Terrain-Vague: a Troll Geography

Between the regulated intensity of the cityscape and the postcard-wholesome countryside there grows a steadily thickening belt of non-location – easily definable in terms of GPS coordinates or dots on a map, yet difficult to grasp in the subjective geography. 

Unblinking, one drives past these parking lots, storage buildings, derelict workshops and convenience stores. Previous ecosystems having either been demolished or disintegrated by road construction and reduced to scrub, generalist species such as badgers, rats, hedgehogs and field mice dominate the local fauna among the thicket.

No matter the level of pressure in housing markets, these areas never get re-zoned for residential development except in large chunks, and only then after being nigh-ceremonially scorched and flattened by landscaping subcontractors. This is the domain of NIMBY, of the high voltage masts (steel giants once admired as monuments of progress, now loathed by the Western middle class, its tastes softened under the nuclear umbrella) where city-planners draw, if at all, only overpasses, strip malls, utilities and noisy, budget-overdrawn highway connections.

Abandoned by the whims of public transportation (though bus stop signs may still be found) this borderland requires either a car or a pair of good shoes to traverse. Mobile phone coverage often being surprisingly abundant in this utilitarian realm, one is free to call a friend or a taxi, but the car one calls will likely get lost on the way, along its roads and unmarked side-passages. Although barbed-wire fences are more common here than anywhere else except military bases, they are not arranged according to any effective pattern and are thus easy to move past on foot, and with rust and disuse their holes are a common sight.

Nevertheless, if the distance out here will not wear one out, the lack of a sight line makes precise navigation a fool's errand. An unquiet silence summons a loneliness deeper than either the city's electrical crowd or the humdrum complacent aura of forests and fields. It is liminal ground, concrete cracked underfoot, reeds and flowers sprouting through cracked asphalt. Here one gets lost to find the shadows, irrational not-quite-selves elsewhere latent, creeping; that, or to hide from the law, from oneself, from the gaze.