Tresspassing

I recently took a trip down to the Charlotte area to visit a few friends.  I left early in the afternoon, early enough that I would have time for at least one photographic adventure on the way down.  I had decided that I would just truck along until I found a nice little detour.  I eventually found it when deciding to take highway 29 off of I85 in search of a location.  As you can see from the map embedded below that opportunity came almost as soon as I could exit the interstate.

I honestly have no idea what it is that I found.  The water towers were printed indicating that it maybe was the North Carolina Finishing Company.  I noticed that in the satellite view that whatever it was still stood at the time of the satellite imagery.  This is certainly not the case any longer.  Whatever it once was, it is now completely leveled.  I saw a few old broken down pickup trucks and heavy equipment, but overall it appeared to be deserted.  The one exception was a 18-20 foot camping trailer that was parked in an empty lot nearby.  This looked like it might be occupied, but possibly not at the moment.

Things looked quiet enough so I parked the car, grabbed my gear, and set out to capture some photos.  I have included a few here and more at my flickr site.  There are still more to be edited on my laptop, although many are fairly repetitious.  It was certainly an interesting site to photograph and given more time I’m sure I would have taken more shots.  Most of it was photographed from open land, however, some of the site was behind a chain link fence.  The vehicle gate was chained shut, but the pedestrian gate didn’t even have a gate anymore.  I didn’t see any tresspassing signs specifically, but it seemed pretty clear that it was.

After about 30 minutes of shooting I took a look around and noticed a figure in the distance moving along the side of the road.  It was a man, older guy, maybe around 70 from the distance I was viewing.  He looked to be the type of guy that could occupy a camping trailer parked out in an empty lot next to a demolished factory.  With this I decided to head back to my car.

As I approached my vehicle, so did the old man.  I could see now that he was pushing along a Vespa-like scooter and was dressed in some rather large and worn overalls.  We were equidistant to my car and once we were near enough, about 100 yards, he addressed me.  He asked what it was I was doing behind the fence.  I held up my camera and stated that I was taking some photos.  He responded by saying, “Did ya’ ever think that maybe somebody didn’t want no photos taken behind their fence?!?”, in a heavy southern drawl.  At this point we were both about 10 feet from the car and I decided that this old man wasn’t worth the fight.  I simply said to him, “Sorry buddy, I’m leaving”, jumped in my car slammed the door shut and took off while he angrilly shook his fist at me.

I looked in the rearview mirror and could see he didn’t have any fight in him today.  He just looked off at me, making no attempt to make chase.  In hindsight it was all pretty comical.  I do wish I had snapped a few shots of him and the trailer.  He probably wasn’t any real threat to me.  Although you never know what kind of firearm he had stashed in the scooter or the trailer.  Seems pretty likely that a 12 guage was lurking not far away.