvious, that this was an old mile marker. But upon Google-mapping, I found that this marker is not 23 miles from Baltimore, nor 17 miles from Washington. It’s almost as if it was picked up and moved here, either by a human’s will or by the slow ebbing flow of nature, growth, and dirt.

It’s also facing the wrong directions to be an effective marker. The “Baltimore” side is facing Baltimore (as the train conductor would see that he is now 23 miles from Baltimore, while heading in the direction of DC) and the same goes for the Washington side. Someone (in their surpassing wisdom) spray painted “Baltimore” blue and “Washington” red, in an attempt to, I assume, make the city names more visible. I don’t think it could possibly help much, as this small stone pillar is crooked, backwards, and probably completely unreadable at 65-75 MPH.

But whatever it was meant to be, someone has forgotten about it. It’s not longer needed as several bigger, easier to read signs have been erected on steel poles on either side of the track, transforming this once obelisk of guidance into an obelisk of obsolescence.

I tried to stand it up straight, but this sucker is heavy, and I was secretly paranoid that a massive CSX leviathan would come roaring down the tracks as I stood messing with a rock, leaving me to leap out of the way or lose my leg, all Fried Green Tomatoes style.

So instead, I lay down on the tracks for a second, ear to the rail, listening for the ghosts of the trains that used this marker rumbling miles and memories away.

Point of view. Vanishing point.

Forgotten Friday: A Bridge Over Landover

August 31, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I’ve always had an infatuation with the ancient world. My earliest childhood memories are faded and grey, but I can still remember scrutinizing books about the Parthenon, Tintagel, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I never cared if these places were real, or if they still existed, I just cared about the history that was interred with their architectural bones.

It’s not that I’m obsessed with the buildings themselves. Mossy stones and broken arches make for interesting photography, but I’m more enamored with the idea of the people these places represent. People who lived lives that would seem alien to us now. People with struggles and challenges like we’ve never known, that have somehow been truncated to a few pages in a text book and a Wikipedia article. People who would be confused and angry that we waste time on things like Facebook status updates and just how hairy Snooki’s baby really is. These places echo the souls of the people who built them, lived in them, and died in them; whose memory is only maintained by a select few who care enough to think beyond the present.

My recent trip to Ireland brought my obsession to a head as I was surrounded by broken skeletons of castles, churches, and things unidentifiable after the ravages of nature and time. I’ve been longingly staring at the pictures of these buildings, dreaming up stories about their denizens, imagining who and why and how they lived.

But interesting history doesn’t need to come from thousands of years ago. There are hundreds of things woven into the banality of our everyday lives that we don’t see because our receptors are pointed inward, not outward.

I work in what, on the outside, appears to be a normal corporate park. The buildings are plain and brown, a hold-over of contemporary mid-century design. The boringly named “Corporate Drive” is in Landover, Maryland; a place that many locals would regard with disdain, or at the very least, indifference.

This is the kind of corporate park that is a tangible of the cliche: “sign of the times.”

The parking lots look like this:

and like this:

1:45 on a workday.

Garbage is strewn about everywhere; the result of a landslide of diffusion of responsibility that comes from the thinking, “well there is already trash there so it’s OK if I throw mine here too.” A fetid swamp pools just off the sidewalk that would probably be a pristine pond if not for disgusting human intervention. In the middle of this swamp floats an algae covered, half-deflated basketball. The back end of a Safeway shopping cart sticks out of the green muck like some iceberg forged in the fires of the industrial revolution.

Why use a trashcan when Mother Earth is right there?

It’s the kind of place that makes you feel sad for both nature and humanity.

I walk about a half a mile to our client’s building from my normal office twice a week. This walk isn’t lonely; I’m often dodging people coming from the Metro or heading to a nearby deli for lunch. Most keep their heads down and ear-buds secure, and react awkwardly and sheepishly if accidental eye contact is made. Short of some aggressive geese and tenacious plant life, it’s about as uninteresting a walk as you might expect.

But on my way back from the client’s office last week, I took a different path. A path I’ve never walked before, behind buildings I’ve never been in, past people I’ve never seen.

When I climbed an old concrete-and-wood staircase behind one of the corporate offices of Giant and Safeway (they share a building? WTF?), I found what appeared to be a gate to nowhere.

Mr. Tumnus, is that you?

As soon as I dismissed my thoughts of Narnia, I tried to figure out just what the hell this thing was. It had gates like you’d find surrounding (protecting?) a dumpster, but there was no way a dumpster would go behind this gate, as it led to a 6 foot drop off. As I illegally opened and moved the gate out of my way (what? the padlock was rusted to all hell, it only took like three kicks to open it) I saw what was on the other side:

A “well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.” One hundred internet dollars to anyone who can place this quote without Google.

A pillar. No, a series of pillars, all overgrown with ivy and lichens and vines galore. They were blanketed in the kind of growth that looks like nature is really pissed off.

I moved around the side of the gate to get a better look and saw at least four of these pillars. About six or seven feet tall, made of poured cement, they stood there as a monument to something long gone, to a time when it was possible to cross this creek and see the other side of the world.

It didn’t take me long to realize this had been a bridge at some point. My mind flashed back to a time when these wetlands were actually beautiful; free of trash, with clean waters and little ducks swimming all happy-like. I imagined employees taking breaks and hanging out on this little causeway. I imagined them finding some peace from a hectic work schedule in the forested wonder just beyond their cubicle walls.

The odd thing is, this bridge clearly did not fall apart from age and mistreatment. There are no broken stones or chunks of concrete in the water below, no signs of damage to the pillars or the entrances on either side. Someone, at some point, deliberately had this bridge removed, for reasons unknown (or at least unknown to the current building property managers, when asked).

Unless the accumulation of trash, run-off from the nearby Metro maintenance facility, and pollution from the even more nearby i-495 freeway had poisoned the ecosystem and ruined the serenity of this little bridge. But that’s not possible is it? We’d never destroy the innate beauty of the natural world in the name of progress, would we?

I found an image of the bridge still intact in 1993:

April, 1993: Google Earth Coords: 38°56’53.61″N 76°51’53.91″W

But the next record in 2002 shows only the pillars:

March, 2002.

In less than ten years, the bridge is gone. I guess I’ll never know why it was dismantled, or if anyone really got to enjoy it when it was there.

At least it can live again here on the internet, if only for a few minutes while you read this.

RIP, random bridge I’ll never know.