It’s a gloomy morning, the sun is far, far away, and a thick mass of cloud sits like a solid grey roof above. Shadowed branches buck and flail as the wind, besieging by night, mounts for first-light’s assault. People gaze dismally through straining glass.
“I hope it doesn’t rain” someone remarks.
But I do. I hope the clouds swell and blacken and extinguish the feeble light altogether, shrinking the world to blind confines as the baleful canopy descends. I hope wind, wrathful and ravenous- overruns the city, pounding stumbling bodies and blind faces- threading howling tracks through thin streets, and sweeping across broad avenues, throwing up swirling torrents of dusty debris. I hope the clouds open to release long amassed waters which plummet in solid monstrous sheets to collide with the earth- wave upon wave- battering head and ceiling- creating sudden gulfs of icy water that divides buildings, and swift rivers leading to deep, black seas. I hope the sum of nature’s power and majesty is revealed wholesale, in magnitude beyond mortal comprehension- that of cataclysmic impact or violent eruption- so that the spinning world of man comes to a shuddering, deadening halt for a time and we must stand awed by what is yet before us.
Sometime in in early 2012, while I was staying with my parents, I found a place not far from that old house that I never knew existed. I was driving, and began following a narrow, overgrown road up a steep and densely bush-covered hill just outside a small South Island town. It was only the fact that this scanty country road was asphalt- not gravel- that caught my eye, and suggested that it may have more to it than one of the thousands of other nondescript little roads this country has. Halfway up the hill- on a criminally tight double-back, I passed an old fashioned iron lamp post- small, hunched and ornate- with a large opaque bulb behind a rusted cage. It was clearly very old, and completely out of place, given the surrounding green tangle. Up ahead the road suddenly opened out onto a wide, level plateau- only slightly less bushy- with a scattering of old faded timber buildings- obscured by resurgent undergrowth and the limbs of a few ancient trees.
This was a village- or had once been- and was now slowing slipping out of reality. A few sun-baked asphalt lanes, choked with weed and lichen, spread left and right, but all was slowly being reclaimed by a green swell. Bush crowded peeling timber buildings, creepers climbed bowing walls and sagging roofs, and moss buried the low cracked kerbs and spread across the road. I drove along slowly- stunned- turning my head back and forth as the car crept through the still silence- its thick tires cracking brittle stones.
I was awed by my find- having strayed suddenly from the familiar, living world to a place outside- lost and forgotten. It was unnerving- the silence, the emptiness and the obvious age- a cross-section revealing the vast and terrible reality of time. I was 200 meters from a rural highway and I had stumbled upon a hidden town- vanished from sight and memory. What was this place? Where had the people gone?
But there were people there. I rode along- surveying my discovery, and only faintly feeling intrusive, and suddenly, there they were- still and unseen at first, with furtive, shadowed faces hanging in open-doorways and behind glass- small children sitting silent on dusty doorsteps under hot verandas- and all quiet, all watching. They lived in the houses I had taken to be ruins- houses baked and beaten bare by hammering rain and piercing sun, covered in moss and mold and overgrown with countless years of neglect and indifference- buildings that rightly should have been abandoned, but were not.
I don’t know who those people were- the last desperate inheritors of old timber, or vagrant settlers, happy to claim what had been abandoned. Here was a ghost town, and these people where its ghosts- pale and stony-eyed in the bright daylight.
There
may have been 25 buildings, but it was hard to tell without following
every trailing, green-clad road to its extent. Amongst these was a 40 meter high concrete water tower, a small warehouse building with a long
smokestack, a blue-edged swimming pool with green water and some kind of
pump-station, housing derelict engines. All ruined-
all with broken doors and smashed windows and mud-caked floors.
But deeper into the plateau I found the largest and strangest derelicts- sprawling single-storied, gable-roofed timber buildings, like old school-houses or small hospitals- classically arranged, with a large central box as the entrance, and long symmetrical wings branching left and right with frail timber-mullioned windows. There were four- distributed separately and in isolation around the plateau, with different orientations and varying landscaping- all overgrown- but all with the same identical footprint.
I left in a state of exhilaration, but it wasn’t long before I was back, as once away, I immediately discovered that those structures I had taken to be strangely large and frequent school-houses or clinics were in fact the abandoned remains of an old hospital; the scattered wards of what was once ‘Seaview Mental Asylum’.
See entire photostream here 'Seaview Hill'
I was driving on the motorway today when I noticed something I’d never seen before. Some fleet and forgotten impulse caused me to turn my head, and within the blurred grey-gold of the earth and concrete embankment whirring past the motorway, I saw a tunnel.
This happens from time to time, a sudden glimpse through the smiling façade of the city we know- the familiar and comfortable- to the things underneath, the things the city tries hard to hide. We are trained not to see them, we follow sheltered paths through preconceived routes, and only see what has been selectively illuminated- everything else is veiled from us. This veil is thick and falls over everything, from empty lots, to dark alleys, to dirty underpasses- allowing us to pass by them blissfully, contentedly, and ignorantly unaware.
But every so often- if you stare directly at it- the veil vanishes and you are suddenly confronted with what is really there- the underside of the city. Strange structures and secret doors, odd angles and funny corners, walled voids and buried gardens- all becoming the ever-dense and impenetrable foundation of the rising city. There can also be found- though you may have to look harder still- the graves of the city- the silent skeletons and the old bones- lost and forgotten- but all there, and always present.
Then there are the tunnels. While relics and ruins dot the surface, the tunnels transcend the surface altogether. Here are portals to parallel realms within the city- under roads and beneath buildings- within ground that long predates the city above.
What had I found this time? A service tunnel for a storm-water system, or a substation buried under road-works? I returned- and now that I had seen it once, the spell had broken. The tunnel mouth suddenly gaped wide and obvious, but still- as I approached the highway on foot- the people rushing by only saw me- an oddity, an alien- a lost soul that had fallen through the cracks of their carefree world and now lay uncomfortably outside. They stared- blank faced and uncomprehending- until I slipped behind the curtain.
The tunnel mouth was round, clad with corrugated sheet to support earth and concrete over. A short antechamber housing a short fall of stairs led to a locked gate of iron bars- this is the portal. I passed by the gate, and set off into this world that I am not wholly unfamiliar with- a world without light, without warmth, and without companionship.
The underside of the city.
We are far, far into the future- and here the earth is now so old that it has become almost alien, sundered from the vibrant and youthful thing we would recognise by time, vast and empty. It is quiet, and radiates only a murky and dull glow as it continues to sweep wide and silent paths through the black vacuum.
The sun is pale now- and to the dim eyes of the planet, it hangs dull and remote in a thin grey sky. The air is cold and still but for the feeble vestige of ancient winds, gliding limply over the dry, flat surface. The planet has begun to cool- its fires long since burnt low, leaving only red embers to smoulder in deep, eternal chambers. But here at the end of its life, time stretches abysmally- almost halting- and the long decay of the earth and its final dusty disintegration will continue for eons.
There are still humans here- in places- spread sparse across the surface where once great ancestors, and ancestors of ancestors journeyed- and there they remain. There is no more travel. Vast distances lie between sheltering pockets of habitation, and in these long, cold deserts are the remnants of forgotten cities, ancient relics and old, sad scars. But all is fading- baked and beaten by the earth’s old strength and slowly becoming as the sand and dust.
Many left over long ages, but grand expeditions- star-gloried or desperate- have too been forgotten, and the fortunes of distant colonies unknown. They that remain- the still masters of the earth- are no longer truly our own. Generations beyond count separate the races- generations so long and vast as to lead the species astray, or splinter it completely. But if a narrow lineage does remain, it is truly ancient now- thin and bare and frail- leaving to unwilling heirs a dry and dusty inheritance. The race has been built-high and razed-low times beyond number, knowing glory and star-grasped wonder, as well as writhing, dirt-housed despair. The will of man has been stretched to breaking, and is slack now.
Those few have little desire or impulse left that would be recognisable to us. But they do now know time beyond mortal comprehension, and this knowledge has laid-low sense and reason. Their minds are numb- endless years have exhausted body and will, but eternity remains. They exist to lethargy insurmountable- cursing vainly deathless bodies built by vanished madmen who long ago conquered mortality. Loathsome they reside- still and cold and silent- hunched with handing heads in dark tombs behind shining doors, with not the strength of will to move.
The human spirit was mighty, but it was not immortal, and therefore it could not forever serve the flesh. The will of man- rejuvenated only by eternal rebirth- was chained to the withered bodies of desperate men, and there it starved.
Their towers rise no more- the last of the builders- in their last desperate acts to escape the loss of the surface, burrowed deep into the earth, seeking the shelter and last heat of the old core. Excavations made by the powerful arsenal of man’s machines dug pits and shafts to unseen depths, and trenches whose walls merge with the horizon, but wide enough for the building of escaping ships by those who sought vitality elsewhere. Pits were deepened as the last of them that would know the open sky drained from the cities- leaving their tall towers and wide avenues to the machines that had served them.
Ever deeper the pits went- chasing the warmth- and the upper levels were left empty, and so they decayed. After long, access to them was lost and so the surface was forgotten, seen now as only long shards of bright light far above, falling through powdery air.
They looked out from dusty windows- those last few- on levels stacked one above another- pale houses lining long and buried trenches. But even here entombed they would find no end- man, as the master of death- had cursed his own grave, and he would never now know rest or peace.
Dain_
These are some photos I collected in December of 2011 along the old wharf at the mouth of the Grey River, in the town it gives it namesake to in the South Island of New Zealand.
Now unused, fenced and forgotten, “the commercial port began life in the gold rushes of the 1860's, however it was in the 1880's that investment in breakwaters, wharves, cranes and railways transformed Greymouth into a major coal shipping port to supply the growing New Zealand economy.” (1)
These ancient and sea-beaten timbers line the town-ward bank, and are over-shadowed by the silent but hulking cargo cranes which I understand to be “10-ton hydraulic cranes made by Stothert & Pitt” (2) installed between 1901-1904. (2)
“Coal and timber exports peaked… in the early 1900's, but declined… after the opening of the railway to the east coast in 1923.” Timber exports diminished from the 1950's as indigenous timber exports were restricted. With the discovery of natural gas in the North Island in 1969, the coal trade almost disappeared but recommenced with tug and barge services in 1988.” (1)
Now retired, these old cranes have been composed into a final heroic gesture, arms raised, facing the east with dusty cabin glass watching dimly the sun continue to rise each day. But they themselves will not move again, this pose is eternal, until salt and water erode old bones and they come crashing down.
See entire photostream here ‘Greymouth Wharf- 2011’
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1 “Port | Grey District Council.” Accessed February 9, 2013. http://www.greydc.govt.nz/council-services/port/.
2 “History | Grey District Council.” Accessed February 9, 2013. http://www.greydc.govt.nz/council-services/port/history/.
