Why are some people such jerks?
Of course, “jerks” was not the word a buddy and I used when we hiked up Mount Misery in Voluntown’s Pachaug State Forest the other day, and I’ll also have to edit the reason we were so outraged.
Before I get ahead of myself, though, if you haven’t been to Mount Misery you should realize the name is a misnomer – not just because a hill that rises only 441 feet is hardly a mount, and also because the summit view of rolling hills and distant ponds is far from miserable. Supposedly the name was given to describe what farmers would face if they tried to grow crops in such rocky soil.
The ledge atop Mount Misery overhangs a sheer rock face, and a vandal or vandals had used this surface, measuring about 30 feet long and nearly 10 feet high, to spray-paint the filthiest graffiti you’ll see outside of a men’s room wall.
Defacing nature is offensive enough when it’s simply initials carved on a tree, but this was a perverse abomination of foul language and vulgar drawings that could not be written off simply as the work of a dumb kid with a spray can.
My friend, who doesn’t want his name printed, doesn’t offend easily, but he was so disturbed by the gross images and the fact that Mount Misery is such a popular family destination that he decided to do something. He called the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the 24,000-acre state forest.
I know what’s going through your mind. You’re rolling your eyes right now, thinking, yeah, fat lot of good that probably did.
Well, you don’t know my friend and how persistent he can be when he’s on a mission.
After a few days of playing phone tag he finally spoke with a DEP official, and guess what: The state worker apologized for the delay in returning my friend’s calls and encouraged him, and any anybody else who spots vandalism or graffiti on state property, to notify authorities immediately. Then he told my friend that earlier this week a work crew went to Mount Misery with brushes and a can of gray paint and covered over the foul graffiti.
So my friend and I went there to check out the hasty repair job.
Was this the best solution? Of course not. The gray cover-up paint, though less visible than the bright yellow, red, blue and white used by the vandal(s), still offends the eye. I hope the state eventually gets around to removing this stain along with what it conceals.
A much better solution would have been if the perpetrator had been caught and forced to clean his drawings with a toothbrush. The best situation, my friend and I joked with bitter laughter as we surveyed the scene of the crime, would have been if the overhang had collapsed and crushed the perpetrator(s) under tons of stone.
“I just don’t get it,” my friend mused, running his hand over the painted blotches. “Why are some people such (jerks)?”
There are several accesses to Mount Misery, including the Pachaug and Nehantic blue-blazed trails, along with a gravel forest road that passes only a few yards from the base of a path leading to the summit, but we had chosen a route of several miles that twisted through dense woods and across several streams. All that winding around allowed our conversation to meander, and we considered such topics as whether the various tribesmen who carved petroglyphs in prehistoric times would be considered vandals today, why such wall-scrawled messages as “Kilroy Was Here” endured, and why some people who got caught spray-painting public walls were hauled off to jail and others, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, became celebrated as Neo-expressionist artists whose works eventually sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We hadn’t reached any conclusions by the time we tramped back to my car a few hours later, other than it takes more than graffiti on a rock to spoil an afternoon in the woods. We both had smiles on our faces when we drove away.
Still, we’re not willing to forgive and forget, and neither is the state. Speak up if you know anything about this incident.