Beached

From Dave Brigham:

On a recent walkabout on the border of Newton and Waltham, I shouldn't have been surprised to find a large piece of trash just a stone's throw from the dump in my town, but I was.

I was tromping through Flowed Meadow, a conservation area that extends out from the Auburndale Playground. I'd walked around this area a few times before, and remembered that there was an abandoned house not too far from where I'd parked my car.

I followed the path that runs between two houses, which, honestly, are a surprise to see in the conservation area. The path is actually called Wabasso Road. At one point, years ago, there were obviously houses along here, and I was hoping to explore and take pictures of the one I remembered from the last time I'd been in the area.

Unfortunately, the house is no longer there. I walked the lot, looking for anything photo-worthy, but found only felled trees and remnants of a stone wall.

So I walked on, past the old fire hydrant that at one time was useful to the neighborhood, but which is now surrounded by trees, and looks like part of an absurdist landscape.

I looked up the slope to my right, and saw where all the lawn bags and yard waste in my town go to die: the dump. My journalism background compels me to tell you that the place is actually called the Rumford Avenue Resource Recovery Center.

I looked to my left, and spied a large, white mass of some sort, hunkered in the weeds. A whale? No. What the hell is that? Is that a boat? No, that can't be a boat.

It's a frickin' boat.

I'm not sure if the boat slid down the hill from the dump and landed here. Or if somebody at the nearby apartment building was storing it there in anticipation of taking it out on the nearby Charles River.

Obviously, nobody's been out on this rig in quite some time. And won't be ever again.

But if you get just the right angle, you feel a big wave coming in.