your future tomorrow depends on your safety today

we found a place the other day. we weren't looking for it, we were just passing by, and when we noticed the looming crumbling wall-structures and the scrubland taking over the old pavement, we pulled over to the side of the road behind a minivan just parked. doors opened, the van had carried a young couple now in the process of removing and staging their toddler's stroller and big toddler-supply-bag. we walked across the splitting pavement perpendicular to them, noticing that they headed for a stub of canal laced at the level of the road with some complicated-looking lock- or gate-type mechanism. there was a paved walkway by the canal leading out to the lake, and the couple with the toddler headed there. alongside it, some fishers waited with their lines in the water, facing other fishers on the other side. 

i had a strange sense of being both deeply and intensely surveilled, and deeply, intensely ignored. all of us using the space were trespassing. we knew that, because it was clearly marked, and we all were aware of one another's presence and activities. but even more bizarrely, a coast guard helicopter patrolled overhead, camera muzzle pointed down, weaving and hovering noisily between the structures, the canal stub, and the open scrubland on the other side of the canal. later i realized the copter was hovering mostly over the open space because it backed the lakeshore, and the agency's remit meant "protecting" the interface where land and water meet. though the copter's movements made me feel like any mammal under the gaze of an aerial predator, it was actually less interested in me and my badgerlike snuffling in the undergrowth than it was in the fishers edging the water, and them only nominally. 

we didn't look so much at the canal, being much more drawn to the abandoned and crumbling structures and the scrub and woodland emerging on and around these ruins. i noticed that the structures and their nooks and edges were home to tags by familiar local graffiti artists, though i realized i hadn't seen these tags in a long time, years. NEKO, KROC, is this one of the only places in town your names are still found? where i live, newer talent seems to be coming up, which is good but strange. i've been living here for so long i now trace generations of graffiti artists. 

this was steel-related, this site. i see a legend on the wall: YOUR FUTURE TOMORROW DEPENDS ON YOUR SAFETY TODAY. on a perpendicular wall, a nearly-effaced order continues the theme of offloading corporate/industrial accountability onto individuals with far less power: WORK SAFELY ALWAYS IN ALL WAYS. 

later r. tells a story told to him by a former workmate--in another industry, the construction industry--who had come to carpentry from steelwork. he told what happened on the old job when a heavy cable support for a hot steel extruder system suddenly snapped. the irony of the messages on the wall suddenly became multidimensional, vibrating through spacetime with a thundering roar. a scream.