William Morgan: Ruminating on the mysteries of the wasteland outside Savers
My wife, Carolyn, and I go to a Savers thrift store at least once a week. The five stores around Providence vary in quality, but the mother ship is the Savers on Branch Avenue, tucked between Interstate 95, the main line railroad tracks, and a scrap-metal yard. Carolyn goes in search of fabric, and I go to the bookshelves (what we call “The Library”) to find suitable reading that I will enjoy on an old couch in the furniture department (“The Lounge”).
The author reading at Savers.
_ Photo by Gabs Choinière. All other photos by William Morgan
The best part of my Savers experience, however, is taking a ramble around the parking lot and the scruffy land behind the store. This is a nasty patch of ground, yet its detritus – discarded wrappers, toys, bits of metal, and unrecognizable bits of trash – suggests a surreptitious nocturnal community. While not the ruins of Pompeii, say, these artifacts speak of an urban wasteland and plain American sloth. Surely, there are stories to be told here.
What of the child’s potty at the edge of the tracks where the MBTA and Amtrak trains roar past? This has been in the same spot for several months – presumably the child is now toilet-trained. Was it thrown from the train over the barbed wire from behind the Savers loading dock?
Depressing and sad, one expects a certain amount of drug paraphernalia. But then there are inevitably those little mouth harps on the asphalt. Is there a strong urge among Savers patrons to floss their teeth in the parking lot? Or, as I have been told, do these flossers have something to do with the partaking of illegal substances?
A recent perambulation lead me a stove top jammed up against the chain link fence separating Savers from the highway. Was the 4-top burner tossed from a speeding automobile, in the hopes that it might bounce as far as the store’s donation platform? Was it, perhaps, a dream prop for a homeless person?
And then there are ever-curious of bits of clothing. How exactly do jeans and a blue shirt get here? Perhaps someone, undressed for a tryst on the grass, fled suddenly when a flying stove top came sailing through the air?
Aside from fabric that comes into Carolyn’s workshop from Savers, not to mention almost my entire wardrobe of L.L. Bean, J.Crew, and Brooks Brothers castoffs, the store’s jetsam and flotsam could attract sociologists or archaeologists looking for suitable master’s thesis topics. Or perhaps there’s a new genre of Providence mystery writers waiting to spring out of the contaminated soil on Branch Avenue.
William Morgan, a Providence-based writer and photographer, has been contributing stories on cultural artifacts to the New England Diary for many years. He is the author of numerous books, including The Cape Cod Cottage, Monadnock Summer and Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States.