The two car garage and workshop attached to the back of the house are wide open. The weight of the snow resting atop the garage door has ripped it from it's track and it hangs precariously.
On the other side of the climbing hole, darkness enveloped. Around the corner, the click of a flashlight revealed a kitchen. The table sits awkwardly in the middle of the room. Tea towels and cleaning supplies stand out amongst the debris. A little further in, the light from the climbing hole had faded to nothing. A car seat, a Sobeys shopping cart and a kids plastic pool furnish the living room. In the darkness of these dilapidated abandonments, delicate steps are taken, or lives can be lost. The heartbeat races, adrenaline pumps. Wonder and excitement overcome, and you feel like a kid again. The house is quite small, he realized as he approached the front door. Ignoring the staircase that would lead him upstairs, he instinctively turned the lock on the front door, and reached for the doorknob. It opened, filling the front of the house with natural light and filling his ears with a stinging creaking noise. Darkness and unknown hazards tend to make a person a tad high strung, but the natural light calmed him down. It also revealed what appeared to be solid floors and no real hazards.
He wandered that first floor again, re-taking all of the pictures he had just painstakingly taken with a flash in the blackness.
Then he headed upstairs. A pink bathroom, clean and shiny. Two bedrooms, walls torn apart. 'THE STONERS Closet' is written on a closet door. Inside is a bench, an ashtray, a candle, and a couple of roaches and beer cans. He laughed when he opened that door. The attic is open but not worthy of note.
He rested his flashlight atop a light fixture, creating the illusion of electricity. He also illuminated a light bulb with his flashlight, attempting to give the illusion in the photo that the light bulb itself is creating the light. Basically, he's starting to learn to use and play with his camera in new ways, instead of pointing and shooting at street art. And he's having the time of his life.
A dip into the basement was next. Creepy, as is always the case in farmhouse basements.
A paved pathway now slices through the property, a popular hiking trail. On the other side of this pathway, on the southern edge of the property, near tiny fragments of what was once a fence, stands this cross...
The house sits empty, with it's cross. Over time, the farmland has morphed into a consumer capitalist carbon copy of every other neighborhood in North America. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and several other box-stores have encroached. A failing mall was also built adjacent, a mall doing so poorly that we may all be exploring it soon.
Today, amongst the hustle and bustle of shopaholics and a steady stream of traffic, this house sits empty, with it's cross.
In our next post, we will find ourselves climbing and crawling in an abandoned file factory along the shores of the Ganaraska River in Port Hope. Followed by a trip to Hamilton, and then a trip to Vancouver, and then a trip to Ottawa, stay tuned my friends.
***EDIT***
"The property was settled in 1820 by the Lee family and the graves are of John and his son Thomas. I believe there is another grave along that path that is marked with a small glass brick set atop a slightly larger stone marker. I believe it is marked Smithson and may be a childs grave. Most of this is from memory as i can no longer access the info i once had on it."
-Otonabee (UER member)
click here to check out all of jerm & ninja IX's ABANDONMENT ISSUES
2 comments:
The cross is broken after the ice storm Apr. 12, 2013. This needs to be preserved.
Me and my friends spend a lot of our days in the woods around there after school, building tree forts and waging war of sabotage against the tree forts of a rival group of kids from another school. This was back in the 90's before the path was paved and a lot of the housing went in, those were just the woods behind our school. I remember that cemetery well, we tried to clean it up a bit because it seemed important at the time. Some teenagers apparently started a grass fire up there and when we went to check out the damage, the grass fire had burned around the (quite grassy) cemetery but had left it very mysteriously untouched.
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