[This is my first explorationy post here. There's quite a few photos because we came across quite a bit of stuff yesterday. Please let me know if there's some other preferred method or something the community in general would rather have done another way!] So, Friday was this beautiful, cold-cream kind of day with grey skies and a lot of silence here in eastern Iowa. My partner and I went a-ramblin' o'er hill and dale to quite fruitful ends on the abandoned stuff front. With the leaves down and the cornfields plowed, it's like the landscape just peeled open to show us things that were assuredly hidden from our usual roadways (and our unusual roadways) during the more lush days of summer. The first site wasn't far from town, and I'm sure we've driven by it half a dozen times and not spied it up on the hill. The view from the house (perfect morning!):
The house from its most intact side:
I did my best to capture how the house was sinking down toward the front door, where the light is pouring into the first photo. That counter is slanting down toward me at about a thirty degree angle:
(note the brown door of the under-counter cabinets through the door) http://crows.halfl...farm-frontdoor.jpg And here's the kitchen:
The view from the kitchen of the sinking front room:
We found an old record player in one of the outbuildings:
The second place was a mini mart a little further on. The forlorn little place is for sale. We could have gotten in to at least one of the buildings without causing damage, but it's fairly exposed and my car was right there in the entry so we didn't stick around long.
Third was way out in the gravel back roads down in the southern part of the state. She's almost idyllic, in a kind of... desolate, post-apocalyptic kind of way. Which is my favourite. Naturally.
Four was the remnants of a farm stead with no house that we could identify, down closer to the real prize at the destination that we were specifically moving toward:
I really fancy these old windmill towers with vines crawling all over them:
Here's the brick silo. I really fancy these as well:
There were a few concrete foundations with things growing in them, but they all looked farmy and none farm-housy:
Last is our jackpot for the day. Pardon the graininess of some of the pictures, the light was beginning to go by the time we got all the way down there and we were moving quickly because there was no discreet place to put the car and it sits baldly up to a well-traversed road:
The barn on the property is in better shape, but we didn't really go down there:
There were a lot of rusty hangers around:
There was a lot of debris around the front of the house, including this child-sized folding chair:
which was right next to this hole in the ground. Maybe some kind of tank opening? I don't know enough about the architecture of these old places to have any idea what this is or why it's there:
This skull was sitting right outside the front door (our guess is raccoon based on size and other remains nearby; the bone next to it in this photo I pulled out from under the sheet metal and is larger than the other probably-raccoon bones so I have no idea what it's from):
We went upstairs first:
Here's the view from one of the bedroom windows:
This is the scene that greeted us in the room at the top of the stairs:
Then back downstairs, where there's still a phone on the wall and some hanging decorative(?) corn to either side of that door, there:
Most everything in the kitchen was open:
And then, we vanished into the gloaming! Stopping to take a few snapshots of some boarded up old buildings in the small town nearby, the one person who noticed us and showed any interest all day pulled over his minivan. What we earned wandering around the ragged edges of these places that we obviously had no business interest in (granted, not trying to get inside) was a tip-off about the site of the old schoolhouse, which as it turned out had been either partially demolished or completely collapsed or some of both, but was still an interesting, if brief, view. He also gave us some local history on the dead buildings we were peering at downtown! (Edited to fix the last photo link which I swear I fixed before...) [last edit 12/9/2012 3:33 PM by crows - edited 1 times]
input: bacon | output: fiction |