To notice the unnoticeable

For months, there’s been a galvanized metal bucket sitting upside-down in my front yard. I try to keep things neat and in their place here, but I walk past the bucket nearly every day, as if it’s invisible.

And that’s because it sort of is. I don’t see the bucket. Well, maybe I see the bucket, but I don’t notice that the bucket is out of place anymore. The bucket has been there for so long it’s as if the bucket has been there forever and that it’s meant to sit a few feet from the porch steps.

Like the metal bucket, there are a lot of things that are out of place in my county. For instance, an outsider driving down our country roads might notice that many of my neighbors dump their trash into the woods next to their houses—old couches, used tires, a busted trampoline, heaps of crushed beer cans. An outsider driving past such a dump might wonder, “Why would they dump their trash there? Why don’t they clean it up? Aren’t they ashamed?” I used to think those same thoughts. But I’ve learned that my neighbors, to their credit, no longer see the trash the same way I no longer see the bucket. To them, that torn-up old couch has blended in with its surroundings—the home, the woods, the gravel road. And while these folks might once have felt shame for their carelessness, those feelings are as forgotten as the old couch. I asked my housemate the other day about one of these makeshift wood-dumps on our road, and even though he’s driven past that dump five days a week for the past five years, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Hell, I hardly notice the dump anymore, and it’s been ages since I felt the twinge of moral indignation that I felt the first time I walked past it.

My county has a ton of “No Trespassing” signs. I’d guess that two out of five properties on my road have a sign telling people to stay off their land, even though most of them have never had problems with "trespassers." And like the metal bucket and the old couch, I think most people no longer see their “No Trespassing” signs. Maybe the sign was there when they moved in. Or maybe they put it up years ago when they heard from their neighbor that someone’s been hunting on private property. And twenty years later, the sign is still up. It’s become unnoticeable.

My project to take pictures of “No Trespassing” signs in my county would strike pretty much everyone around here as strange. “No Trespassing” signs are a part of the landscape, like birdfeeders, mailboxes, and pick-up trucks. And because my neighbors can’t view things from the vantage point of an outsider, they can’t see that their homes are hideously decorated with unwelcoming warnings that, in most cases, serve no purpose whatsoever.

A “No Trespassing” sign seems like a good metaphor for all that we rarely notice but that is always within or around us: a deeply-rooted racial prejudice, the unethical treatment of the factory farm animals we eat, a bloated defense budget. The more normal the norm, the more difficult it is to notice. It seems the only antidote is to, if just for a moment, force ourselves to view the world as if for the first time, to bring all things new and old into focus, and to engage the world with a deliberate perspicacity.