The continuing adventures of TCP are not here

Chambers beneath the desert

The high, smooth concrete walls sent our footsteps echoing all the way up to the vaulted ceilings 50 or more feet above our heads. My companion was tall and thin, dark eyed and with curled dark hair that fell between her proud shoulders to the middle of her back. I had never been in this complex, deep beneath the California desert, but my friend wanted a guide with some actual drain time under his belt, and I was the only one she knew. We had been walking an hour or so before the walls opened into this vault. It was huge and well lit by sodium arc lamps on 15-foot squared steel posts. Conduit, steam pipes and industrial hose snaked across the walls and floor in a baffling network of rusty iron and dingy accordians of yellow rubber. This was unlike any storm-drain I had visited before, and I told the girl as much... This story is continued here

A jar of nothing

The ruins loomed at the edge of a sprawling, self-similar suburb. Boxy three-bedrooms painted in the same shades of rust, grey and olive marched endlessly away in all directions from the massive and crumbling edifice of red bricks. Like a factory out of the world wars, the building looked like a cross between a fortress and a red stone steamship. Three majestic smokestacks rose from behind the shabby facade. The roofline was crenellated with age, looking as though the place had been bombed out. The bricks had fallen in large bites to the rubble and debris below over many years. This exposed the bones of the old building, iron girders bracketing fragments of nighttime sky. I slipped between two identical houses through dewy grass and up the embankment behind. There was a sagging chainlink fence haphazardly thrown around the property, but even this token gesture lay flat against the rubble where it sagged too far between bent poles. I stepped over it at one of these places and easily hop...

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