There is loneliness in abandonment. Like a baby’s sock spied on the sidewalk. You know the baby kicked it off, and the parent is later annoyed by an unpaired sock. Yet, you see a single sock alone on the concrete, maybe it has a ruffle and little multi-colored hearts, and your heart breaks. Just a little.

Combing though boxes at a yard sale–and seriously what the hell are we doing going through other folks’ castoffs??–there’s that beat up puzzle box. It’s likely missing two or three pieces. You find the beat up box next to an old Barbie with a fright wig style hairdo. She’s always naked. And her twist and turn waist is seriously wrong.  Pawing through, there may be a few stacking blocks, the ones with the ABCs, rattling around. I guess someone just couldn’t throw it out. So you are stuck with their melancholy just because you were hoping for… Oh, nevermind. Don’t go to yard sales.

Even a car up on blocks in a front yard, once you push past the eyesoreness, is mournful. Especially when you see it in front of a short boxy house with a mostly sunken roof and peeling siding framed by what had been a screened in porch. Today, though, the door flaps in the wind and makes a loud clapping sound when it tries to fit in its frame. The porch is minus much of the screen. You can see the broken couch that would have been hidden on the porch. Nobody is there. But the couch, a pile of mail overflowing the mailbox and an old green hose snaking from the side of the house toward the rusting car makes it clear that was not always true.

Driving on NC-12 reveals the remains of what had been the Waterfall Action Park in Rodanthe. First, what an odd name. What were they trying to sell? Anyway, it was built in 1980 but had the look of the worst of a 60’s amusement park. Passing by, it looks like it was abandoned 30 years ago. The grass is growing through cracks in the concrete. The chutes and flumes of what must have been the water action slides are both sun bleached and misshapen. There is almost no color left. Everything is askance and a silvery grey-white, with maybe a darker gray that was once blue.

The park was big and spanned both sides of the highway. There was a putt-putt golf course and two or three go-kart courses. All that is left is a bunch of old tires and the curve of the concrete that the absent carts dragged across. Seeing this wretched wreck over the past few years makes me mourn a past that I never knew.

This wreckage, despite its full ruin, is all of four years old. After a one-year decline, due to the founder’s death, Hurricane Sandy ripped through. In less than two years, this “action park” became an inaction eyesore.

Like that. The story isn’t ancient history, although the site looks it. It’s more like the missing sock from a baby’s foot. Immediate. Transient. And sad.