Yesterday, I went for a long walk. It was warmer and sunny, so I decided to go to the woods. There is a pond and an old dirt service road that goes through the area, and a brook that runs all the way through the woods, across the town border, under a few roads and actually goes through my property, a good three miles away.

In the area it's cold enough for the ice to freeze but most of the snow is gone. The area I was walking in has a big morass and pond splitting the place in half. Usually the water prevents me from exploring the other half, but this time I could walk on the ice to the other side,and to other inaccessable areas.

I found something that kind of disturbed, kind of amused me.

About six or seven setups on the shores of the pond and swamps, small areas where homeless people collected junk. I don't know where they went, but this stuff looked abandoned for some time. You can usually tell if an area has been used as a living space by the condition of the place, and these things were abandoned for at least two years or so, maybe more.

Brooms, trash, bamboo poles, CRT televisions, children's toys, towels, beds, bedding, tarps, a lot of things. Each area had some sort of place to sleep, some sort of shelter like an awning or tent, some cups for meals and drinking, and some sort of place to sit. Each had a nice view of the pond. And each was at least a half mile from the nearest paved road or house. Some had more gruesome remains, like deer skulls and furs badly cured, bandages with dried blood rotting underneath tarps, and worse.

The best one, though, had a CRT television and a Sony Lazerdisk player set up, as if the person living there could watch Star Wars or something while sitting in the woods. All this under a tailgating awning, torn, ripped and bent all to hell.

If these people stayed out here in the winter they would have frozen to death, doubtlessly.

Sometimes I find old homeless camps, usually not looking like they were occupied for more than a few days or a couple weeks, some being made out of an old trailer or something, but never have I seen them in this concentration before.

Just an interesting thing to mention here.