Lost in the woods

Last week we got a tree. It looks like this now:

It's displaced me from what Girlfriend "affectionately" calls my "nest," that alcove by the window which was just the right size for a big, squishy chair or a decorative conifer. I guess they'll take turns.

It happened that the closest Zipcars to our house was taken the day we decided to get the tree, so we went along the trail to the metro station, where the next closest ones were. The trees on either side of the path were bare for the first time that I'd been around to notice, and I could see pretty deep into the forest. Something square caught my eye. Bricks, apparently. An oven? A fireplace? What looked like a foundation around it. We didn't have time to check it out just then, but it made for an interesting change in our impression of the formerly impenetrable woods, which had seemed to contain nothing but spawn points for deer. It's easy to forget that forests aren't necessarily old, and this one had sprung up where something had apparently been built. Had someone lived there? Had there been a road there?

On the way back from dropping the car off, we had more time, so we veered off the trail to see what we were looking at and maybe take some pictures. It would have been silly to expect too much, but I will admit to harboring some residual fantasies from my interest a few years ago in ruins photography. I wasn't hoping for anything spectacular, but some pictures of an old house abandoned in the woods, two stone's throws from my own house, would have been tremendously neat.

An aside, to point out the first thing I learned, which is something I knew objectively but have instinctively forgotten lately because I've been playing Skyrim: it's really hard to get anywhere when you go off the path. Sandbox games may have taught me to make a beeline for the floating triangle in the distance, but in real life bees make lines because they don't have to push underbrush aside. And on the subject of floating rectangles, once we were in the woods we didn't end up exactly where we had set out to go anyway.

Which was odd, because we did sight a square pile of bricks and go more or less directly toward it. But it wasn't an oven or a chimney, it was just... bricks.

And nearby were more bricks.

Also one of these:

But mostly the woods were just full of bricks!

The bike trail had once been a railroad track, so we figured this must have been the remains of some railroad-connected building, but that was as far as we could speculate. Chunks had fallen pretty helter-skelter. This one block may be what I mistook for a fireplace from the path, but I never did get my bearings that precisely.

Not everything was strewn around like that. Some foundations were in place, particularly some walls around a hollow that looked like they went pretty deep. Maybe this hinted at the purpose of the whole mess of structures, or would hint if I knew anything about railroads.

A culvert? Was there a bridge here? Only just now am I regretting not going deep enough into the woods to look at this from the other side. But in my defense, it was cold, and we were nearly out of sight of the path, and the bricks just kept going.

So the mysterious bricks remain mysterious, at least to me, and my dreams of ruins are... well, not ruined. Tempered?

The next day, our trudge through a Maryland forest still fresh in our mind, we decided to do what any reasonable people would do: we watched The Blair Witch Project. Which I'd never seen, despite being the perfect age to have been scared bejeezusless by it when it came out. Now that I am a fogey, I was able to watch it and keep most of my bejeezus, but that last image did get under my eyelids as I tried to go to sleep that night.

And when geese go overhead (it's weird to me to have geese still going overhead this late in the year), I imagine their honking as an ongoing argument, the one in front shouting, "We are going south! We've been going south!"