Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

It was a hot, sunny day in Northern Alabama. I was walking along in the late morning, soaked as usual with perspiration caused by the heat and humidity. There was a little house to the left. I guess it had a bedroom or two with maybe 500 square feet of living area. It was a light brown color and had a porch across its meager front. Next to it was a gray building of perhaps 20,000 square feet.

That is right, my guess of 20,000 square feet. The gray building was at least 200 feet long and about 100 feet deep. It was only one story tall with a slightly pitched roof.

This building had one regular door – the kind that you have on the front of your house that allows one person at a time. There were no windows. There were no signs anywhere indicating that this was a warehouse or a factory or a mini-storage or anything of the sort.

It was inexplicable – no explanation. For all I know Osama Bin-Laden’s brother lived in there with Salmon Rushdie and Elvis.

A year earlier shortly after noon I was walking in Southern Virginia. Rising out of a large, flattened (by tractors) field was what looked like an airplane hanger. It had a giant semi-circular frame like a quonset hut. It’s “roof” was a brilliant blue fabric stretched over the frame. There was nothing inside this  giant  blue quonset hut. No explanation; it was just sitting there in the middle of a field.

I saw several such buildings while taking a walk. They were

• too big
• too small
• the wrong color
• made of the wrong materials
• or had any number of other characteristics that simply didn’t fit

Perhaps I have spent too many years living near Washington D.C. Perhaps I have worked on  too many strange engineering projects. Perhaps my mind wonders and wanders too much when I walk all day in the sun. But there they were, these inexplicable buildings.