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Urban What?


Cityism! Urban exploration. Infiltration, per se. The art, hobby, and sport of going where one is not intended to. This is our thing. It is, amongst other piffling day-to-day activities, "what we do".
Urban Exploration is just that: the extensive exploration of old, dangerous, off-limits or simply nifty places -- specifically those created by human civilization, as opposed to natural formations such as caves and canyons.
Why?
Why not?
Everyone has a different answer as to "why". Some say they're interested in the history of old and abandoned places. Some say it's for the rush of going where they're not supposed to, socially engineering, or putting their life or freedom in danger. There are those who hold that putting one's life in mortal peril makes one feel more alive.
Then there are those of us who just get a kick out of it.
Imagine visiting a city and learning of its history not through pamphlets, guided tours and local access cable channels, but through the very buildings and tunnels that make it up. Rather than just being told of it you delve into the very belly of the beast, where nothing is hidden, nothing is censored, nothing has rounded ergonomic corners to indicate the areas intended to be interacted with for maximum efficiency and functionality. There are no dire warnings not to pull the plug out by the cord and there are no dialog boxes warning you not to delete anything from a certain directory. There is just you and the city, and as long as you treat it with respect and caution, it won't kill you.
The urban explorer hears the secret voice of the city -- its true voice. The voice that is too quiet to hear over the rush-hour traffic, in a crowded fast-food restaurant or coffee shop or mall. When one stands in what was once a grand, opulent, thirty-story railroad station and office complex, completely alone in a high-ceilinged lobby, with the airborne dust illuminated by the moonlight as it shines through the sharp-edged, shattered stainglass windows high above, lighting the room in dull tones of grey and brown -- then, then one truly hears the city speak. It speaks in cryptic, often obscene graffiti, it speaks in the sound of rain filtering through the floors over one's head and of wind blowing through deserted hallways. It speaks through the homeless whose belongings and beddings slowly accumulate and are gradually deserted. It speaks through the decay of a building that was once proud, cared for, beautiful. The beauty one finds in a building that has been abandoned for decades, with vines climbing its walls and razorwire and caution tape surrounding it -- that is the voice of the city.
After any night of urban exploration normal life seems unfulfilling. It seems false, or at least too far abstracted from reality to be useful. One never thinks of riding a subway the same way once one has been through its tunnels on foot, with no steel and glass shielding you from the world beneath.
The urban explorer is free for a few hours. He steps out of the world of neon signs and streetlights and city buses and contracts and income tax and going-out-of-business-sales-everything-must-go, and for a period exists in a separate cosmos, where there are no arbitrary rules, no laws, no regular expressions and no human resource directors. Whether walking (or crawling) through the storm drains of the city, underneath the streets, or running the mass transit tunnels, or exploring ancient buildings (or, for that matter, active ones), the urban explorer is granted a brief reprieve from reality.
That is urban exploration. It is all that and more. It is destroying your favourite shirt and tearing your back open on a rusty nail hanging from the ceiling of a three-foot high concrete drain and feeling good about it the next day.
That's really all there is to it.


Fine. What, then, is UEC?


UEC (Urban Exploration Canada) is a loosely-organized, informal group of people from the small, boring city of Barrie, Ontario. Most of us used to infiltrate various places on our own time before meeting up, then began to arrange larger group excursions within and outside of the city. The question continually came up of what we were "called", and I was adamant that deciding we're a "group" was silly. Nonetheless, when Asher and I decided to merge our separate, independent (and very small) pages about various infiltrations we'd done, it was arbitrarily named UECanada -- and so it goes. It's far less pretentious than, say, "The Black Liquid Night Drain Ninjas", and it's fun to be able to tell people who query us about being in off-limits areas that "it's alright, we're with the UEC." We even have a page up about each of the members now.
Our history? Sure. One fine day an attendee at the local 2600 meetings asked me, for the sixth time in as many months, if I had heard of a newsletter called Infiltration. I hadn't, other than from him, and he directed me this time to infiltration.org. It was there that I read the Cave Clan's article on draining and became rather fascinated by it. That evening I went out with a friend, Dain Bramaged, and with some bolt-cutteriffic fun entered Harvey Drain, the first I'd ever been into. It was a tiny, crappy municipal drain, but in my complete lack of experience it fascinated me nonetheless. (I like to think that the tiny drains in my area are a blessing, since they won't spoil me like the cavernous "drains" in Melbourne. Yeah, right.)
Later, at another meeting, I met a girl named Asher who, it turned out, was also something of a budding drainer. She had recently visited a downtown drain (Queen's, in fact) with her partner-in-exploration, Grebin. They went, photographed it, and put up a small web page about it. Intrigued, I later went to the same drain myself.
Between a wide group of disparate individuals such as myself (FlameOut), Asher, Grebin, Dain Bramaged, NFF, Beast Angel, PrussianSnow, Krall and Efferfax, UEC was gradually given life.
Again, the UEC is not a tight-knit crew. We don't have official "members", people don't "join" or "leave". We're just a bunch of people with a common interest and a fair bit of equipment. You know the sort.


What of the UEC site?


Our web page. It is administrated chiefly by Asher and myself and is currently served out of our basement. Its hosting hops around from time to time and our home webserver occasionally explodes but for the most part it's up and it's stable. One thing it is not, at the moment, is complete. Some things to come include:
- More photos.
- More content that isn't write-ups (the usual infiltration page stuff -- "tips", "equipment", "links", that sort of thing -- just to keep us busy).
- Perhaps a forum, perhaps a PHP door game. Who knows?
The Conquests section of the page is constantly growing as we add material to it. Probably less than two thirds of what we do ends up there, often because we just weren't there long enough (or nothing noteworthy happened) to make a write-up worthwhile, and/or we don't have any photos (although a quick review of some of the write-ups will make it apparent that neither of these reasons have ever stopped us before). Nonetheless, we do try. We usually have several expeditions planned at any given time, most of them pending transport, so there should be new stuff up quite soon. Taking more photographs has become top priority for us, as they are pretty to look at, so you can assume that pretty much every new write-up from here on in will be accompanied photographically. Keep an eye on the news page and current write-ups, as well, as they get updated or expanded from time to time.


I live in Ontario, and I fjeer.


Fine. If you're particularly intrigued by anything we've done (or mentioned) on the page, drop us a line for directions, tips, or anything of the sort. If you want to do something silly like send us a write-up of something we've done (or, for that matter, anything nifty and relevant), go right ahead. If we like it, we'll link it and credit the author.

And that, as they say, is that.

Contact: [email protected]
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