Urban Exploration. . .Sort Of

I'm not very physically adventurous (as opposed to what? mentally adventurous? emotionally adventurous?) by nature. I sometimes pretend otherwise, but the truth is that I prefer a stroll to a hike, I don't like getting dirty, and I am nothing if not civilly obedient. Despite all this, I was determined to give urban exploration a tentative try so I put on my sandals, grabbed my camera, and stepped out of my apartment. I didn't have a specific place to explore already in mind so I decided to walk to the public library (as good a destination as any) and see what I found on the way. To facilitate exploration and avoid arrest I made the following ground rules:

1. I would try doors, peer through windows, and just generally snoop around any likely buildings I encountered (excluding houses).



2. I would not break in anywhere or pass posted "no trespassing" signs.
   
   

Ground rules in place I started down the hill.

I have only lived in my apartment for a couple of weeks, so I haven't made any habitual walking paths. This time, I decided to take Grand (even though south Grand is possibly the most uninspiring street in town) because I knew there were a couple abandoned buildings and sheds along it. I came to the first of these, an old car-repair shop, and peered in the windows. The street behind me seemed particularly busy and behind all the tinted windows of the cars passing I imagined manicured women and grumpy old men flipping open their cell phones to report a suspicious person poking around an abandoned building. In short, I chickened out and when the front door was locked, I didn't make any serious attempt to find another way in.

I kept walking and soon came to a more promising site. I'm not sure who owns the shed, but from a distance I could see that the door was opened.

When I got closer, however, I noticed the SUV parked in front of the door and saw the man and woman walking in and out. I did not investigate.

I used to have this dream. I was in my grandma's basement and I found a door that I had never seen before. It wasn't hidden. It was just sitting there, unnoticed. In the dream, I opened the door and found a spiral staircase that run from the basement to an attic that didn't exist in the real house. It was one of my favorite dreams because it let me feel like I was in on a secret. It let me feel like I had discovered something special.

So far, things weren't going too well. I hadn't really seen anything all that interesting and it was hot and noisy on Grand so I decided to go back a little way up the hill and take the residential streets. I was on my way up the hill when I saw this alley.

I turned down it, grateful to walk in the shade.

When I was about eight my sister took me with her to an audition for A Midsummer Night's Dream at the community college. I read for one of the fairies (Peasblossom I think) and then was entirely ignored while the director tried the adults in various combinations as the four lovers. I slipped out of my seat and wandered to the back of the theater. Nobody noticed. I wandered around the back and found a door in a wall facing the stage. It was cracked open. I eased it open and stepped through. It was the light booth. I looked out of the big window in the front and could see my sister and the others moving around on the stage and hear their voices muffled through the concrete and glass. Next to the door I entered was a spiral staircase that went up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Over the next half hour, I followed it both directions. I went up and tiptoed onto the catwalks that were bolted to the roof to give access to the lights. I went down and wandered through the tunnel that ran under the stage from one side to the other. I explored the open costume shop, running my fingers through the period dresses and trying on the old fashioned hats. No one saw me and no one stopped me.

I think that afternoon was the moment when I first began to fall in love with the theatre. It's funny now to think back on it and realize that my obsession with acting and play production began not with acting or play production but with that intimate and thrilling (largely because I knew it was illicit) knowledge of a space. When you are in a play, you are granted access to a view that is denied to the audience. You see the underside of the play. You stand unseen above the actors. You hear their footsteps above your head. You get to be an insider.

I walked down the alley for a while. On the left I could hear a woman in her backyard scolding her dogs. On the right the hill ran down to the flat roofs of buildings that faced the street below. I walked over and peered down the bank to where the roofs started. Their were stairs that ran down the hill and into back doors in several places. Looking down, I was pretty sure that I could walk down the stairs, climb on the railing, and pull myself up on to the roof. I stood there for a while trying to work up the gumption. I looked up and down the alley and saw no one. I even took a couple of steps toward the stairs before I hesitated and then made a decision. I turned back down the alley and kept walking.

I was disappointed in myself for being such a wimp. I thought about going back and trying it but I knew that I would never really do it. Still, I did see some cool things in the alley like this bench.

and this overgrown hedge rose.

Near the hedge rose I came to a place where on of the roofs came up to almost level with the path I was on. It was literally just a small step from the hill to the roof. I couldn't rationalize not trying this one. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching me and stepped across.

I hurried to the far side of the chimney with some vague hope that it would make me less conspicuous from the alley. I sat down on the ledge and looked out at across the roof. I waited. Anxiously.

My mom is really into natural (and sometimes self-invented) medicine. Here is her cure for an infected finger: microwave a mug of water until it is scalding hot; submerge the infected finger in the water and hold it there until you can't stand it; remove finger until nerve endings stop screaming; repeat. Sitting on that roof was rather like this cure. Oh how I wanted to get off. I was breaking the rules! I would probably be arrested. I would lose my job. I would face public humiliation and disgrace. Boy I was tense, but I stuck it out because even in the midst of my internal prophecy of doom, I believed that sitting on that roof was good for my character. I do things like this to myself from time to time. I force myself to ignore my own anti-social tendencies and go to a party or I will suddenly decide I am becoming to reliant on my routines and make myself change them or I might sense some growing vanity in my heart and make myself forgo makeup for a day. As I said, I'm not a very physically adventurous person but I recognize this (at least on some days) as a character flaw. Being on that roof, I thought, would be good therapy. I would stay there as long as I could stand it.

As long as I could stand it didn't turn out to be very long. I climbed off the roof and hurried out of the alley half expecting to hear police sirens in the distance. The sirens wouldn't have been necessary. Ala Discipline and Punish, I am adept at policing myself.

I came out the alley quite near the library, but also near the community center. I'd never been in there before and so I decided to wander around and see what kind of interesting places I could find my way into. I got in and wandered around the halls but all the interior doors were locked.

I peered in through the locks and saw rooms that would have been ordinary and uninteresting if they were accessible but because they were barred up became tantalizing and inviting.

Even without being able to get into the rooms though, I felt a small stir of excitement. The halls were cool and completely empty. I tiptoed down the halls and through the windows and bulletin boards on the wall I caught glimpses of what this place must be like on a weekday.

At the top of one of the side staircases I found an office. It was full of cabinets and a desk and chair all painted white and the sun was pouring in through the windows so that the whole room glowed. I wanted that office. I wanted it for my very own.

I covet buildings. I want to own them. I want to know all their nooks and crannies. I want to have their keys on my key rings. I think this hunger for ownership of a space in part comes from the restrictions of being a renter. I live in my apartment, but it isn't really mine. I can't paint the walls or tear out the front shrubs or drill holes in the walls (at least not with permission, but even my respect for authority has its limits). Maybe that is why seeing an abandoned or badly maintained building makes me angry. It's like neglecting a child. Well. Okay not really.

On my way down the hill from the community center I had my urban exploration breakthrough.
First I saw this.

Then I saw this.

I crawled underneath the fence and got inside.

It smelled like autumn. Unlike my time on the roof, I didn't have to force myself to stand there and unlike the sunny office I didn't feel any desire to own this little grove that had sprung up between two derelict buildings. I sat against the wall for a while and looked at the sun coming down through the branches.

Favorite Meal

It's hard to choose a favorite meal. My family celebrates nearly everything with food and in the years since the kids started leaving for college every homecoming is cause for celebration and each trip home is a blur of barbeques and baking and trips to the grocery store to restock the pantry.

But as I was thinking about it, I remembered a particular meal we used to make every year -- a meal I haven't eaten in far too long. It's called "peasandnewpotatoes" and it's not exactly the height of my family's culinary accomplishments. Boiled potatoes and peas in a plain white sauce speckled with black pepper is just about as exciting as it sounds, but it was special because it was a marker of spring coming back and the beginning of a summer full of trips to the farm to harvest sweet corn and climb the grain elevators and ride around in pick-up beds looking for kangaroo rats.

Preparing peas and new potatoes required a trip out of town across the Snake river, past the turn off to Burbank and all the way to red and white sign for Nedrow Farms. Once on the dirt road that crossed under the power lines we would take off our seatbelts (the only time our parents allowed such behavior) and stand up in the suburban lifting our hands off the seats in front of us and standing sideways like surfers bending our knees to absorb the shock of the potholes. We always stopped at the office first to buy a pop from the antiquated vending machine my dad kept stocked with Pepsi cans. I usually chose a Squirt and wiped the grime off the tab before openning and drinking it down in burp inducing gulps.

Then we'd pile back into the car and drive to the pea fields. A pea field, in case you've never visited one, doesn't smell like a potatoe field or an alfalfa field or a field of green wheat. It smells like peas. Green and sweet. I have a sharp memory of sitting on the top edge of plastic five gallon bucket in one of the pea fields. The edge of the bucket presses into my backside and the backs of my thighs as I grab the peas pods off the bushes (they make a satisfying pop when you pull them free) and shelled them into the bucket, snapping off the stem, sliding my fingernail into the seam until I could fit my thumb into the pod and run it down the length of the inside popping the peas free. Occassionally I would shell a pod directly into my hand and toss all the peas into my mouth at once to eat them raw.

After we had enough peas we would take the buckets and put them into the back of the Suburban and drive to the pea field. Mom always grilled Dad about how recently the field had been sprayed and Dad always reassured her (multiple times) that the potatoes were perfectly safe to eat. Dad would take a shovel and we would follow him into the field until we were past the scrawny plants on the edge and into the thick green ones that made up the central part of the circle. Dad dug the shovel in on one side of three or four hills of potatoes and loosened the dirt so that we could use our hands to pull up the vines and sift through the cool soil to find the potatoes. This time of year, the potatoes were small and round, probably no bigger than walnuts or chicken eggs, and the skin on them was so thin that even rubbing the dirt off with the palm of a hand would peel it off the flesh.

At home, my involvement in the process ended. Mom washed the potatoes and put them, skins and all, into a pot to boil. She didn't boil the peas, but made a white sauce and put the raw peas in it while it was on the stove just to warm them up not to cook them. Pour the sauce on the potatoes and eat it all together.

A few years ago, my dad stopped growing peas. They were too expensive and labor intensive. He switched to bluegrass seed. More recently, he put the farm up for sale. I keep expecting to feel some nostalgia for the place, some regret to see it go. So far it hasn't happened. The farm changed for all of us. The longer we stayed in the farming business the more business and less farming it began to feel. Tightening food safety regulations, rising operating costs, and increasingly demanding processors took the fun out of it.

It's been a long time since I had peas and new potatoes. I'm not even sure I want them again.