The container yard at dawn

An original literary non-fiction-style account of looking across a freight yard from a public footbridge.

At first, the yard seemed to consist entirely of walls. Blue walls, brown walls, a single wall the colour of a peeled orange. They stood three high beneath the lamps, each narrow door crossed by iron bars. A few letters had flaked from the names along their sides. The boxes looked anonymous and heavily defended, as though every one contained the same important secret.

Then a small vehicle slipped between two stacks. Its amber light blinked against the metal, disappeared and returned further away. The whole arrangement changed when I saw someone moving through it. What had looked like a solid fortress became a set of passages, turns and working spaces. A man in a pale jacket walked out carrying a mug. He was so small against the doors that, for a moment, the mug seemed the least believable object in the yard.

A crane's shadow travelled over the boxes before the crane itself came into view. The spread of its frame filled the pale sky like a hand opening. It stopped above a container, lowered itself and held still. From the bridge, the pause seemed longer than the movement. Then a gap appeared beneath the box. The stack had lost a tooth.

Daylight reached the upper edges first. Scratches brightened; patches of rust turned from black to red. Below, the lamps still made little islands of yellow on the ground. I could now see a coat hanging inside the cab of the small vehicle. The yard had not become smaller or quieter. It had become inhabited, which was a different kind of change.

How does the writer use language to present the container yard as both imposing and a place of human activity?