Nobody else really spends any time out here, except for teenagers some weekends who leave all their beer cans and bullshit behind, and the handfuls of homeless people who seem to pass through on occasion. She has never actually run into anyone camping out here, but when she sees a makeshift mattress pop up every now and then she makes the safe assumption. These are usually accompanied by a surrounding accumulation of gas station soda cups and food wrappers– where else are they going to put it, after all? If she had to sleep in a bush, she probably wouldn’t give a shit either.

She had been inspired in her youth, being an elementary school member of the Recycling Club, to come out here with trash bags and gardening gloves, and see if she could prevent the slow evolution from woods to landfill. She cleaned up for hours, came back several weekends in a row, and honestly got an impressive amount of garbage picked up. She had resolved to keep her own little patch of woods clean as best she could, but over time she realized that no matter how much trash she removed, there was always more. Some of it was stuck in the ground and she couldn’t dig it up, some of it was being used as a home by 300 insects, and she realized more from the overpass came floating down the shitty little stream when it rained.

She supposes she just got bored doing it all alone out here, and fed up with the whole project anyway. In her fit of burgeoning pre-teen angst she quit the recycling club before she started middle school, and that was the end of her extra-curricular lifestyle.

Pretty much nothing ever goes on in her life nowadays. One such as this is often swept up in the rush of a grand escape.