I finally realized what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I’ve always been fascinated by abandoned, lost, places. When I was young, I used to go exploring the woods surrounding my house. I discovered an illegal junkyard with a dozen cars in it. Most had been there for decades, and I investigated every one of them. It wasn’t the cars themselves that interested me; every single one of them had a story. Every one had something that they could tell me about who had been in them, what kind of lives they had led. Surrounding them on all sides was someone’s junk, the heaped and forgotten detritus of an anonymous life. Baby carriages. Bird cages. Long forgotten toys. I knew that everything there had meant something to someone once.
Less than a mile away, I also discovered the remains of an old homestead. Almost nothing remained of it, just a clearing overgrown with long grass. In the center stood the crumbling remains of a foundation and an electric pole, sans wires to the power grid. I wanted to know who had lived there, when, why they had left, and when they had gotten there.
This interest in the forgotten never left me. For me, there’s mystery, dignity, and an exciting sense of uncovering the unknown. Christine and I biked out to an abandoned hotel to poke through the ruins. Megan, Mike and I toured the underground tunnels in downtown Seattle. I would love to become an urban explorer, but it’s a dangerous hobby and not the sort of thing one wants to do on his own if he values his life.
I wish that I’d realized that there could have been a future and a career for me in archeology and exploration. I think it would have been a far more interesting and rewarding life than the one I’m leading now.