Unseen Corner, Rt. 12, Avon, N. C.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Much of our current environment becomes invisible to us over time. Like a virus that we’ve built up immunity to, we simply don’t “bother” seeing it anymore. This can lead to some odd decisions in infrastructure placement and appearance. Cartoonist R. Crumb went through a period of drawing power poles, wires, and the huge (dangerous) hanging transformers above our heads. Most European countries ban overhead power hardware, so these places look oddly bare to us when we first travel there.

The current photo is a corner on highway 12 in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The block behind this corner is a stretch of beach houses owned by one realty company. Their “branding” is to have some alternating white and red bougainvilleas on each corner of Rt. 12, which essentially is the only major road on this very thin strip of land. The traffic light control box was planted in the middle of this set of bougainvilleas, which appear cloudy/smoky due to their moving in the high wind during the time exposure. The box at the top of the frame is the remote control interface. This is the “hurricane evacuation route” and so probably requires immediate remote control during evacuations. No one “sees” this corner, so several cars and trucks stopped in the middle of the road (it was late and traffic was sparse) to ask what I was taking a picture of. None of my answers seems to satisfy, although they drove off after a comment or two, or a guffaw.