Infiltration

Riptides \|	Tarklin Airfield < on 4/28/2005 8:16 AM >

	Back when I was a kid.. I got to spend several weeks at my Great-grandmothers home in Pensacola Florida near Perdido Bay. A friend of mine got to tag-along for a week of that trip because he had family in Mobile Alabama that his He and his Mom visited at the same time. She dropped him off to hang out with me the last week I was there, and he was to ride home with my parents and I. My Gramma had a pair of rugged 10-speed type beach bikes with fat treads for riding on loose sand, and these bikes were tough. We took these through the swamp and sawgrass woods local to her. Happening along one old trail we followed it until, a surprise for us, we hit the edge of an old WWII-era airfield. Being 12-13 years of age, its just what you would expect out of some comic-book. It had trees nearly lining the edges of the runways. Grass growing up tall in the cracks of the Tarmac. We could see extremely rusted chainlink fencing along behind some of the trees, but we actually never saw a fence along the way we came in at the end of one of the runways. I might have called it abandoned except that a quite new and fresh Port-O-John sat along one of the runways. After looking about and seeing that there was possibly no one else in the world there with us, know what we did? We got to haulin' some ass up and down those runways. Thats what we did. Nothing but flat smooth runway on 10-speed bikes. Thats when we came out along and saw the hugenormous middle round runway. That thing was crazy big. It wasn't long before we were wishing for 4-wheelers or go-Karts or some other crazy thing to race when we noticed something beyond the rust rust red chainlink fencing out in the trees. A few somethings actually, big and dark. Beyond the chainlink fence at the edges of the runway sat several airplane hangers hidden in the trees. These hangers were completely and individually fenced up with the same rust red fencing. We got around the fence at the runway by riding down to the end and simply going around it. We came to the hangers for closer inspection and saw carcasses of planes inside a couple. It should be noted, a lot of the hanger and things remaining inside the hanger was the same color of rusty rust red. Some of the hangers had trees growing through them as the tops had probably been blown off by a storm at one time or another many years ago. There were all sorts of plane parts sitting in disarray where we could see through the the gaps on the sides of the hangers. There were even a few places we could have gotten inside at, but everything was so fallen down and rusty that I'm sure we would have both needed tetanus shots after we climbed out. We spent over an hour visually examining all we could and trying our hands at laying down some WW2 "knowledge" on each other. We finally had to go. But planned on coming back later in the week. Later that week we returned, had just gotten out of the woods and was bookin' across part of the runway when we saw quite a few vehicles parked at the far corner of the field. Thats when we noticed even more buildings through the trees past the cars, but these buildings look more kept up. Thats when I realized this place was crazy big. We scouted about along the trees for a little bit, but never saw any people, and in return, didn't get seen. Later in life I now realize we were in every sense trespassing on Air Force (read: Government!) property. We wanted to see more but decided to get the heck outta dodge and go do something else before some M.P's arrived. But had we explored more that previous day, the coolest things we might have seen. Because now I know that this is Bronson Airfield. There is even a ramp at the field for launching seaplanes, but it was far from where we were and I wish we had found it. If we had looked around more we might have seen things like this or this. But most of what we saw was like this. Theres also aerial photos of the place on This Site for the interested. If you look in the last recent photo from the air you can see all the trees grown up around it, so thats why we didn't realize the size of the place. And I realize now that what we thought were the runways were just the service roads, it was the big middle part that was the main runway. We came in at the end of the service roads along the northern side. In the end it was still a heck of a find for 2 kids one lazy summer day nearly 20 years ago.

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