re: B
Reader's Digest Version 1.0
At the beginning.
Okay, so back in the day in Michigan there was this guy, Ed Hines. Relevant information on him via wiki below:
Edward N. Hines (1870-1938), was a member of the Wayne County, Michigan, Road Commission from 1906 to 1938. He is one of the most important innovators in road development.
Hines was appointed to the Wayne County Board of Roads at its inception in 1903, along with Henry Ford and Cass R. Benton. In 1909, Hines (in conjunction with Horatio Earle) was responsible for the construction of the first full mile of concrete road pavement in the world, the stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile Roads in Detroit.
Hines originated the concept of painting a line down the center of a road to separate traffic in opposing directions. Painted center lines were first used in Wayne County in 1911. This simple idea has since been recognized as one of the most important single traffic safety devices in the history of highway transportation.
Snow removal from public roads was another of Hines' innovations.
Hines was a national leader in the concept of landscaping highway rights-of-way. He was instrumental in movements to beautify highways by eliminating power lines and billboards.
In 1935, Hines was awarded the George S. Bartlett Award, for outstanding contribution to highway progress.
Hines was one of the organizers of the League of American Wheelmen, and served as its chief consul.
his reward: he got the best parkway on Detroit's west side named after him.
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Hines Park is where i spend a lot of the time in the summer. Huge place. One of the Largest (longest) Park Drives in the world.
Most of it is Wayne County parkland. State Cops and Sheriffs patrol it in addition to various city cops who use it to avoid the highway and gridroad traffic.
it bumps into a lot of other parks and little undeveloped bits of land along the (north)west detroit suburbs.
in a lot of the the more urbanized areas, the various apartment blocks will have big backyards that run directly into the park or into smaller parks that run into it. Especially along Wayne Road in westland.
I used to live in one of those places.
previously, i posted pictures of the old Quo Vadis Theatre, which was just down the block from me, across the mall, which i've always loved the style of, even if it was a crackden (sat on a needle there once). Designed by the World Trade Center guy. (Minoru Yamasaki, pictures prolly at wiki)
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the park is mostly contiguous, and once you walk away from the mown lawns along the edges of the Street (Hines) you'll find yourselves in less-touched wood areas. From the inside these appear much bigger than they are, and they do encompass a fairly large chunk of the map.
(google, incidentally, refuses to detail map the specific place i'm talking about, but if you ever visit, i can show you in person)
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however, this appearance is somewhat deceiving, as the park dips and runs along with the road it follows which itself crosses a very many gridroads. which is to say that if you walk more than a mile or two in any given direction from ANY point in the park, you're bound to have to cross a girdroad and/or at least use the sidewalks at the edges of the park to avoid doing so.
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from my apartment complex, literally, by walking off of my balcony, you left the land owned by the compex and entered land that was, sort of, Hines Park. I could see it from my livingroom. (it was the only thing i could see) the specific history of this chunk of land is somewhat harder to ascertain, especially as to who currently owned it and was thereby responsible for its upkeep. i know this because after the oddities i experienced in these woods i tried to look into it. the best i could come up with was that neither the city nor the state/county park wished to care for this particular area as the trails and bridges were continually washed out with flood water from being lower ground than the surrounding areas. Hines Drive itself is often temporarily shut down due to rain. in any case, the state of this strip of land is not as nice as the Park proper. The Bridges connecting it to the main parts of the Wayne County Parks Hines Complex were removed, with only their foundations remaining. The park benches and whatnots were pulled out. And the trails were left to degrade. Only those in the immediate vicinity of the couple of apartment complexes were kept up, and this was done by locals who use it almost as their own private park (because you have to wade through creeks [no bridges] to access it from the other side, from the main park. I'll take some pictures next time I'm there, to help give context.
i was helping to host a druggie communal atmosphere, for my part, at this time. we spent a LOT of time playing in the woods there. Normally on drugs. All the teenagers would wander back there to smoke dope and whatnot. Safe, more or less, from police, as no one wanted to claim responsibility for mowing the grass, therefore the only way to get Police there was to request them. (nice, really)
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we walked the extent of the woods. there was only so far one could go in any direction without swimming or jaywalking a major road. the strip ran farther north/south than east/west and at its widest extent in any direction was a couple of miles (three maybe).
i played flashlight tag, at night, on LSD back there more than once. i doubt very many people know the area and its trails better than i do. i still go there to smoke weed and reminisce with friends whenever i catch a movie in Westland.
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all of that is context for what is essentially a very short adventure.
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one morning, probably at the tail end of a weekend binging on something, some friends of mine and myself decided to play hide and seek again. the sun had just come up. summertime and fairly warm days, though still chilled mornings.
got dressed. made up rules. two of us, myself and one other, would get a headstart, about half an hour to go and hide either together or alone. the fact that everyone knew the trails and the space was limited was the reason for the headstart as it'd be too easy to find someone if they only had a hundred count or something.
we left. walked down normal main paths, around a sort of minature gorge that runs the center just off the entrance path, if not for the trees, you'd have still been able to see my balcony from there. wandered down the trail a bit. if you follow it forward, you'd come to a little debunk bridge foundation that still halfway crosses a creek. this is where the kids smoke their dope.
we didn't follow it. that was the main drag and would lead to either crossing the water there and coming up in main Hines Park (violation of the rules of the game) or force you back onto a main clear path where you'd be easily found. instead we dropped off down a little grown up side track that worked its way along the side of our "gorge" and then back in the other direction when it bottomed out along the creekbed. following the direction we'd taken we'd have circled back around and come up on a similar gorge on the other end, obvious because of the remarkably dangerous overhanging ropeswing someone had installed a long time ago. fun to play on.
only, we never found it.
eventually, the hill to our left disappeared, which shouldn't have been possible, and we hadn't come to the spot we were searching for. we doubled back and wandered a bit, before realizing we were in a foreign place. it was very disorienting, and we decided to take one of the main trails back towards one of the edges, where we could use a grid road as a marker to tell us where we were. we followed a trail for hours. literally. nothing. up and down hills. day went on. got hotter. down little winding trails. nothing familiar. we decided that we must have ended up on some wandering path and found ourselves father west in the park. maybe we'd crossed a creek and hadn't noticed or something. knowing the tendencies of the park, laying mostly north/south and that it was usually fairly narrow in most places, we decided to choose an direction and walk, offtrail if neccessary in a straight line. as it was now afternoon, we decided following the sun would be the easiest thing to do. fortunately after another hour or so of walking we found a trail that seemed to run nearly straight west. given the relative dimensions of the park, which anyone who drives here are familiar with, it shouldn't ever be possible to walk more than a mile or two west without running into a major four lane highway/gridroad. we're in the middle of the city, after all.
during the walk along the trail, the temperature was much hotter than it should've been. i remember the sensation of the sun blaring down on me, like i was in the desert again. i suppose i was likely experiencing extremely altered states of some sort. we climbed up and down progessively larger hills. i had the nagging sensation of being followed, and seemed to keep getting tripped up. while climbing, hand and foot up a hill much too exaggerated for this part of the country, i had a sensation as of someone attempting to push me down. several times i actually did fall, as if i had been struck. the nagging sensation of someone right behind me continued. my friend, upon discussion, suggested similar experience. at the top of the hill, i looked around. trees for miles in every direction.
as disconcerting as this seemed, we decided in the inevitableness of our original logic. if we merely continued west we'd eventually HAVE to come out at a grid road.
i saw a couple of things along the path which increased my discomfort. one was a table. on a gazeebo. made of stone. there was grafitti on it, nealry covering it. both it and its vandal art seemed very old. i noticed that the writing wasn't all the same, but that it used a recurring alphabet. i also noticed it wasn't any i recognized. i considered this strange. stranger still that my friend was also unable to recognize its origin, he being a speaker of Klingon and all. perhaps an eccentricity of the vandals? this was my rationalization, at least.
we continued walking for several more hours. eventually, it was getting, dark and we were very hurried as we had no idea where we were and didn't want to get lost there at night. not least because it was illegal to be there at night. our path deadended into a chainlink fence. after a short inspection we decided it'd be faster to climb it. which we did. we came out along a gridroad. somewhat significantly to the EAST of where we had started to begin with. we followed the sidewalks and roads along the edges back to my home.
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our friends likely would've thought we'd made up our story of being lost in a place that didn't exist.
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when i undressed, i noticed,
between the layers of my clothing, i was covered in a orange-oily-looking, glowing substance. sticky. like day-glo paint. it wiped right off. my friend was likewise afflicted.
we gathered some of it into specimen jars, which we already had on account of being druggie nerds. i planned to run it somewhere to see what it was. we connected it with the poltergeist like effects we'd experienced on our walk. calling it "ectoplasm" as much as a joke as anything.
over the next couple of hours, we watched it turn to a jelly in the jars, and then into something even more solid, like clay and crumble to dust. by morning the jars were empty.
i've gone back several times to find the place i went to.
it is not there.
by OP ED » Mon Feb 16, 2009 1:14 am 
While my love was trying to shout "Noooo doooont..." a lil too late..
