The exit sign for route AB is not new. Ive driven past it a hundred times without looking at it because there was no reason to look at it, its a green sign with white letters, that is the entire category of object it belongs to, until Tuesday when I actually looked at it and realized something. Its the same exit. Not a similar exit, not an exit like it. The same one. The white truck took this ramp back in March, I have the timestamps, the second route pass is still up if anyone wants to check it against this, I keep the dates so I dont have to keep retyping them from memory every time something else lines up with something else.

Two letters. AB. Somebody in a district office picked those letters for a designation decades before I was ever going to be driving past it and I understand that, Im not saying the department of transportation knew my name, Im saying a designation gets picked once and then it sits there doing its job for fifty years without anybody re-picking it, and a thing that sits still that long becomes load bearing whether anyone meant it to or not. AB. Alpha bravo if you want to be formal about it and I dont, formal is for people who havent been paying attention this long.

Behind the guardrail theres a fenced hill. Chain link, the kind with the green privacy slats half rotted out of it so you can still see through in patches, and under the fence the grass is mowed in RINGS, not rows, rings, somebody drives that mower in circles around whatever is actually under there instead of back and forth like every other marked easement on that road for six miles either direction, I checked, I drove it both ways to check. Some guy emailed me last year asking if I chase crop circles. Actual crop circles. Aliens. Like Im standing in a field at 3am with a plank and a length of rope. I do not do that and I have never done that, I document what is already sitting there in daylight, I dont manufacture the pattern and Im not interested in the ones some bored teenager flattened into somebodys wheat in 1998, that email is still sitting in my inbox unanswered and its going to stay that way. I dont know what the hill covers. I know the grass grows in rings and I know its directly behind the exit the truck used and Im not required to know both of those things mean something before I write them down.

Thats three markers on one ramp if the truck pages count for anything, and I think they count for something. Im going back through that exit again this week, same time, and Im going to get closer to the fence this time, I didnt get close enough Tuesday, I know I didnt, I was still driving.

UPDATE 9/6:

Went back. Not this week like I said up there, that was Tuesday's plan and Tuesday's plan didn't survive Tuesday, I went last night instead, after dark, because the daylight version of me kept finding a reason to keep driving past the shoulder instead of stopping on it.

I got closer. not close, closer, theres a difference and Im not pretending Ive closed it yet. Pulled onto the gravel past the guardrail, hazards on, for maybe ninety seconds before a truck came up behind me too fast and I had to pull back onto the ramp. ninety seconds, I timed it off my phone after because I didnt trust my own count in the moment. In ninety seconds the camera couldnt hold an exposure long enough for the grass at that distance in that dark, everything under the fence line just went to black... which is its own kind of answer honestly. But above the fence, above where the rings are, theres a treeline I never once looked at in March because who looks up at a treeline doing sixty. it doesnt read as trees first. it reads as one shape, one solid mass against the glow off the highway lights, and only after you stare does it split back into branches, like your eyes have to be told twice its trees and not something holding still over the hill.

Hazards remind me of my fathers truck, the amber ones that stuck half the time, nothing to do with any of this, putting it down anyway because it came up. anyway. The white truck took that ramp in march, I already have the pages up top, the second pass is still there if you want the dates again, Im not retyping march a third time this year. Fence has been ringed since at least march. Now theres a canopy over the ring Im only noticing in september, identicle rings, different season, same grass. Which means either the trees have always looked like that and I never once looked up, or somebody let that canopy grow in on purpose to cover the hill from above the same way the mowing pattern covers it from the ground. Two ways to hide the same hill I guess, one from the road and maybe one from whatever flies over it, I dont know how else to put it and Im not going to dress it up cleaner than that. Keeps reminding me of the building with the two sightlines, not the same operation, Im not saying that, Im saying I now know two places built to be watched from more than one angle at once and I only found the second one by accident.

Ninety seconds isnt enough, not for what Im actually trying to get, so next time Im bringing the longer lens and Im not doing the hazards again. parking further up. walking back instead.