In which our intrepid hero visits a graveyard of an unusual sort…

One of the most interesting things about driving in a rural area is that many people treat their property—their land, their front yard, or even their porch—as their own personal junkyard.  Junked cars, old refrigerators, broken furniture—you name it, you can probably find it alongside the road somewhere.   Most of this junk is fairly predictable, but every now and then something will surprise you…

[Please note that you can click on every picture here to see a larger, better version of that picture]

As I was continuing my drive southeast of Buckeye Lake, I came across the vehicular equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits.  Someone’s property was full of junk, but not the usual sort of junk.  There was no rusted out Camaro here; rather, it was more like Hoarders for heavy equipment operators.  The yard was full of old, junked vehicles.  However, aside from one antique tractor (below), the vehicles tend to be highly unusual ones, like cranes and city buses.  I wanted very much to explore this bizarre graveyard, but the frequent “No Trespassing” signs warned me away.  However, I could take a few pictures from the side of the road.

It was quite odd to be in the middle of the countryside and find old city buses.

My camera, a Sony RX100, has a large number of different photo effects filters, as do most point and shoot cameras nowadays.  Most of them are not very useful.  One effect, however, an illustration effect, is to my mind quite good, better than a number of different Photoshop plug-ins I have tried over the years to achieve similar effects.  I thought the graveyard would look good with this effect, and it does.

The scene also looks good in high contrast black and white.

From another angle, you can see a second bus next to the first.  I am assuming it is a bus, but the lack of headlights almost makes me think that it is a streetcar.  That would be strange indeed, were it true.

As I’ve mentioned, shooting in summer is often much more attractive than shooting in winter or early spring, because Ohio is such a wonderfully verdant state (about which I have more to say in a later blog post).  However, one advantage to shooting “out of season” is that the lack of foliage sometimes reveals things to you that you otherwise never would have seen.  That’s what happened to me with the next couple of shots.  I was driving down a tiny one-lane road and caught something out of the corner of my eye through the trees and shrubs that lined the road.  It looked like a covered bridge.

This structure was curious enough for me to stop the car in the middle of the road (I was probably the only person to drive on that obscure lane all day long) and traipse over to the fence to get a better look (and shot).  It turned out that I had indeed seen a covered bridge, only the odd thing was that there was no road.  The bridge spanned a large pond and seemed to have been built for decorative purposes more than for any practical reason.  That’s a lot of effort to go through for something like that.

I thought I would include here a shot of something I see quite a bit in rural Ohio, but don’t generally take pictures of.  This is a large livestock building.  You can recognize such buildings because they are low to the ground and typically have elaborate fan systems (the oldest ones still standing just have ventilation systems).  The fans are needed because, inside the barn, the heat and the stench of urine and feces from some many animals jammed together in such small quarters is more than overwhelming—even with the fans.   My first guess would be that this structure holds pigs, but I could easily be wrong.

Let’s wind up this part of the excursion with a nice ruined home.  A nice dirt driveway winds up to this property, which once must have looked quite nice.  Now the whole structure is leaning, as if the foundation cracked or shifted, and it clearly hasn’t been lived in in many years.