Ruins

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Ever visit or come across a ruin?  I don't mean a touristy ancient landmark or anything like that, but an actual abandoned ruin?  It's kind of creepy.  I wound up walking though an early 20th century ruined farm in Ft Drum, New York one winter, during a training exercise.

Historic ruins aren't abandoned.  They still FEEL occupied.  Likewise, construction sites - while being physically similar to ruins - don't feel abandoned.  Standing alone in a farmhouse that has been empty for 80 years when the temperature is -10F is a different story.  It doesn't feel haunted, it feels empty.  The sense of isolation is intense.  There's a feeling that the house is lying to you.  "This is shelter", it says...But you'd freeze to death if you believed it.

And when you walk back out, the feeling of isolation gets even worse.  Not a soul around you, for miles.  Nothing but wind and snow, not even an impression that people ever actually lived there, talked around the table, anything like that.

There's a point to all this, but I can't quite put it into words.

Would the last Roman to leave the Acropolis please turn out the lights?

[Juana]

I get it. There's an old winery, all boarded up and overgrown, in one of the surrounding towns of Fresno. Built in the late 1800s, it was abandoned in 1940. A friend and I snuck in it once and it was so lonely, even though there's a busy street in front. Out back, you can't hear the cars. It's just you, the rustle of dead grass, and the sound of your breathing. That lingers with you a while, quietly reminding you that that fate is always looming. Perhaps it is inevitable.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I get it. There's an old winery, all boarded up and overgrown, in one of the surrounding towns of Fresno. Built in the late 1800s, it was abandoned in 1940. A friend and I snuck in it once and it was so lonely, even though there's a busy street in front. Out back, you can't hear the cars. It's just you, the rustle of dead grass, and the sound of your breathing. That lingers with you a while, quietly reminding you that that fate is always looming. Perhaps it is inevitable.

Makes you want to read Percy Shelley.

Interesting story behind that poem, by the way.

[Juana]

I'll look it up. Thanks for the recommendation.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'll look it up. Thanks for the recommendation.

I am of course speaking of Ozymandius.  Thing is, he wrote it in a "duel" with another poet, over who could inspire the feeling of desolation more strongly.  The other guy did a hell of a job, too, but nobody really remembers his poem.

Shelley's:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Shelley

Horace Smith's:

IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
      Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
      The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
    "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
      "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
    "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
      Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
    The site of this forgotten Babylon.

    We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
    Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
      Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
    He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
      What powerful but unrecorded race
      Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

– Horace Smith.

[Juana]

Smith wins. That was much closer to home than hers, I must admit.


I did have an experience recently that was actually kind of fitting for both yours and Smith's. I was driving through a really shitty, really rough part of town on New Year's to drop off a friend and we hit a blackout area, where there is not a blink of light as far as the eye could see. The city has shut off the lights there, and in a few other areas of town. And when I say "shut off the lights", I mean the street lamps are off, the stop lights are off, every single business and strip mall light was off - all the lowered, isolated lights that just say "shut down for the night" were gone. This was "everybody as closed for business and abandoned" dark.

It had that "ruin" feel to it, the lying loneliness that you talked about, and maybe a little more to it, because we had JUST driven that street, a few hours before and it was lit just fine. So I guess that ruin feel can be much more sudden than an old farm house and a winery that's been falling apart since before WWII. That can happen to us, right now. The Lights are impermanent and could go out faster than we can deal with.

[Richter]

Reminds me of some of the old mill buildings back home.  Floors and bricks walls so full of smoke and motor oil they've forgotten how to decay.  They got painted up like fossils and forgot they were buildings once.  Timbers bigger than they make trees now propping up walls and floors.  I beams candy coated with leaded oil base paint in whatever color was cheap and surplus at the time.  HUGE shafts and gears hanging from the ceilings.  I know they were once part of massive drive trains, leather belt rigs that could run half the works on one boiler (you know, what they called the reactors that ate wood or coal with primitive plasma, before nuke piles)  Academically I knew that's what they did.  To the mind they were dinosaur bones.  The machines left behind were all built like tanks.  Built to last forever.  Heavy and cast, forgiving of jsut about any neglect, and disdainful of any abuse less than a 5 lb. sledge.  Great squatting curmudgeons made to DO, without even a passing fancy paid to what obsolescence might be.  The more I think about it, those ARE relics from a dead civilization.

[Cain]

I've spent what seems like half my life in such places.

I used to be in the Scouts.  And I didn't used to live too far away from Dartmoor and Exmoor.  Now both are fairly popular tourist destinations...but, hell, we were Scouts.  We didn't just walk off the beaten track, we invented entirely new ones, especially when racing other patrols to some hill or such.  We had maps, compasses and far too much energy for the comforts of civilised sight-seeing.

Lots of Dartmoor has been abandoned, over the centuries.  In Neolithic times it was rather popular, as evidenced by the tombs.  However, the weather changed, and people left.  All that remained were farmers and miners, and over the years, those have also been abandoned, leaving crumbling buildings and walls dotted over the landscape.

We'd spend all day walking through the foothills and rivers and ravines of the area, making way for some abandoned homestead or former factory to spend the night - scant protection against the wind and rain, but nevertheless worth it, given the sheer amount of the stuff.  And occasionally, we'd find something that wasn't on the map, and so would go exploring.

There were some superficially similar places in Peru, as well.  When travelling into the rainforest, we would frequently pass huts covered in red writing - I wasn't sure what it said, my Spanish was passable but I was hardly fluent, and besides in these parts of Peru the native languages tend to be more popular - and utterly abandoned.

Odd places, those.  One of the guys I was travelling with said he had seen similar things in Brazil, and the red writing was normally political slogans, but he wasn't so sure about this.

And then there was the abandoned town. 

Somewhere in southern Peru, between Arequipa and Caylloma Province, in the highlands, there is the burnt out shell of a former town.  Not marked on any map, the place clearly saw some kind of destructive end.  Scorch marks are evident on several buildings, as are what looks to my untrained eye to be marks where bullets struck the stone.  The houses were virtually empty, with only a few rotting remains.  I presume they were either evacuated before whatever happened there, or else looted afterwards.

If I had to guess, I would have said the place was caught up in the fighting between the Shining Path and the government, though it's beyond my ability to tell who might have been responsible.  Arequipa was where the group's founder worked, and where he recruited for the organization.  By the early 90s, the fighting was brutal, with entire villages being wiped off the map.  The Shining Path tended to prefer machetes to bullets, however...bullets are more expensive, after all.  Because of the level of indingenous support for the group, the government fought back with a near-genocidal policy of extermination...accusations are still made today that, in addition to ethnic cleansing and mass killings, chemical warfare was employed, along with the sterilization of indigenous women.

That place didn't feel empty.  It felt menacing, and while combing through the ruins was interesting, I was glad to be away when we left.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The Lights are impermanent and could go out faster than we can deal with.

And for those of you not in the trades, let me state that this eventuality can happen with incredible ease.

[Dildo Argentino]

Ever visit or come across a ruin?  I don't mean a touristy ancient landmark or anything like that, but an actual abandoned ruin?  It's kind of creepy.  I wound up walking though an early 20th century ruined farm in Ft Drum, New York one winter, during a training exercise.

Historic ruins aren't abandoned.  They still FEEL occupied.  Likewise, construction sites - while being physically similar to ruins - don't feel abandoned.  Standing alone in a farmhouse that has been empty for 80 years when the temperature is -10F is a different story.  It doesn't feel haunted, it feels empty.  The sense of isolation is intense.  There's a feeling that the house is lying to you.  "This is shelter", it says...But you'd freeze to death if you believed it.

And when you walk back out, the feeling of isolation gets even worse.  Not a soul around you, for miles.  Nothing but wind and snow, not even an impression that people ever actually lived there, talked around the table, anything like that.

Great OP. (And it's not a rant, either, congratulations!)

It put me in mind of a large barn I found off a pretty deserted country road a couple of years ago. I deduced it must have been a dairy before it became a derelict... there were odd sections that were tiled in white and still a faint whiff of manure about the place. But it was also used as a dwelling by rural homeless afterwards: highly varied broken furniture arranged around several focal points, with evidence of open fires. Eerie, abused word that it is, describes it well. And it was completely empty. And then, kicking a pile of rubble gently apart, I found a school exercise book full of handwriting by an uneducated hand, context suggested from the sixties or seventies. It was a crude and repetitive erotic memoir which, however, rang true. After reading a couple of pages, I was so weirded out, I dropped the thing and walked out. No idea how it ended up there. Might go back this summer. Would be very strange if things remained unchanged.

Also: The Zone, in Stalker. The undeniable presense of indecipherable human purpose. Makes for a longer perspective.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Great OP. (And it's not a rant, either, congratulations!)

Stopped right there.  There's no point in reading further, because it's going to just be more of that.  You are the most passive-aggressive piece of shit I've ever met on the internet, and that's saying something.

Go drink Drano, please.

[Dildo Argentino]

Great OP. (And it's not a rant, either, congratulations!)

Stopped right there. 

I don't think you did.

There's no point in reading further, because it's going to just be more of that. 

Actually, no. And I think you know it. So what's the point of your message? 

You are the most passive-aggressive piece of shit I've ever met on the internet, and that's saying something.

And you are the most amazing example of someone quite willing to dispense abuse at the drop of a hat while completely unable to take it I've ever met on the internet. And, actually, that's also saying something.

Go drink Drano, please.

Not available here, will some other highly reactive drain-cleaner do?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Great OP. (And it's not a rant, either, congratulations!)

Stopped right there. 

I don't think you did.

Who cares what you think?  If you have to slip a back-handed insult into each post, if you are truly compelled to do so, and you seem to be, then I have no interest in reading anything else you have to say.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

THIS THREAD IS NOW ABOUT RUINS AND ABANDONED BUILDINGS.

I went to visit my hometown a couple of years ago and a lot of places were like that. I saw some from the outside and went up inside of others (while my friend Vida worried they'd cave in on me) and didn't get any sense of deja vu, the people I knew there or the old times. It's hard to explain, but everything was a kind of blank, like visiting a grave. Nothing there.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'm surrounded by ruins, fuck, half the new houses in this shithole are practically ruins right off the cuff but up north there's everything from prehistoric tombs to derelict castles, to boarded up victorian and edwardian townhouses. Coolest ruin I've seen recently was an entire island which used to be a working granite quarry until it was abandoned. We landed in pissing rain and had to break into the old generator house to get shelter. Although nothing we were doing was illegal there was still that adrenalinish feeling you get when you break in somewhere you shouldn't. Diluted but still palpable.