Abandoned Places
Have you ever found yourself in a place that people haven't been in for decades, possibly left as if they just turned the lights off and simply walked away, or left in complete ruins?
I can remember the first time I found myself in such a place. I was with my father and we were swimming in a river not too far from Houston, Texas. The river had a good current and a little waterfall not too far from where we were swimming. I had my fun doing this,but something drew me away from this place, I’m not too sure what or why it was, but I found myself up on the top of the banks looking out across a field with many pads made of concrete.
In my less than teenage mind, it hadn’t occurred to me what it was that I was looking at until my dad walked up to me and I asked him what it was. I was told that it was an entire neighborhood along there that’d been washed away many years ago. At least for me, it seemed like many years ago. I’m sure, looking back on it now from older eyes, that he probably meant less than a decade ago.
I tasked myself with exploring this place, thinking that there might be something neat to find there. The foundations of the houses where that grey, aged concrete you see in lots of places where the houses were gone, cracked and surrounded with tall grass where yards once were.
Sure enough, I began to find things around that had a story. The one thing I remember being a pile of adding machine keys from some long ago left device. I found only them, scattered along the ground next to a small pile of dirt and rocks.
For but a moment, I was fascinated by them as I held them in my hands and looked at them one after the other. There was something about them, something that held my mind and began to form early questions. It was as if I could feel the presence of fingers pressing those buttons and hear the clicking sounds they must have made on the plastic.
That sounds a little creepy I guess. I should rather say, it was like I could feel the presence of the person who pressed them. I don’t know why this comes to me now, so long after this place I was at and is only lost in foggy child memories, but for some reason, these days, I am seeing this stuff clearer than I ever have.
This has been an entire week of things like this, feeling impressions and memories of places long past either in my memories, which for some reason NOW come foreword for the first time since I made them, or things I pick up around places, almost like feeling the people and their presence in past places.
Another example, in my teens, we lived way out in Deerfield beach Florida. There were endless days exploring places in the overgrown woods around our neighborhood,back when ours was one of the first ones out there.
Along Hillsborough Boulevard, there were huge stands of trees and bushes, completely hiding what was there before all of the construction and development began.
You wouldn’t recognize it now,but back then, there was nothing but old and vacant land from people and industries that were there long before the complete plague of human pollution that inhabits that part of the state.
Way back in the woods, several hundred feet from that road, after you climbed the berms of leaves and dirt, mixed with thick bushes and trees, the forest opened into an incredible place, canopied with high branches, like a living dome of forest. In this place was the incredible ruins of a huge dairy farm, still barely standing. It was all there in its completeness.
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This was a good one acre area that you could walk in, with no bushes or anything else, just a matting of dead, fallen leaves. It was an eternal Autumn under the massive arms of long reaching trees from the edges of the place.
Under all of this stood the milking barns, filled with broken glass tubing, and an office room with old broken electronics and other machinery. The electronics turned out to be radio equipment used to communicate to vehicles out in the fields. Someone long ago, had broken and smashed everything in the place.
Part of the roof was partially collapsed in the area where the cattle were milked, but I got as deep in there as I could, but it was kinda weird. I could FEEL the place, I could touch the way it was. I could hear the machines and sense something about the place.
It wasn’t spooky or creepy like so many say, but like touching and feeling, even SMELLING and hearing another time. I had a million questions that I felt I was just on the edge of being able to answer. The rest of the building further back from the cattle area was not reachable safely.
I can still remember walking on those old thick plank floors, worn smooth buy who or whatever crossed them so many long years ago in that deep dark place in the semi collapsed part. There were a few chairs there and some twisted metal framework back there, next to old dusty and rusted machines that I had no idea what they were used for.
I went back the other way and entered an open room with the metal roof still intact. This was the office area, as much as I could tell. That was where I found the broken and destroyed radio equipment and piles of torn up user manuals for said equipment.
The equipment was vacuum tube based, and some of the sheets from the rubble had schematics and instructions for its operation. The high cinder block walls in this place and the sturdy metal roof allowed the paper in there to stay readable and the machinery to stay relatively clean even though it was all smashed by vandals.
I had a basic understanding of electronics, so this was like a goldmine to me. I found an old metal ,“axial flow blower”, that I took home in my bag and was able to get it to spin up! I thought that was pretty cool!
Here’s the weird thing though, I held these things in my hands and it occurred to me that other people worked with this equipment. There was something there, not nearly as much as other times, but handling the pages and the bits of equipment, you could kind of still sense it a little,but nothing like other things I’ve found in other places.
My impression of the whole place was that of peace, like a place you were welcome in. It felt good to be there under that immense dome of leaves and branches,like some kind of other world, cool, in the Florida heat. Thinking on it now, I don’t remember any birds or other animals in that space.
Back then, we didn’t have digital cameras or cellphone cameras, at least the majority of us. It was the time of the Commodore VIC-20 and such. I wish we did, because there is no real way other than memory to even be able to relate to you what it was like there. I went back to that space and areas around it many times before I moved away to another state.
That place as well as quite a few other ones, haunt my thoughts from time to time. They resurface here and there over the years, drawing me back to when I stood among them, feeling the air, hearing the world around me in my mind, and clearly remembering how it was, even the ground below my feet, hearing my footsteps as I walked around those places back then. Even the dry dustiness on the surfaces of things places my hands on. There’s a certain kind of dusty, dry, dirtiness you feel in those kinds of places. Every old place has it when people haven't been there.
More than this though, some of those places have an energy, for lack of abetter word, that you can open your mind to and touch a bubble of time or a frame of mind,a kind of feel for it. These kinds of places are alive, even though the people are long gone from them, filled with the echos.
When you are calm and alone, you can interact with them. For brief instances, you can “be there”,standing in the halls of some long deserted office or place, and can almost hear it all, but not fully grasp it solidly. Longing for understanding and the taste of it.
That is what it is, those abandoned places. That is what it means.
