Thoughts on Urban Exploration

  My friend recently told me that I was an anachronism.  I thought about it, and he may be right.  But I think my idea of being such most likely does not parallel with his.  Most girls my age, I'm speculating, who are considered to be "born in the wrong decade" would prefer to be likened with the free thinking flapper of the 20's (I'm referring to all the "bangs" out there), or perhaps find the nostalgia of the mid-century modern woman more to their taste (do I have to bring up the countless Mad Men dress up parties I'm forced to witness via Facebook...? :sigh:).  I am not swayed by such fashion, and although the beatnik era(s) are sexy and characterized by youth's beauty and all of that, I still find them a bit boring.

     Nope.  I'll take none of it.  But say I COULD choose who and where I'd be, I would change much more than my clothes. Without question, I would like to have been an golden age explorer. This probably means that I would have to be a man.  Cest la vie.  As long as it meant some queen out there would be willing to just GIVE me a few ships of my own, an army of workers, and as many sweaty wads of cash as my bright yellow pantaloons would allow, I believe I could die with a big, fat, gluttonous smile on my face...and probably in a ruin somewhere.  Hopefully in France.

     But I'm not Columbus, or Magellan, or Ponce de Leon, or Cortez, or any of those crazy cats.  I'm not even a trust fund baby, so my exploration is a touch more limited than these explorers' pampered, pantalooned butts.  I've come to terms with this, because what exploration really IS has very little to do with the scope of promised fame or fortune that fueled the curiosity of most of these figures.  It is about coming in behind somebody or something that happened.  It is finding a gem within a loud, chaotic, overpopulated world that has been frozen in time, untouched by our insane desire to bring everything up to date.  To mess around with it.  To make it better.

     Many of these places are untouched for a reason.  They are usually unwanted, unloved, or just flat out forgotten about.  They all go through this cycle of life, death, purgatory, re-recognition, and finally "rebirth"...if the real estate is valuable enough.  I like to find these places in "purgatory", so to speak; when their previous animation has been seemingly suspended, still hanging in the air...thick, and ghostly.  I love the feeling of standing in a room awash with dust, and finding something as trivial as a woman's hairpin, or a child's toy - any bit of insight into the people that inhabited the space before.  What you usually draw from it is probably going to be much more dramatic than what actually happened, but these places are playgrounds for the imagination.  They allow for the "anachronisms" of the world to time travel, if even just for an afternoon.

This TAL podcast is amazing and embodies everything that excites me about UE.

Dim the lights.  Put on a candle or two.  Enjoy.

Some photos of past explorations

Old job reports from an
abandoned airport control tower.