But Whitman didn't get the point of urban exploration. He saw the tunnel in negative terms. For a true devotee, however, the cold, damp, silent darkness of a tunnel or an abandoned apartment complex or a deserted factory is exactly the goal. The spooky attraction of the eerie past: I suspect that's what a much later explorer felt in 1980 when he uncovered that same Atlantic Avenue tunnel 119 years after it was barricaded and forgotten.
A major modern instance of urban exploration occurred recently in the Paris catacombs. Those catacombs are part of a 170-mile tunnel system beneath Paris, the consequence of quarry work that over many centuries provided building materials for the city. In the 1700s, some of the tunnels were used to store thousands of corpses when Parisian cemeteries exhausted their space. In September of 2004, a French police team on a training exercise found a fully equipped movie theater among the bones. Seats had been carved into the rock. A small adjoining cave functioned as a bar and restaurant, with whiskey bottles on display along with professional electrical and telephone systems. Another major example occurred in Moscow in October of 2002 when Chechen rebels seized control of a theater. After the military surrounded the building, a Russian urban explorer guided soldiers inside through a forgotten tunnel.
Some of this is adventuring in a basic sense. But I think that there are also psychological implications. As I note in Creepers, our world is so fraught with elevated threat levels that it makes a lot of sense to retreat to the past. Old buildings can be a refuge, drawing us back to what we imagine were simple and less stressful times. In my youth, the deserted apartment complex provided an escape from the turmoil of my family. I was a time traveler, finding sanctuary in a past that appealed to my imagination and in which there were never any arguments.
In my youth. As an adult, I now have a different perspective, one with deeper, less comfortable implications. To me, old buildings have become like old photographs. They remind me how swiftly time passes. The past they evoke draws attention to my ultimate future. They are an opportunity for reflection.
I recently had the chance to visit the high school I attended more than forty years ago. A part of it had burned to the ground. Most of the remainder has been boarded shut for a decade. When I entered, a hazard team was checking for asbestos, lead paint, and mold, prior to the school's renovation. It's amazing what years of disuse can do, especially when broken windows allow rain and snow to intrude. In disturbingly silent hallways, the hardwood floors were buckled. Plaster drooped from the ceilings. Paint strips hung from the walls. But in my memory, everything was clean and well maintained. I envisioned students and teachers filling the noisy corridors. The trouble is, many of those students and teachers have long since died. In the midst of decay, my imagination conjured youth and the promise of hope, gone just as the school would soon be gone.
I wonder if deserted buildings are vessels to which children bring a sense of wonder and adults bring their unacknowledged fears. When I obeyed the compulsion to visit that wreck of a school, was I unintentionally confronting my own mortality? But my visit had a safety that urban exploration doesn't. Infiltrating forbidden sites, investigating the decay of the past, creepers flirt with danger. Any moment, a floor might give way, a wall topple, or a stairway collapse. Creepers challenge the past to do its worst. With each successful expedition, they emerge victorious from another confrontation with age and decay. For a handful of hours, they live intensely. Obsessed with the past, perhaps they hope to postpone their inevitable future. Or perhaps they feel reassured that the past lingers palpably into the present and that something about their past might linger after they're gone.
When my fifteen-year-old son Matthew was dying from bone cancer, his most plaintive statement was, "But no one will remember me." Memento mon. Maybe that's what urban exploration is all about. Is an obsession with the past another way of hoping that something about us will linger, that years from now someone will explore where we lived and feel our lingering presence? That phonograph album I found. The distant hiss I listened to just as someone listened to that same platter decades earlier. "Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine." It's a song about time, which is basically what all stories come down to. In the lyric, a young man says he's got a lonesome feeling. But as I think back to that apartment complex and the deserted rooms I wandered through- the abandoned sofas, chairs, lamps, and pots-I didn't feel alone.
– David Morrell Santa Fe, New Mexico
RESOURCES
Visit the following Internet sites for more information about urban exploring. They are representative of thousands of others. Some have links to other sites.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There, he also met the distinguished fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That "father" of all modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them national bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries). Eventually wearying of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full-time.
Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell's life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.