jack_babalon | Postcards from my recent silence (Reply)

The Last Days Has Begun!!!

Travel west far enough on Lee Street, keeping the railroad tracks to your left and you'll eventually come up on an abandoned brick office building (crowned in glorious irony with a billboard reading "ACT YOUR WAGE" on top of it)... from there keep going about two maybe three more blocks up until you come across an Exxon station that will be located on your right. Park there, buy some smokes, cross the street and then cross over the tracks towards the dilapidated wharehouse with the graffiti banner draped across the ledge of its roof reading -"The Last Days Has Begun!!!". There you should see a long out-of-service set of side tracks that will curve off to your left, follow them a few yards in and you will find the entrance to what can only be called a graveyard for trucks.

To be honest i’m not sure what the deal is. From what I can gather though this is where the big rigs, 16 wheelers, school-buses, ice-cream trucks, library vans, RV’s and even the odd trailer-home have come to die quietly unburied along the shore of the dead tracks that run along it. I survey the motor carrion around me, taking in the husks of massive steel insects and the rusted skeletons of industry with intuitive snapshots. I’m racing the light - the sun is almost behind the whare-house. Not much time. I find myself playing Jack Babalon - future archaelogist of the wasteland and post-apocalyptic tourist. I imagine strange ghosts watching with eyes of broken headlights as I walk by. I catch movement in caved-in cabs of tour buses. I find a maze of abandoned trailers... the remains of those famous trucks that ’things fall off the back of’. Some of them had their doors left wide open - sudden glimpses into narrow rooms stuffed with obsolete computer parts, industrial fans, club spot-lights and ominous cardboard boxes with white styrofoam chips spilling out of them. Then I’m back out again, scrambling up hills made out of thick black tires and chunks of broken concrete. I get the big-picture from the top: The rusted silo’s off in the distance, the tagged water-tower, the shadows of the sky crossing the shattered windows. I come back on down and reach a series of engine blocks that have been torn out of the chassis of hollowed out machines - left to rot as both sacrifice and salvage. I tread cautiously through the mud - a post-modern still life consisting of a medium of circuit boards and white porcelain mugs. A palpable sadness clung to the air - stuck the steps in the earth, dampened words so they would drip off the silence that followed them and lingered with the frost drifting off my breath.

The last of the light had sunk behind the whare-house. I knew it was time to go. I was out of shots and this was not a place to be after dark. However I’ve filed away the location in my memory and have begun making plans to enter the building on my next round of urban-exploration.

Perhaps a team next time?