I saw two abandoned places on the news yesterday, each one abandoned for a different reason. If "growth, growth, growth" is humankind's mantra, then abandoned places seem especially odd in that light, and they are.
The first abandoned place was the Leilani Estates subdivision on the big island of Hawaii. An intrepid local was walking through the area and recording what he saw.
The formerly pleasant residential street he was walking on was lined with deep cracks, which made the road impassable for cars, though cars still could skirt the cracked areas by taking to the shoulders. But for how long? Seemed any drive up or down this street could be your last.
The power lines were down, due to some of the poles being burnt to ash, and where a house once stood there only remained lava mounds tinged with yellowish sulfur deposits. The lush greenery that once surrounded this house was brittle and browned, and the grass had taken on the color of straw.
Next to this house sat a few untouched, one next door and another across the street, somewhat higher in elevation, but would those residents ever come back? Good question for as our intrepid resident walked up the road to where it joined another at a 'T' intersection, in looking down that road to his left he could see haze about a quarter of a mile away. Volcanic fumes were in the air down there, and he, having experienced breathing such fumes before, said to the camera that he would no way be walking in that direction.
Jakob Owens- Unsplash.com
The second (nearly) abandoned place was the Memphis airport. It was originally a bustling place, serving over 11 million passengers a year. The Memphis airport served as a hub for Delta Airlines but upon some merger, I think it was the purchase of Northwest Airlines, Delta decided to operate out of its Atlanta hub only and the passenger count in Memphis dropped to 4 million a year. That still seems like a lot of people, and it is, but for the Memphis airport it meant a lot of empty gates where planes could be parked and a lot of empty concourses. The airport manager lamented that as an 'airport guy' he wasn't expecting to see anything but growth, crowded terminals, endless construction, upgrading, and expansion so it was hard for him to make the decision to shut areas of the Memphis airport down, mothball them, in effect.
Places that are abandoned like this don't usually make the news. They are forgotten, overlooked, discounted as being unnewsworthy. Not a lot of action taking place. They're anomalies in an otherwise very busy world. Curiosities. Asides. Eddies in an otherwise mighty river. A different kind of tourist attrraction, perhaps. An enterprising company could host niche tours to Places Where Nothing Is Really Happening At All.