Slag under my nose

I call it slag. I don't know where I learned that word and can't remember ever using it before.

Slag is what I call that which I have found on a old railroad bed that I have walked many times over the 21 years I have lived here. It is a visually striking rock; it must have been molten once; it is bulbous and extravagantly pock-marked and tortured looking. It can have convexities in ways that rock rarely has. Perhaps it could be pumice or one of the other igneous rocks of that ilk though I suspect it is man-made. It is full of bubbles and cavities and can have a smooth shiny surface like a liquid frozen in it's tracks. It can have colors unusual for rock: a shiny red-brown with patches of bright powdery yellow.

Now that I have noticed it, I see it everywhere on that old railroad bed, never used by the railroad as long as I've been here. Perhaps slag is particularly subject to the frost heaving that happens this time of year, that force which churns up the usually solid ground; the same force responsible for potholes in our roads. I fill my pockets with it until I must look something like the squirrels fleeing bird-feeders with bulging cheeks.

Probably it was just waste, used as fill, used to build up the bed, from some long-gone industrial site. I am so curious where it came from and how long it's been there. There is so much of it that perhaps at some point I'll get sick of it, ignore it, even kick it out of my way.

And the reason why I finally noticed this noteworthy part of my environment? It is because suddenly I am outside the rat-race, a casualty of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. My pace of life has slowed and I have started to look again, like a child, at my world.