Hiking with my mother through Redwood Park yesterday, I was coming down from the city's highs, taking in the damp leaves under my sneakers and the immense, humbling trees, when I looked up to see a small wooden fence against a rising hillside, and in front of it, a small platform made of slippery two-by-fours. The wood was old and had turned a green that almost matched the park's natural floor, but it rested on top of something hard and metal, still discernible through the moss. Between the plywood and the base were three metal padlocks, hanging equidistant across the platform.
Padlocks in the woods! A lock had never looked so strange. In the middle of an ancient redwood forest, where all of nature's most vulnerable secrest to survival take the beatings of visitors, weather, disease and exposure every day, there is something so important it needs to be kept under lock and key! The obvious explanation--that park rangers kept emergency or maintenance supplies there, and did their best to disguise the container--didn't even matter. The presence of security in the middle of the woods revealed the human urge for secrecy and containment in all of it's man-made paranoia. But still, it was powerful: For all that we could touch and see in the park, all of the opportunities for exchange, there remained something completely closed off and inaccessible. It felt offensive, in a way, to be meditating on one of nature's greatest creations, and be surreptiously accused of still maintaining some human desire to steal.
Padlocks in the forest--society's fears drive society's rules...
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