The
best places you find are always not exactly what you were looking
for. And that is precisely what we found a few weeks ago.
Our
friend Marissa had visited and brought her housewarming gifts to the
#shamhouse. Among the Nerf guns and adult beverages, and after
talking about recent horror movies with Dylan and I, she had her new
high-end camera in tow and was incredibly excited about it. Even
though it was a similar model to one that we use, I gave her a hard
time about it, telling her that she should co-star with Zooey
Deschanel in a new movie, considering how “fresh and hip” the
device was. You know, age and technology jokes! Wocka wocka.
Well,
after breakfast at the diner, she wanted to go to a nearby park to
get some pictures. She was going back to her hippie lovefest in
California soon, so she wanted to capture some of the greenery she
had grown up around. Since I was (and still am) relatively new to
Piscataway and our suburbs, I did not really know of any decent
parks. A quick search on my phone brought up some suggestions, but
none of their names really stuck out or seemed familiar, so I
arbitrarily chose one and we were off.
Anyone
familiar with central-to-north Jersey knows that driving anywhere at
anytime of day is a terrible idea. The GPS told us we were about
twenty minutes away and I had no idea where we were actually heading.
I began having my doubts when the route became increasingly
industrial and the landscape increasingly less green. The traffic was
getting worse, but our surroundings momentarily opened up. We were
driving with a row of residential homes on our left and a weed-taken,
knotty field on our right when something caught my eye. There, in the
field, was a small, broken, residential property. They did not look
like farmhouses. They looked like someone plucked two houses from a
random piece of suburbia and placed them in this field.
“Well,
make a decision. I can keep driving to this place that we don’t
even know is a park, or we can check out that.”
We
were both anxiously glancing back to the shrinking property.
“Uh...”
“To
hell with it.”
I
immediately swing into the nearest turn-off, into a small cul-de-sac
of houses and parked the car. Some of the nice residents were doing
yard work and we tried not to make a scene as we rapidly deserted the
vehicle and jogged back to the main road. I am sure they deal with
this a lot, so I appreciate their whole not-calling-the-authorities.
There was about two hundred yards from the road to the houses, and
the entire time, I was aware of just how exposed we really were to
anyone passing by. I mean, we were realistically running across a
business highway into an obviously abandoned property. And we
obviously had no business there. But we did not care as we reached
the mouth of a lane that rose in the dirt on the side of the busy
road.
About
ten feet off of the road was a chain lazily draped over a dirt path,
with the tell-tale “no trespassing” sign. There was also a large,
molding log blocking the road from vehicular access. Things got
exponentially more interesting from here. We realized that this path
rose up and not only passed these two (pretty) houses, but kept going
into the field. The field crested into a hill lined with shrubbery
and a few trees, so we could not see too far beyond them. With the
busy road behind us, I willed to check out the path first, before the
buildings, because I did not know how much time we would actually
have before someone showed up. Admittedly, I was nervous.
As
we crested the hill, anxiety was replaced with wanderlust. Although
the two houses we passed seemed to just be out of place buildings,
they very well may have been farmhouses. What appeared to be one
property, that was linked by this dirt path, had opened up to us. As
we followed along we realized that this land also contained an entire
other house, a shop front and small warehouse, a silo, a greenhouse,
and a small garage hangar, all in varying stages of dilapidation and
disrepair. Some looked just fine; others were piles of concrete and
rusted iron. Many of the structures were branded with a circular
symbol which we assumed to indicate either asbestos or some other
condemning presence.
We
made our way around the buildings and took a lot of pictures. The
most memorable structure was the garage-type arch that was collapsed
in the front. It looked like something straight out of the Fallout
video game franchise or a place you would find in Star Wars. Easily
the most terrifying was what appeared to be an old storefront. The
building was average enough, but the owners seemed to have
indiscriminately added on and had built structurally unsound
additions and compartments to the original. Some doors opened to
alleyways that were only inches wide and half-filled with dirt and
glass. Walls would be rowed with doors of irregular and mismatched
heights, with large panes of broken glass dotting others.
Some ceilings opened up to reveal the skeleton of a second-story that
never truly was. In the center of the sunlight-blocking building was
a cement room. On one of its walls was a small, machine-cut doorway,
only two or three feet high. We could only see darkness within. What
was the purpose of such a useless, little compartment? Probably
storage, but our minds, ever stuck in an adventurous-set, assumed
something more sinister. That’s half the fun, eh?
On
the way back, we stopped near the two houses that had originally
caught my eye. The door to one was blown open and oddly inviting. It
was your typical two-story American home. It couldn’t have been
more than ten years abandoned. It was still far too clean and modern
for any alternative. The best part of this place was the children’s
drawings and coloring book tear-outs that lined the small stairway
into the attic, which was completely uninhabitable. Some rooms,
especially the corners and ceilings, revealed the presence of light
wildlife occupation. Birds and the like. One window even had a nest
tucked firmly between the two panes of glass.
The
second building was much closer to the road and looked to be much
more locked down and secured with wooden boards. We decided that we
had tested our luck enough and it was time to go back to the car. We
only took with us memories and photographs, but the nature of the
place, its condition, its unknown history, left us scratching our
heads. It was a beautiful piece of land and probably profitable. Why
couldn’t they just doze the unsafe structures? It was not as if
they were afraid to rebuild portions themselves, by the look of the
warehouses. Why... nevermind. Perhaps some things are better left
unanswered. Let us pretend that some horror-movie-quality incident
happened and this charming family is on the run from some ethereal
being, leaving this beloved farmstead behind.
