I used to live five minutes from a locked gate that I presumed,
ridiculously, belonged to the army. Not any actual military organisation
with soldiers and barracks and Whatsapp groups and a HR department but
the sort of nebulous, conceptual version of the army that exists when
you're a child and is always on the other side of rusted spiky walls.
Yesterday,
while going somewhere else and for old times' sake, I chanced a glance
(because it felt like I shouldn't be looking) and sure enough wasn't the
gate wide open with a newly-revealed tunnel just beyond.
If I've a photography motto, a photto if you like, it's that I don't want to endure the burden of regret. I'm not talking NO REGRETS
in a calligraphic font like the kind sensitive hardmen commit to skin.
I'm talking risking having to explain myself to a stranger from the
business end of a CCTV stream so I don't have to come home wishing I'd
hopped that fence just to see what it looked like looking back.
Through
and beyond the tunnel I discovered the following. Satisfyingly it's not
identified at all on Google Maps and, coupled with the unforgettable
image of earthy mists of fine soil borne aloft by the breeze, I really
felt like I found something otherworldly yesterday. There wasn't another
person in sight and sight ran the stretch of horizon for miles side to
side. At one stage, a ten-wheeled red and chrome megalith kicked a cloud
of dust towards me and rumbled off around a dune and gone, its driver
never once glimpsed.
Haste the price paid to trespassing, my
car appears in some of these shots but if I'd had the time to rearrange
reality around me to change what I was pointing at it would belie the
truth - I shouldn't have found this place at all.
P
Photographs taken with a OnePlus Nord 2 CE on 29th July 2022.