Didn't find what I was looking for, but I found.

I found a cemetery on a gravel road. It was a pocket tucked into the forest, a room carved out between trees. The barbed wired gate was pressed down by a fallen limb, an invitation to step over, old graves pining for attention. The grass was shaggy and long. An arrangement of ceramic magnolia blossoms lay like the exposed face of a man buried. Broken, caked with dirt, a loom for for spider webs, I almost tread on them. The sun broke through a pane in the forest, highlighting a group of tombstones against the far wall that had been erected but not engraved, names and dates painted in black, deaths in 1958 and 1964 marked cheaply, but marked. A dirt mound sat in the center on haunches, unshaven, sprinkled with tiny blossoms, each with october blue petals that faded to lavender in the center, thin and quiet.

I took pictures of that cemetery and more. A horse found a huddle of trees near the road, enjoying the shade, and I'm not sure if he liked the view of the road. His eyes were frozen blue, almost white. I wondered if he were blind.

I came to an old church that I'd been to before, built at the beginning of the 19th century, and the frame counter on my camera showed 25, time to change rolls.

Empty.
Nothing.
No film.

How could I not notice? I was at that church because I defied my instincts and experience, turned left on pavement found rather than reenter a gravel road that was carved into the land with walls of dirt on each side. I remember how to find that road, I'll see where it goes someday. But the empty camera soured me.

I want to make note of those flowers and the blind horse, they might not be there on a return trip.

Was the day a waste? No. I got lost, found new roads to revisit and still yet more untaken that another day might find. Was it a good day? Not hardly, but the reasons for that are personal and having nothing to do with that camera or not finding Ashland.