Prose >I WALK INTO THE GOAT CAGE
Ben Bunting
"I WALK INTO THE GOAT CAGE":
Travels in the Interior of Pullman's Urban
Wilderness
Part One: On Top of the World
My hands are already grasping the lip of the roof a few feet above my head, but that grasp turns into a death grip as my toes lose contact with the top step of the ladder beneath me. Said ladder, precariously balanced on the concrete slab fifteen feet below, has been whining and wiggling during my entire climb, and when I finally get to the top – the least stable point, scientifically and emotionally – the whole thing tips to the side with a screech of metal. Leaving my feet dangling in empty air.
Normally, pulling myself up the rest of the way with my arms wouldn't be a problem; I'm no pull-up champion, but I can do a few in a pinch. The lip of the roof, though, is only about an inch high and it's hard enough to maintain a good grip, let alone use that inch to lever my entire body weight straight up. So I hang in space for a few seconds, craning my neck to watch the ladder as it sways back and forth.
"Are you alright?" Matt's voice finally comes down to me from the roof, more amused than concerned, which is ironic because at that exact moment I am wondering what my head would look like splattered all over the concrete below.
"Oh yeah, no problem," I say back, dryly. Apparently, my sarcasm has a five foot maximum range, because he just says "Okay", and then I hear his footsteps on the roof moving away from me.
Drama aside, at this point I could probably let go of the roof and land hard on my feet on the concrete below, absorbing my momentum in a roll that would result only in minor scratches. That, though, is not what we came here for. We came here to get on top of the damn roof.
* * *
Now let me explain something while I'm hanging here: I've always been fascinated by wilderness. If you want to go somewhere but you don't exactly know where "there" is, you can count me in.
When I was growing up, my personal definition of wilderness was pretty parallel to the traditional American idea of the term. What I mean is when I thought of wilderness I thought of a dark, empty copse of trees that could be hiding anything, or a stark, empty plain that could stretch off to anywhere. I thought of wilderness in terms of undefinability, unmappedness. Those aren't real words, but they should give you an idea of wilderness was for me. I had a broad definition of the concept in the sense that pretty much anything containing an ounce of mystery and danger constituted wilderness, but at the same time I had a narrow definition in that the only real wilderness experience I had to rely on was various relatively safe and controlled camping trips with my family.
I spent a lot of time hiking and camping as a child, and I hated it. In retrospect, I think I was just frustrated at having no say in camping- and hiking-related matters. Even when I was a teenager, the overall planning of trips as well as the day-to-day and minute-to-minute details of a hike were entirely decided by my parents. I can't necessarily blame them, since they were paying, driving, and feeding me, but it sucks the fun out of wilderness when you never had the ability to be curious about your surroundings. In those days, the wilderness always came with parental rules, basically making it a hotter, buggier version of home.
Looking back, though, I think that in some bizarre sadomasochistic way, these trips were preparing me to discover my love of unknown—or at least undefined—places. While my parents were meticulously planning trip after trip and hike after hike, laying out all the details until they clicked together like a bland, jigsaw puzzle of a picture of the Appalachians, I was reading really, really bad young-adult science fiction next to the campsite fire ring, wondering why we couldn't just walk into the woods and see what happened. In a strange way, though, the very blandness of these trips made me even more excited about being able to eventually strike out into undefined places on my own some day.
I learned quickly, though, that it wasn't that simple. My first real "unregulated" exposure to wilderness came my freshman year in college, so when everyone else was learning about sex and drugs, I was learning, as Kathleen Meyer so delicately puts it in her book of the same name, How To Shit In the Woods. Well, one of the first things I learned from my backpacking mentors were the ins and outs of no-trace ethics, a philosophy often summarized as "take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints".
Suddenly, my dreams of tromping into the forest with no direction in mind seemed very selfish and inconsiderate. But, while I had lost the ability to smash plants under my feet without feeling guilty or at least conscious of my trespass, I had gained a respect for wilderness that I hadn't had before. From my new viewpoint, the wilderness was an entity, an environment unto itself instead of my personal playground. My curiosity of undefined places hadn't diminished, I had just realized that I had to observe rules while exploring, and as a result the exploring became a little less just exploring and a little more communing, a give and take instead of just a take.
In the long run, my new sense of wilderness ethics did nothing to spoil my desire to fill in the blank spaces on the map by going to them. I've lost track of the number of times in those first couple of years that a spot off the trail and blank and featureless on a USGS quadrant would turn out in real life to be an beautiful view, a challenging climb, or a bunch of cougars. This method of exploration fostered a new attitude in me, which in time began to extend beyond hiking and backpacking trips.
The idea of there being boundaries between cities and forest, for example, something which I had always taken for granted, started to erode. These boundaries were man-made and man-defined, and how much did that really mean in the scope of a world that could naturally produce things on a level of beauty man-made constructions could only aspire to? My definition of wilderness started to broaden to include these areas that weren't so much private property as they were old forests and plains recently built over by transient human cultures.
I started to wonder if maybe the idea of wilderness didn't necessarily have to end at the forest edge, but could continue instead into the city. After all, in this day and age, even our wilderness is mapped and visible via satellite on Google. But that doesn't mean it can't still confuse and frustrate your expectations once you and your topo square or GPS unit are out in the backcountry. Likewise, just because you can get a city map at any gas station doesn't mean there aren't empty spaces on that map. There are many, many empty spaces, as I eventually came to find out. I also found out that there's a fancy name for wandering around industrial wastelands: "Urban Exploration".
Some people take Urban Exploration (UE) very seriously. There is an entire UE subculture that share and discuss their exploits on the internet, through websites such as Infiltration.org, and Jinxmagazine.com. There have been books and articles written about it, two of the most popular being Ninjalicious's "Access All Areas" and "The Urban Adventure Handbook" by Alan North. These websites and books cover a large range of topics, from suggestions on how not to get in trouble while exploring to what to do when you do get in trouble, to locations of good exploring sites, to creative works by explorers describing their adventures.
Each explorer seems to interpret the concept of Urban Exploration differently, and so you will find "Urban Exploration" sites that range from explaining how to illegally break into an active office building complex to sharing maps of government-constructed, legal bike paths that you can simply take a stroll on and enjoy the scenery. Some people spend as much money on professional equipment for Urban Exploration as I do for backpacking. I'm not quite that interested. All I really need to enjoy the experience is some dark clothes and a good sense of balance.
Generally, I sit around looking at photos of satellite images of industrial areas whenever I have free time, and occasionally I'll see something interesting. Or, sometimes while I'm out walking a particular building or warehouse or something similar will catch my eye, the same as a particular hill would while out hiking, and I wonder what things would look like from up there. My motivation is entirely the same curiosity that fuels my exploration of forests and national parks; it's merely modified a bit to fit into urban settings, where some of the rules are a bit different.
Some rules, though, are exactly the same. Like the law of gravity, for example.
* * *
My grip is getting weaker, and I consider again just letting go of the roof and dropping, but eventually, the ladder acquiesces to my angry telepathic demands and settles back onto its legs, which in turn allows me to settle my legs back onto it. From there, it's an easy scramble up to get my legs nearly level with the rooftop; I go fast, not giving the ladder time to tip again. As I lever myself over the lip of the roof, the first hand I plant on the roof surface goes directly into a puddle of icy water. This is one of the first things you realize when you start exploring urban areas: just like there is almost always snow on the peaks of mountains, there is almost always water on the roofs of buildings, even if it hasn't rained in a few days. In this case, the water soaks my entire jacket sleeve before I realize what's happened, which is unfortunate because we're at least two miles away from the car and the temperature is just above freezing.
I finally get the rest of me onto the rooftop, managing to plant one of my knees in the puddle, too. I curse under my breath.
"Dude!" Matt yelps from the other side of the semi-circular roof, waving his hands in a "get down" motion.
Only then do I realize I'm standing on top of a university observatory dome on a hill at night with the hazy sulfur glow of a floodlight shining on me from behind. It's just the normal lighting of the observatory, but it's making me painfully visible to anyone that might happen to look in my direction from the ground. I drop into a crouch and shuffle over to the other, darker end of the roof.
* * *
This is the problem with UE. Unlike backpacking, it's generally illegal. I'll be the first to admit that this also makes it more fun than backpacking in a certain high-school-smoking-behind-the-gym sort of way, but this also makes it dangerous. In my experience, getting caught trespassing will only result in someone yelling at you for a few minutes, but on the other hand trespassing is trespassing. Just like you wouldn't want to wander into a bear's territory in the woods, with UE you need to always be aware of exactly what you're doing wrong, so that you can minimize the chances of being caught, and minimize the chances that anyone will really care that much even if you are caught.
When I started exploring urban wilderness, I almost reflexively applied no-trace ethics to the practice. My particular sense of outdoor ethics, as I mentioned before, came from a mentor of mine with whom I went on my first few backpacking trips. I didn't see any reason, once I started participating in UE, that I should treat urban wilderness any differently than traditional wilderness. There is already far too much urban detritus around as a result of people being too wrapped up in their minute-to-minute lives to walk an extra ten feet to a garbage can; why should I contribute to this if I already knew better? Unfortunately, much of UE shows evidence of the same sense of entitlement that leads to garbage all over the streets of cities.
For me, Urban Exploration and breaking and entering are two different things. Though this seems not to be the case with a lot of people based on what I've experienced. I don't understand why you would treat an urban wilderness any differently than you would a traditional wilderness; neither of them is your private space, you are sharing that space with other people and animals, respectively. I've run into trouble in the past by going exploring with people who just seem interested in breaking things, stealing things, and generally causing trouble, which has prompted me to become extremely selective about the people I'll explore with.
* * *
Fortunately, Matt and a few of my other "explorer" friends are like me when it comes to no-trace ethics. I suppose it should be no surprise since they are also backpackers: very concerned with being quiet, well hidden, and doing nothing wrong (legally or morally) except the occasional trespass, which is often necessary but not physically intrusive, nor liable to leave any lasting effect on the environment.
It's still illegal, though, which is of course why I'm so concerned with the floodlight as I crouch in the darkness next to it. Getting caught trespassing on a roof in the middle of the night when you're a twenty-five-year-old graduate student would be pretty embarrassing. This is only the latest in a string of urban explorations for Matt and I, though, and we've certainly found ourselves in more dire straits before. After all, this particular time we were only looking for a nuclear reactor.
Our evening had begun a few hours before when Matt, wandering around the internet at my apartment, had said "I remember reading once that there's a nuclear reactor somewhere on WSU's campus." I didn't need details other than a general location. I threw on a black coat and dark jeans and we were in the car five minutes later. An hour or so after that, we were in a copse of trees about a quarter mile northwest of the nuclear facility, trying to figure out if anyone was currently patrolling the area around the surprisingly small building, when we were pinned against the tree trunks by approaching pickup headlights.
The pickup was white and looked like a Ford Ranger—a model often used by campus security and maintenance personnel America over. I hissed "Down!" just loud enough to be audible to Matt, about twenty feet away to my right and dropped to my stomach. Matt dropped just as fast, and we lay there for a moment, listening. Unfortunately, a small hill lay between us and the approaching pickup, and so we couldn't see the truck at all as we heard the driver get out and shuffle into the trees in our direction. Then silence.
For a few moments, we debated in whispers the merits of waiting the driver out, or trying to cut north and circumvent him, but the silence was oppressive and threatening and finally we decided to just run for it. We headed north, dodging among the trees, running while hunkered over as best we could, staying in the shadows. Sounds of pursuit – imagined and possibly also real – spurred us on until we stumbled out into the sulfur lights along North Fairway Drive. A half hour or so later, we found ourselves walking through some trees in the northeast corner of campus when I saw an observatory bubble on top of a hill and decided that it would be fun to get on top of it.
Now, I reach the dark side of the roof, and drop down to sit. Spread out in front of us is a panoramic view of WSU's campus in the dead of a frosty night. To the east of us, the motor pool we crossed to get here spreads out like a concrete lake and ends abruptly in a number of spires, each belching smoke into the otherwise pristine winter air. The main building has four such smokestacks, making it look at this distance a little bit like a hand stretching its fingers towards the sky. Scattered around it are smaller facilities, smaller stacks, smaller puffs of smoke. To the south is darkness—that particular kind of darkness I've gotten used to seeing in Pullman. Where I'm from, the suburbs south of the mostly defunct city of Canton, Ohio, each town bleeds into the next until you reach the city itself. At night, to find unlit areas you have to search for city parks inside the lit boundaries, or you have to drive very far and very particularly in order to escape the lights of the city (or the next city, or the next) and the interstate. Here in Pullman, all you have to do is reach the edge of town and you're met by a wall of darkness. The edge of town is not just demarcated on a map; it's also an actual physical edge that you can see.
I suppose, at least in Pullman, a term like "urban exploration" is dicey, mostly because Pullman isn't necessarily urban, as this boundary with darkness makes clear to me. I would argue, though, that urban exploration really works in just about any inhabited area, anywhere that's large enough to have holes in its definition of where things are. That is to say, in any town location is generally defined by street and building names. However, this sort of location-finding is two-dimensional and a bit less exact than it might seem at first look. There are always alleys between buildings, rooftops, the insides of buildings, buildings not necessarily adjacent to roads, and other such things that might not match up in reality with what maps define them to be. Reality is three-dimensional.
Part Two: There Must Be Another Way
From the observatory roof, right before the darkness kicks in to the south, I can see the outline of what appears to be a large racetrack. Before climbing to the observatory roof, we had debated the merits of climbing down to walk on the track, or at least to try to figure out what it was because half-concealed in the murk and situated against a large copse of tall pine trees, it looked particularly out-of-place, and therefore, to us, inviting. From our angle of approach, though, it would have involved a sharp descent down an unlit hill, which we found to be almost completely mud after going about fifty feet. The coyote yips we could hear from the area of the track, sounding a little like crying children in the dark, didn't exactly spur us on to adventure, either. I don't know enough about coyotes to not be a little afraid of them.
To the north and west is the heart of campus, lots of lights, lots of buildings, most only a few stories high but a few tall and stark against the sky. It's a little jarring to see so much light this close to the dark boundary to the south, like someone was building a city and just suddenly gave up. I'm inclined to want to wander the dark places first, but I scan the line of buildings to the west, looking for something that seems particularly interesting and/or climbable.
I'm interrupted after a minute when Matt says "Car" softly under his breath. That's what I like about having him as an exploring partner. He recognizes the inherent dangers of this form of exploration, but he also realizes what I realized a long time ago: if you're not breaking anything or hurting anyone, hardly anyone will ever notice you, and those who do notice won't care. This is no excuse to not be careful, but it also doesn't mean that once you climb up on top of an observatory you can't take a minute to relax and enjoy the view. The car is coming from the southwest, moving along Olympia Avenue. It's a civilian car – one ability you pick up quickly in urban exploration is being able to recognize by quick view of headlights or brake lights which models of cars are owned by police and security guards and which aren't – and it's just out cruising around. I press my back up against the observatory dome a bit regardless, disappearing back into the shadows and watching the car snake around in the darkness until it is a decent distance to the southeast.
In the course of waiting, my eyes become locked on the sky. When we first left my apartment, it was cloudy and threatening rain, which is just about the best weather to be trespassing in, mostly because it makes you nearly invisible if you're wearing gray clothing, but also because nobody – even the police – really want to be out wandering around in the rain. Now, though, the weather has cleared up and, appropriately, I can see a beautiful skyful of stars from the observatory roof. Luckily there's not much of a moon, as a full moon can be extremely detrimental to skulking, but the sky is clear enough that not only can I see many more stars than normal, I can also even make out the faint, milky clouds of more distant star clusters even further away. It's the sort of sky you'd expect to see on a mountaintop, and I'm struck by how well we're shielded from the glare of the floodlight on this side of the roof—a few steps back towards the ladder and the starry sky is obliterated by a sulfuric backglow.
We don't stay on the roof for more than another minute or two. As always, the challenge of getting there, mapping the place for myself, is a large percentage of my motivation, and once that's gone, the desire to move on and explore the "next" place is difficult to overcome. Besides, an arm and a leg are soaked in near-freezing-cold water, and I don't really want to stand still for too long unless I have to. "Want to head back down?" I ask, still scanning the buildings in the distance for our next potential target.
"Yeah, sure." Matt's reply sounds a little disappointed, like conquering the observatory wasn't quite as fun as he thought it would be. I'm guessing he's probably just tired; after all by now it is somewhere around three in the morning. I wonder for a moment if we should head back to the car. Matt and I are both a bit wary of confrontation, so often when there is a possible point of contention between us, I just awkwardly pretend to ignore it rather than bring it up. I tell myself that Matt's the kind of guy who has no problem coming right out and admitting if he has a problem with something, so for now at least I can safely assume he wants to keep wandering. This makes things less complicated, even if it might not be entirely true.
I move back over to the other edge of the roof, and start to lower my legs over the side. After the climb up the ladder, I expect the climb back down to be equally terrifying, but it's not nearly as bad. The only way we were able to get on the roof in the first place had been by taking a utility ladder that had been conveniently left alongside the observatory fence and moving it into a standing position. As we quickly found out, though, because of the topography of the hill the observatory was built into, the roof was nearly five feet higher on the west side of the building than on the south side. Unfortunately, the south side was paved with concrete while the west side was grass. And that's how we ended up climbing a metal ladder placed on a concrete slab in the first place.
Once I get back down, I hold the ladder for Matt while he climbs down, then we spend a few minutes carrying the surprisingly heavy ladder back around to the west side of the building where we found it. Sometimes a concern with putting things back the way you found them can result in a lot of extra work. Luckily, the ladder had left indentations in the grass where it had been standing before we came, so it was easy enough to put its "feet" back in the same grooves. Here, crouched down along the side of the observatory building, but still a bit in the cone of one of its sulfur lights, I can actually make out Matt's appearance for the first time in an hour or so.
He's about as tall as I am, a few inches over six feet, but he has light curly hair that's more orange than red. He's lanky but luckily stronger than I am, or else we might have never been able to move the ladder in the first place. At the moment, he's wearing fittingly dark jeans and a dark blue coat; he didn't have much of a wardrobe to choose from since he had recently flown into Pullman from Pennsylvania, where he works as an urban planner – a fitting profession for someone who moonlights as an urban explorer.
Matt was my roommate for four years when I lived in Ohio, and in a way I think that probably makes him more of an authority on all things Ben than just about anyone else I know. We spent much of those four years getting into and out of trouble and those sorts of experiences tend to tie people together suddenly and intensely. We make a good team – though of course just like any other two people we have our differences. I tend to be a bit more irresponsible than him, and he is sort of the more logical one who reins me in when I'm about to do something really stupid. He is not logical enough, though, to avoid accepting my invitation to fly out to Pullman on a lark and spend the night skulking around the WSU campus.
I also know Matt well enough to know that, on his first night exploring the campus, no matter how tired either of us are, he isn't going to want to call it a night yet. We head down the hill and to the north a bit to get out of sight of the road, then we stop to decide on our next move. We have only been out for about three hours at this point, and there are a few hours still before sunrise, so it goes without saying that we are going to try to find somewhere else to explore.
Despite having lived in Pullman and worked at WSU for nearly two years, I have little idea of how the east end of campus is laid out, and this is actually an advantage in the sense that every hill or building is a possible new challenge or mystery. I look south at the racetrack again, considering it for a moment. It might be interesting to poke around down there, for one. But it's still just a racetrack. There has to be something better. "Where to?" I ask Matt.
He shrugs. "No idea. You're the one who lives here."
I just smile in response to his reply. "We could try to get to the nuclear plant again. Maybe we could come at it from a different direction." I tend to get obsessed with certain urban exploration goals, and I can feel it happening with the nuclear plant. I don't want to give up until we actually get close enough to touch it.
Matt shakes his head. "We already tried that. And almost got caught. Remember?"
"No." I feign confusion, but he just glares at me. I put on my best "Aw, come on, dad!" face. "How often do you get a chance to check out a nuclear reactor up close?"
He laughs, less reluctant to expose himself to possible jail time than I would have thought. "Good point. Yeah. I don't want to get over in that area where the security truck was, but maybe we could come at it from the other side, and at least get a close look."
Here we pause for a moment to orient ourselves and decide that the reactor is somewhere to our north and slightly east. There are a few buildings due north of us, including a large water tank, that I remember being south and west of us when we were approaching the nuclear plant before. "Alright," I finally say, "let's head a bit to the east and then turn up and head south. We'll be coming at the reactor from the south this time. We won't be coming through the trees to the north, so we won't have much cover, but if there's anyone around, we'll be able to see them as easily as they can see us." Matt just nods in response.
We strike out to the east, passing the four-fingered steam-belching facility again, and then crossing the motor pool. The first time we had come through earlier, I had found this area a little mesmerizing and a little terrifying: a huge slab of black concrete, covered with official-looking vehicles and squat, imposing buildings on all sides, all colored a uniform dull brown, spitting out dirty yellow floodlight glare. The whole thing seemed like a scene from a Tim Burton "Batman" movie. This time through though, it's a lot less menacing, like somehow by having passed through it once, we had broken the spell. It's become a known place.
As we cross the motor pool, to our left the Moscow-Pullman airport landing-strip lights come into view, over a few hills and off in the distance. I know the nuclear plant is in the same general direction, somewhere between the airport and us, and so I point in that direction. We turn a bit to the north and sure enough after a few minutes of walking we can see a set of floodlights in the distance arranged in the same pattern as those on the south-facing wall of the reactor, which we had seen earlier while running from the aforementioned security truck.
For a moment it seems like we'll be able to just make a beeline straight to our target, but then we realize that, due to an enormously long and secure-looking fence surrounding the factory complex to the north of us, we'll have to either find a way over the fence or go at least a mile out of our way in order to get far enough north to reach the nuclear facility. This fence is only about six feet high, but studded with three lines of barbed wire and with the last two feet of the fence angled slightly towards us to further discourage climbing. Confident in our fence-jumping abilities, we decide to follow the fence around the factory, and see where we can find a place to jump it, or crawl through it, or something similar. I opine to Matt that "Fences like this one always have holes in them somewhere", and we continue on along the fence's length.
Fence-jumping is pretty much one of the most basic skills of urban exploration, and you get quite good at it quite quickly. The fact is, fences are almost always very fragile constructions stretching hundreds of yards or miles around some building or field or complex, and unless you're trying to infiltrate a government building, you'll find that they are poorly maintained. All it takes is one person coming through before you who wanted to get in the fence bad enough to cut it or bend it, and you're in. Of course, our leave-no-trace style means that we can't cut or bend ourselves, but there's almost always a hole. When there's not, jumping is acceptable and possible even on barbed-wire fences as long as you are extremely careful. Being six feet tall doesn't hurt either. Ultimately, if none of these approaches works, there is always an entry point – and gate, door, or something similar – to the fence since, by its very nature, it has to let certain people in and out of the area it is defending.
All that said, however, about ten minutes after my confident claim, I am forced to admit that perhaps not every fence like this has a hole somewhere. We've continued following the fence, which leads us to the east and up a particularly sharp slope. The slope drops back off on its other side, leaving a ridge about the width of my shoulders with the fence and us fighting for space to stand. The fence at this point runs south to north, and we decide that if we simply follow it along, eventually it will simply end, or curve back west towards the factory, and we'll be free to continue on towards the nuclear facility.
No such luck. Ten more minutes of straggling along the ridge and the fence turns ninety degrees east and continues into the darkness-at-the-edge-of-town for an unknown distance. Whatever sort of field is being fenced in, it's huge. It'll take us nearly a half hour just to circle back around to where we had started and then meet back up with Wilson Road.
Annoyed, but not yet ready to give up, we trace the fence a bit back to the south, towards a gate that had seemed too big and too loud and too possibly-electrified to risk climbing when we hadn't been desperate. Now we're desperate. The gate itself is only about six feet high, but it is made up of mismatched steel slats and there doesn't appear to be any uniform series of footholds or handholds on it. Now that I'm more than willing to make a little noise and maybe scratch my hands up a bit to get over it, though, I make short work of the climb and Matt follows suit. The gate makes a horrible creaking noise as I swing over it, and after landing inside the fence on the factory side, we huddle under the shadow of a nearby tree for a few minutes, making sure that no one is coming to check out the noise. As usual, our paranoia is unjustified, and we continue on our way.
It won't be too long now until we realize exactly why the fence was maintained so well, and exactly what it is that's being fenced in. Looking back now, it should have been obvious to me beforehand, but I was too caught up in the moment to really reason things out clearly. This is one of the dangers of urban exploration for me: no matter how careful I am, no matter how deliberate I am about not disturbing things that I shouldn't disturb, sometimes the whole exploring aspect is so exciting I get carried away. And that's when things really get interesting.
Part Three: "I Walk Into the Goat Cage"
The fence is at our backs; at our feet is a sharp decline of mud and wet grass, uneven and filled with potentially ankle-popping divots. At first not wanting to risk the descent and eventual climb that would inevitably result – I can see from where we are that to the north the field rises in altitude again – we had decided to walk along the ledge all the way back to where the fence had stymied us the first time. However, where we had had room to share the ledge with said fence when we had been on the other side of it, on this side things aren't quite as congenial. The fence is flush against the ledge's drop-off and so walking parallel to it entails having my left foot on ground about two feet lower than my right foot. We struggle along in this fashion for about one hundred feet before giving up in frustration and just plunging down the hill in what quickly turns into a run.
The next twenty or so seconds involve me watching the ground ahead for potentially dangerous potholes and leaping to avoid them while plotting to not land in the next pothole a few feet downslope. It's like a surreal video game, with my anklebones and possibly my face at stake. I hear Matt trip behind me at one point – a muffled thud – and look back to see a cloud of sod exploding into the air with him shoulder-rolling a few feet ahead of it.
I laugh. For a second the absurdity of the whole enterprise hits me and I laugh. We're tumbling down a hill at breakneck speed – literally – at four in the morning, trespassing on private property, yelling and running towards a huge factory that is clearly currently inhabited by the very people we are trying to avoid, having already been chased away from a nuclear plant, pressing on into the dark towards no particular thing, otherwise two men in our twenties with promising careers and fairly normal lives… What the hell are we doing?
The whole urban exploration experience is so absurd, so indefinable in regular day-to-day terms that we have always joked that in the event of our apprehension by authorities, simply telling the truth about what we were doing would most likely get us off the hook, based solely on how bizarre it would sound to them.
We might not distinguish between urban and natural wildernesses, but most people do, and sometimes that attitude reintroduces itself in my mind at the strangest of times. Like now. What is it about being inside this fence, on someone else's property, that is so important, so transformative, that it is worth risking incarceration for?
I think, ultimately, it is the very defining of that unknown space that at least I, personally, want to accomplish. One of my favorite explorations I've ever done was at an old abandoned water-powered industrial plant in the Cuyahoga River Valley in Ohio. I circled the building again and again for three straight nights before realizing there was no way to get inside without breaking a window and so there was no way for me to get inside at all. But the very sight of the plant against the moonlit sky at night, so huge and silent, made it seem like a relic from a lost civilization. It was the sort of place that, though in reality had a particular purpose, obscured that purpose in an aura of mystery generated by time, abandonment and cultural development.
Sure, intellectually we might know what the inside of a power plant looks like, but how many times have you actually been inside one, by yourself, with no agenda other than to consider the plant seriously as part of a wild environment? Probably not often.
The joy of exploring for me is turning these supposedly known places into wildernesses, challenging the assumptions that people have that lead them to just walk past these places without a care or curiosity every day. Sure, maybe Something Else goes on there that doesn't effect your immediate life, but wouldn't be interesting to see what it looks like anyway? If you live next to a steel factory for twenty years, don't you wonder at least once what might be in happening in there when the prescribed purpose of the building – making steel – isn't going on?
I'll admit that it's easy to rationalize the urge to explore on this page, but often – usually in moments of extreme danger – I still question why I do it, how I get into these situations, and if it's worth it. So it's appropriate that it is in the middle of my musing that I realize that in turning to look at Matt's tumbling, hilarious fall, I'd stopped devoting any eye-time to my own now soon-to-become-a-fall. I yelp a particularly offensive curse as I turn face forward just in time to see the factory fence, eight feet high, all steel and unforgiveness, rushing up to say hello.
The only thing I can think to do to arrest my momentum in time is to jump and hope the impact with the ground will suck most of my inertia away. The slope doesn't level off until about five or so feet before the fence, and so it is for the nearest edge of that level patch that I aim when I launch myself into the air. My aim is true – my eyes lie. I land right where I'd hoped, but the grass isn't actually grass so much as it's just reeds sticking out of a calf-deep pool of water. I hit with a splash, and this time a curse is sort of driven out of me—the "Sh" when my feet splash down, and then the "it" a moment later when my receding momentum causes me to pitch forward onto my knees.
Fortunately, the mire is deep and muddy enough that it eats the rest of my momentum and I stop before planting my face in the muck. Unfortunately, it is filled with water and now so are my pants. I want to jump up and splash to dry land right away, but my urban explorer's instinct demands that I stay still for a moment, scanning the factory catwalks for any indication of movement. My splashdown had been quite loud and if anyone actually cared about trespassers they couldn't have missed it.
I reach into my pants pockets and pull out my cell phone and wallet and move them to pockets above the water line as I watch for signs that we'd been sighted and were about to experience embarrassment and possibly jail. Water has completely soaked through my pants up to the knees by the time that Matt makes his way down to the bottom of the hill, presumably by walking the rest of the way at a nice, leisurely pace. I stand up out of the puddle, satisfied that we haven't been sighted, and ring some of the water out of my jeans, dump some muck out of my shoes, and consign my socks to an already-soaked jeans pocket. Walking in wet socks is like walking with shoes filled with cold pancake batter. Matt is a little grass-stained, but otherwise none the worse for wear, having absorbed the brunt of his fall excellently.
We set off to the north, the new, more imposing fence immediately on our left. It becomes clear at this point that the field we're fenced into is shaped like an "L", with the factory complex nestled in the L's cradle. We're inside the L, at one extremity, closed in by the fence on all sides. Also clear now is that our best option is to proceed northwest to the other end of the L, looking for an opening in the fence to our left.
No more camouflaged puddles are waiting for us, but the going is slow thanks to the particularly moist ground—likely caused by runoff from up on the hill we'd just come down. Footsteps are punctuated by a sequence of plops and slurps as feet sink into the ground and need to be yanked free of its grasp.
As we walk, I notice heaps of what look like either dirt or industrial detritus to my right. Skulking around at night in the shadows, unable to use a flashlight for fear of detection, I think your mind gets used to categorizing semi-distant featureless lumps as all being similar: either threatening or non-threatening and that's all that's important. In an urban setting, especially in abandoned factories and the like, this generalization often proves true and self-reinforcing. It doesn't really matter what this sort of urban waste is – though often it is discarded steel beams, wooden planks, dilapidated sheds, and the like – all that really matters is that it isn't threatening and can simply be ignored or used for cover on the way to a bigger, shinier objective. So for now I note the large number of mounds and their somewhat haphazard placement, count them simply as non-threatening and don't investigate further, focusing instead on searching for breaches in the fence.
It's a formidable fence, much like it's brother back up on the hilltop. There don't appear to be any openings on our left – in fact the fence looks like it might be electrified – and when we reach the point in the L where things turn off to our left, there is suddenly another fence running across the field directly in front of us, effectively cutting the L in half and barring further passage. I throw up my hands in disgust and am about to let loose with another barrage of useless, unoriginal swear words when I notice an opening in the fence ahead and to the left. An opening big enough to drive a truck through.
I chuckle at my flash of irritation, and jog as best I can through the mud towards the breach – which is, as I see now, an open gate – already wondering what beautiful and lonely industrial wilderness awaits us on the other side of the fence. And then, suddenly, Matt yells "Goats!"
I don't know why, but for some reason the word "goats" makes me stop in my tracks. It probably has more to do with the way he says it than what he actually says. It's almost a hiss; harsh, low, and urgent. After a moment, logic reasserts itself and I turn to lecture Matt on the necessity of not yelling random words while we're trying to be sneaky. It's then that I see a large, low form, cloaked in shadow, detaching itself from the side of a nearby shed and moving across my field of vision. Goats.
This does a weird thing to my perception of urban wilderness. I see lots of crazy things when urban exploring, lots of crazy types of people. But not goats. Goats belong in natural wilderness. Though both nature and the city can contain wilderness, I apparently have a strong mental separation still between the two because the appearance of goats in the middle of campus throws me for a loop. I crouch down and Matt, now alongside me, does the same. "Goats," I say, my mind whirling, grasping ineffectually for an explanation. "Where the hell are we?"
"I don't know," Matt replies, "but I guess we have to go back the way we came."
It's maybe a little unreasonable at this point, but even facing an angry looking goat I don't necessarily want to turn back; most likely it's the fact that Matt seems sure we can't get past the goat that's urging me to see if it can be done. "Oh, I don't know," I say with the forced casualness I always use when trying to convince Matt to do something that isn't necessarily good for him, "we might be able to sneak past him…err…" – I notice a number of other goat-shaped lumps moving now – "them."
"Ben!" Matt's using his are-you-crazy voice: it's high-pitched and generally involves the bugging out of eyes. "We're not going to sneak past goats!"
"Why not? They're not like super-robot-security goats or anything. Besides, what are they going to do, bite us?" I know that this is stupid as soon as it leaves my mouth. Generally sentences containing the phrase "super-robot-security goats" are.
Matt is staring at me like I just fell off the idiot ship. "Yes!"
I know I'm being unreasonable. I just happen to like being unreasonable. Goats or no goats, I still want to see the nuclear facility. In a way, the appearance of the goats makes me more curious and more willing to put myself in danger to discover why the goats are here in the first place. The first goat has passed behind one of the sheds about fifty feet in front of us, and passed from sight. For some reason, I'm exceptionally attached to the idea of crossing this goat-laden field, and it occurs to me that because all the goats are concentrated directly in front of us, if we could get inside the gate without being bitten or bleated at, we could immediately veer right and follow the fence, circumventing the goats.
I suggest as much to Matt, and he doesn't really reply—either he is too shocked at my apparent obsession with navigating the goat-field or he is starting to think I might have a good idea, I don't know which. Either way, at this point it seems to me the best way to keep the adventure going is to plunge headlong into the goat cage and see what happens. Now, I'll admit that removed from the situation, in retrospect my logic seems a little faulty, perhaps even just plain stupid. But at the time I was swept up in the moment and the dangers of a few drowsy goats seemed insignificant compared to the payoff of getting to see what was beyond the goat cage. This sort of excitement is easy to catch when you're exploring, whether it be in a goat cage or in the backcountry, and it makes you do stupid things. This excitement should be ignored.
I do not ignore it. I walk into the goat cage.
The goats and sheds are to my left, and I immediately start edging to the right. Matt doesn't follow and I don't blame him: I'm the idiot, after all. I'll come back to where I left him after I've canvassed the goat cage to my satisfaction. At this point Matt and I's conflicting attitudes towards doing stupid things are rubbing up against each other; I think exploring the cage is worth risking physical injury and he does not. I disagree respectfully with his caution, and am not about to drag him along.
One benefit to living with someone for a long time is that you learn to sort out disagreements quickly, or you kill each other. While sometimes my "solution" may come in the form of passive aggression, like earlier at the observatory, here things are much more effective. I go ahead and do what I want, and he accommodates me by giving me a few minutes to go off on my own while still avoiding the goat cage himself. Matt and I have had this sort of understanding for a long time, especially when it comes to exploring. He's better at heights than I am, for example, and I'll often wait for him at the bottom of tall, rickety, terrifying things while he climbs up and looks around. As long as I'm only gone for a few minutes, he'll stick around and wait.
The goats have obviously seen me by this point, but they haven't responded yet. Most likely they are used to people walking around, or at least that's what I tell myself as I wait for one to attack me or let out some sort of hellish goat-shriek. I'm almost past the first shed when a shadow detaches itself from the larger shadow cast by the shed itself and starts heading towards me. This shadow is not only bigger than the goats it's bigger than me. Much bigger.
I freeze in my tracks, the sheer size and unidentifiability of the looming spectre shocking me for a moment. I stay low to the ground, but it's making a beeline towards me; it knows exactly where I am. I'm pretty sure that any second the shadow is going to coalesce into a bear, which will proceed to kill and eat me. I think about sprinting back towards Matt, but I don't want to lead the giant shadow-monster back towards him. I haven't completely shaken off my shock when the shadow passes through the corner of a sulfur-light cone projecting from the nearest factory tower and I see a flash of black and white patching. "Cow!" I hiss, mostly to myself.
The cow responds with a barking, growling sort of cow-noise, which I imagine is the cow equivalent of "What the hell?" or maybe "Hungry!" This, in turn, sets off the goats, which counter the cow's bass with an alto line of brays. Cows aren't known for being bloodthirsty, and neither are goats, but when you're in the dark in the middle of the night, fenced in on all sides in a place that you're not supposed to be anyway, with goats flanking you on the left and a cow circling around to your right, I think you have a right to be a little nervous. At least a little nervous. Maybe nervous enough to run back the way you came like a maniac.
As I pass through the gate, Matt is already on his feet. "Cow!" we both shout simultaneously, our tone probably more appropriate for something like "Lion!" or "Shark!" I wave my hands forward, shouting "Go, go, go!" like someone always does in action movies during a chase scene. The goats aren't following, but the cow is. He isn't running, but he's covering enough distance at a fast enough speed to make me want to keep running.
As we reach the halfway point between the goat-gate and the gate we jumped to enter the L-shaped field—that gate is now up on the hill to our left—we slow down a little. Not completely, but a little. We've put some ground between the cow and us and the braying seems to have settled down a bit. Now we're half terrified and half doubled over with laughter. "It was…a…cow!" I'm shouting, but having trouble breathing from laughing so hard. "We just ran…from a fucking…cow!"
Matt is laughing hard enough that we have to stop in the middle of the industrial-debris laden field so he can drop to his knees for a moment, clutching his stomach. "Oh my God! The look on your face was the best part of the night!"
I want to defend myself, but plunging into a goat cage and then running from a cow is pretty indefensible. I just laugh instead. It is pretty funny, now that I'm sure I'm not about to be devoured by a bear. I sit down in the field next to Matt. I don't want to spend too much longer in the area, as the goat-chorus might have drawn unnecessary attention to us, but I figure that the recent scare and run deserves a bit of a break. "Yeah, I guess I was asking for it," I admit.
Matt just grins and falls back into the grass. "Great. That was excellent." He claps his hands as if applauding a performance. "I have to come out to Pullman more often."
I open my mouth to agree, but my words are drowned out by one of the strangest sounds I've ever heard. It sounds sort of like a cross between a sandblaster, a blender, and someone forcing water out of a sponge. And it's extremely loud. And it's extremely close to the back of my head.
I turn, horrified by what I might see, but my grin still sticking to my face from seconds before, as if my mouth doesn't want to change to suit the rest of me. Immediately in front of me is one of the many piles of industrial waste I'd seen piled in the field during our first passing-through. Only it's moving. And making this horrible noise. Then, just when I think things can't get any worse, it begins to grow taller. It takes me a minute to realize this is because it's standing up, but by then it is towering at least eight feet in the air. My jaw is hanging open, nonfunctioning, so when Matt says "What…the…fuck," he's sort of saying it for me.
It's a llama. And llamas are a lot bigger in real life than they look in pictures. Yelling "Llama!" at this point might have been thematically appropriate, but I'm more interested in getting up and escaping. I am absolutely convinced as I get up that something that big must eat people whole, then as I turn my back on it to run towards the hill and the gate, it lets out the sandblasting-blending-sponging noise again, and this time all the piles of "industrial waste" within hearing range start growing into full-size llamas.
"This is bad!" I yell to Matt, but he's already running towards the gate.
Considering how difficult the descent to the llama field was in the first place, one would think the ascent would be at least as difficult. No. Apparently terror does give you wings because one moment I am running among llamas, dodging and juking like a running back, and the next I am on top of the hill, running along the fence (running on the uneven hillside that I hadn't been able to walk on earlier), headed towards the gate. I don't remember how I got uphill without using my hands. I don't remember jumping potholes and divots that must have been there. I don't even remember looking back to check on the llamas' progress. I think the combination of llamas, cows, goats, and that godawful llama noise echoing at our backs was a little too much for my common sense to handle. I was possessed by some primordial terror – the fight or flight response, and I flew up that hill like the hounds of hell were on my heels.
We reach the fence and I look back. It seems as if the llamas became unconcerned with us once we had made it up the hill, though I now realize that a lot of the divots in the ground must have come from llama hooves, and I'm not completely convinced they can't follow us if they really want to. I just want out of there. It seems slightly insane to be chased away from a factory by llamas, and once again urban and natural wilderness collide in my brain, but for right now, I'm running entirely on instinct and the logical confusions aren't enough to stop my legs from pumping. Actually, the very fact that this sort of terror can be inspired in one while one is traveling through an urban setting is indicative of how the unknown can pop up in the most "known" places.
Matt goes over the gate first, caution and silence be damned. His weight and the impact of his hurled body send the fence rocking and the sound of metal clacking echoes through the air like an alarm. Similarly unconcerned with stealth, I hit the fence as it is still vibrating from Matt's passage, getting one good grip on it about halfway up and just jumping, clearing it with everything but my left leg, from which the top of the fence takes a bit of flesh as payment. I slam down on the other side shoulder-first, this time landing on hard-packed dirt and gravel rather than mud, and just lay there for a moment, breathing heavily.
Then the sheer amount of noise we'd just been responsible for tells me I should probably get up and move. Without a word, Matt and I both jump up and run back to the south, in the direction we'd come from, back towards where we had climbed up on the observatory roof. We finally stop running when we simply can't run any more, and then we drop down on the side of a utility road, creep back into some bushes, and just lay on the grass for a minute, catching our breath.
"That was fucking ridiculous," I finally say after getting my lungs under control. "Dumbest idea I've had all day. Dumber even than the 'let's sneak up to the nuclear reactor' idea."
Matt chuckles. "Yeah. It's also going to make a great story in about ten hours, after we get home and sleep for awhile."
"True." I take a deep breath and for a moment consider the merits of sleeping a bit, right there and right then, but my heart rate is still unacceptably high and sleeping on the side of the road is probably not the best way to avoid drawing attention to oneself.
"So now what?" Matt asks, still grinning in the dark.
I'm the incredulous one, for once. "What? You don't want to go home yet? Well, we could break into the bear facility and get mauled by bears. That would be fun. Oh wait, no it wouldn't."
He gets back to his feet and dusts himself off. I follow suit, in the process finding a bit of blood on my fence-scratched left leg, but there's not enough for concern, so I just roll my pantleg up enough to keep the swamp water that's soaked into it from getting into the cut. I look at Matt expectantly, as if to say: "So what's our next brilliant plan?"
"Well," he says after a moment, "I'm all about going home, but we can't go back to the car the same way we came out here. That's your rule, remember?"
He's right. Ever since Matt and I started urban exploring together, it's seemed contrary to the spirit of the experience to take the known way back to where we'd started, and so we've always made a point to never return in the same way we left. We've violated the rule a few times in situations of extreme duress, but with the llamas safely behind us and no pursuit in sight, it seems like there's no such duress this particular night. There are countless other ways back to the parking lot we'd started from; I can see the academic building adjacent to the lot from here – I don't know its name – off in the distance with all sorts of urban empty space between it and us. It might be a long night yet. I check the sky, estimate we have about two hours of night left, and with a grin step out onto the road, gesturing at Matt for him to lead the way.