Personal Reflections
What Once Was
A few weeks shy of our nation’s twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, I visited the abandoned Lukens steel rolling mill in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. For once, this urban explorer and her exploring group had permission to investigate this facility, but only with the presentation of a purchased on-demand insurance liability certificate. I love to photograph heavy industrial abandonments, perhaps because such facilities evoke nostalgia since I grew up in an Eastern Pennsylvania steel town. I looked forward to experiencing this steel mill’s look, smells, and color, or lack of color. Little did I realize how affected I was by the mill artifacts and their connection to New York City’s fallen World Trade Center.
Within minutes of arriving at the facility, the skies opened up and drenched all with sheets of seemingly incessant rain. Much confusion about the mill entry procedure prevailed because of this downpour. Still, the Lukens representatives corralled my group of explorers into the mill as I attended to the administrative paperwork inside the Lukens office. Even though the torrential rain created limited visibility outside, I could still grasp the Lukens landmark steel trident proudly displayed in front of the derelict rolling mill. I knew this trident, a/k/a steel tree, was a 35 ton, 70-foot structural support from the first nine floors and lobby of a World Trade Center tower. I also was aware that this colossal piece of steel stood in the rubble of the towers’ collapse. Nevertheless, I was taken aback to see nine additional massive steel trees resting inside the mill – each weighing up to 70 tons and up to 100 feet in length.
On April 14, 2010, nine years after the fateful day of 9/11, a tractor-trailer convoy of twenty-eight left New York City with ten World Trade Center steel structural supports. The steel trees were manufactured at the Lukens mill and were never expected to return home when they departed for New York City for the construction of the World Trade Center towers in the 1960s. Thirteen hours after departure, the steel trees arrived at their Lukens birthplace. Five hundred tons of World Trade Center steel returned home and were no longer required to be the foundational sentries for the towering symbol of American commerce and trade. Seeing the mammoth steel remains on the mill’s dirt floors and some stacked on each other is humbling and forces reminiscence about many aspects of that eventful day. Curiously, politics and even the essence of my urban exploration activities mingled in this thoughtful stew, too.
Life takes you to surprising places, but love carries you home – the ideal. Frequently, I am overwhelmed with a strong sense of sadness and loneliness when I explore abandoned homes because I believe in the “home sweet home” ideal. I often encounter so many personal items strewn about inside forlorn homes—possessions that were once treasures to the owner. Sometimes, I only need to photograph the rooms of abandoned houses with an emphasis on small details of interest to tell a story about the experience. I never become comfortable, however, with witnessing so many artifacts in all corners of the house, not claimed by family members or friends—just left behind.
Many question my fascination with urban exploration (“urbex”) and specifically, my love of the urban decay photography genre associated with urbex. Urbex is the exploration and documentation (in my case, documentation via the camera) of abandoned industrial infrastructure; including, in part, factories, hospitals, asylums, schools, amusement parks, power plants, retail centers, multi-unit office and housing structures, tunnels and even drainage sewers (although I have yet to partake in a “draining” adventure). Abandonments are usually inaccessible and not meant to be visible. The urbex code of conduct demands respect when visiting these forgotten places – no tagging, vandalism, destruction or theft. The urbex golden rule is: take only pictures and leave only footprints.
When one thinks of Kenya, one imagines classic safari snapshots of natural beauty, rolling fields, a medley of landscapes sprinkled with herds of wild animals, acacia trees, fiery sunsets, and Maasai people draped in vivid fabric. Kenya is home to the great outdoor expedition – it is National Geographic Magazine on steroids. Of course, most already know that game viewing in Kenya is wonderful, and the bounty of wild animals will almost always promise sightings of the big five as well as other unique animals and colorful birds. Kenya, however, offers much more with its mosaic of cultural diversity.
How ironic, but also how fitting, that I found enlightenment in the environment where Charles Darwin had his epiphany — the symbolic persistence of life prevailing even under the harshest of conditions. My Galapagos Islands adventure fell within one month of a significant anniversary event that derailed my life. It also fell within one month of another recent life-changing moment.