‘‘The Free Mattress Dump,’ ‘The Spring Brambles,’ or, in some circles, ‘The Tetanus Garden,’ is a thousand mattresses decaying in an otherwise abandoned Connecticut field. The seed of this strange crop was planted when a local farmer, disgusted at the surreptitious furniture dumping of his neighbors, offered a place to toss mattresses right where everyone would see them daily: on his plot of land next to the freeway. This shaming tactic failed spectacularly, the farmer having underestimated the number of old mattresses that were stored in houses for the perceived cost-prohibitiveness or geographical inaccessibility of local dumps. Too stubborn to admit he was wrong, the field has been lost to the mattresses.
Some say there is a treasure in the fields and that the farmer’s mistake was actually a ploy to frustrate would-be thieves and their amateur metal detectors. This is likely half-true by way of the country’s overall saturation with hidden treasure. This is a nation that buries things- valuable and dangerous. This is a country that sometimes forgets which is buried where.’
I don’t have the money to board Hector again so he comes with me into ‘The Spring Brambles’ and, being careful from all his many years of blindness, passes between the rusted springs without much issue. I don’t fare so well, which makes me thankful for the booster shots I sometimes pick up at free clinics and for the haphazard mess of papers in my bag, among which I found proof of a semi-recent tetanus vaccine and a suggestion that, finding myself torn ragged by dump-metal, I would only need to seek out an additional injection to cover my bases.
I am not quite ragged after an hour in ‘The Bramble,’ but the thrift-store leather jacket I bought as armor for this particular outing is missing a few of its unseemly patches and I am lost, despite being able to see the motorcycle and the freeway in the distance. The nature of the mattress springs is that they have a tendency toward entropical shift. Tangled as they are, a single break can release the tension required to reshape the web of metal as far as half a mile away, closing paths that were once safe and opening new, unmarked exits.
I was prepared for this and, as night falls and I experience the disorientation caused by a flashlight beam playing across the old mattresses, I make camp at the first available clearing and resign myself to a lightless evening under the stars with the mad twanging of tense metal as the only sound but for the distant passing of a car on the freeway. It’s said that Ranger visits ‘The Spring Brambles’ on Mondays and Fridays, armed with heavy wire cutters and puncture-resistant armor to help those who find themselves stranded as I do now.
Like most Americans, I have yet to shake my suspicion of rest. But it’s Wednesday which means, barring a clearing collapse, I will have a rare day of peace made mandatory by threat of harm.
Just the way I like it.
-traveler