One day when she was attending her conference, I took the rental car and was driving aimlessly around over near Coronado, and near what looked like an old, overgrown civilian airfield, fenced off with barbed wire chainlink fence, I saw helicopters with guys rappelling out of it on long ropes, probably SEALS training, so pulled over, got out and just watched for about an hour with my binoculars.
It wasn't until later that I wondered if anyone had been looking at me (this was after 9/11)
This is unrelated, but I hope you will indulge me!
It reminded me of a time, probably around 2004, when I was down in Maryland to meet up with the DC Chapter of Free Republic for a protest, and I decided to take a ride over and see if an old base I grew up on was still there.
It was an old Naval communication station about five miles from Andrews AFB, (NAVCOMMSTA WASHINGTON DC) and I drove around for a while looking for the long, straight tree-lined road to the Main Gate (it wasn't on any maps I could see). When I found it and drove up, the Main Gate shack was gone, but there was an unmanned card swipe unit, but the barrier was raised, so I just drove on the base.
It still looked kind of the same, but there were absolutely no humans around anywhere. Totally deserted.
I don't think I am alone in this...I have always had an odd attraction for deserted and decrepit structures and facilities of all kinds. There is something stark, deserted, and lonely about those places that has always touched a hidden part of my soul. Perhaps at some level, it reminds me of where we, as humans all eventually go, degrading and slowly returning to dust and disrepair.
Anyone who has spent any time on military installations knows, there are always those kinds of things on nearly every base. Old buildings, broken windows, doors ajar, and so on.
I grew up on military bases, and as a kid, spent considerable time probing remote, unused parts of them, entering long abandoned buildings, exploring, smashing things, and so on.
As long as you didn't light the place on fire, nobody cared. If you were caught in them, you were often just told to leave and not go in there. Next time you went back, there might be a padlock on the door where one had not been before, and the message was clear.
On this particular base, in its heyday, it was part of the MoonBounce Program (before satellite communication) and was one of the five bases that facilitated communication between Washington DC and our forces on the other side of the world by actually bouncing the communications off the moon and relaying them over there. This moonbounce technology was state of the art, until we began getting communications satellites into orbit in the 1960's. When my dad arrived there on his last duty station before retirement, that
When I was there, the giant parabolic antenna which seemed like it was about 100 feet across, was obsolete and unused, and we would get on the top of the building and climb around on the antenna...kind of like giant monkey bars...really dangerous.
I was not a particularly bright kid, and I was oblivious to the danger of climbing around on it, being 50-100 feet off the ground, where a fall would likely have been fatal. If we had been caught climbing around on it, there surely would have been hell to pay, especially since my dad was the XO on the base, but it was an untravelled part of an obsolete base nearing closure.
The only one who would have ever seen us there would have been Old "Pop" Soule, a civilian security guard who manned the Main Gate when there was a small shack there, and would drive a gray, Navy issue pickup truck around the base a couple of times a day. He even drove around at night, and when I used to camp on a remote part of the base with the Boy Scouts, we would sometimes be up when it was dark out, walking the dirt perimeter road around the base, and would see headlights coming. We weren't doing anything wrong, but instinct took over and we would all fly pell mell into the woods and, laying flat on the ground in the dark, watch Pop Soule drive by in his truck. I think that was his life. I think he just did that job all the time.
One time, a friend and I walked by and began poking around the abandoned windowless concrete building that the huge antenna was built on top of, and we found the padlock on the door was broken, so we went inside. There were some old desks, fluorescent lights stacked (which we promptly destroyed, holding them in our hands like huge, pre-Star Wars light sabers that would explode when we hit each other or the wall with them) and we began to pull huge pieces of asbestos pipe plaster off the pipes and threw it against the walls, which caused it to explode, completely covering and immersing us in white clouds of...asbestos powder.
That will probably kill me someday. We were rambunctious 14 year old brats...but...the building was a wreck anyway! My dad would have killed me if he found out we were screwing around in there!
When I went back there and drove around that abandoned base in 2004, it looked quite similar to when I lived there 1971-1973. I even found my family's old house next to the base water tower, front yard dug up, door ajar. I went inside and took pictures, which sadly, I lost over the years.
When I went up to where the giant antenna had been, it was, along with the building my friend and I had terrorized, was gone, removed apparently in 1986. I was going to explore further, but saw a camera on a pole, and decided I had enough and left.
A few years later, maybe around 2008 or 2010, I decided to go back and see what it was like, and maybe take some pictures to replace the ones I had lost.
As I went up the long, arrow-straight road, I saw a sign "DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT".
I gulped.
At the end of the long road, there was no longer a card swipe entry gate, but a gigantic, structure that the road went straight into, two or three stories high on each side of the road, with what appeared to be thick bullet-proof glass spanning from structure to structure, also two or three stories high, and I could see uniformed figures under fluorescent lights inside.
I had the creepy feeling I was being watched by dozens of unseen eyes and cameras, and I thought that to do a u-turn in the middle of that narrow access road might have been...well...unwise.
So I pulled up to the gate, and a uniformed (non-military) guard walked over and the conversation went something like this:
ME: (Nervously) I, uh, used to live here when I was a kid, and I had come on the abandoned facility to look around a few years ago, but...I guess that probably isn't going to be possible now.
GUARD: (Tight lipped hint of a smile with no humor or mirth, silently shakes his head side-to-side in the negative)
ME: Okay. Can I turn around?
GUARD: (Wordlessly points in the direction I need to go to turn around)
And that was it. As I drove away, again, with that creepy feeling my back was being watched by dozens of unseen eyes and cameras, I thought about the old adage which, in this case, was true: You can't go home again.
On a side note, before I had gone down to Washington the second time, my brother and I had been looking at old Navy Base site on Google Earth, and had seen a satellite image of the area, the fire tower and our old house was gone, there were other changes, and in the region where there used to be an old athletic or football field near where the parabolic antenna used to be we saw what looked like a small airfield with complicated taxiways or maybe even a large go-cart track...but it was too small to be an airfield, and why would someone put a large go-cart track there? We were both puzzled.
Then, a year or two later, when I went back and looked at it again on Google Earth, the satellite image on Google Earth had changed. It looked like this again:
It now showed the base as I had first seen it, you can even see the access road the main gate complete with small trees on each side in the upper left corner of the image. It is a desolate, uninhabited place, with the old fire tower still there along with our old house (you can see the shadow of it near the pin showing our house, pointing towards the 11:00 direction)...and the small airfield or go-cart track was gone, and the old football field area was still there instead, and I realized:
They had gotten rid of the image my brother and I had seen, and replaced it with an older view before they build the Homeland Security station there.
And the small airfield/large go-cart track we had seen on the vanished image had been a course to train drivers. The old photo had shown it with four way stops, roundabouts, parking lots, highway lanes, all manner of places where cars would go, and sometimes...need to take evasive or defensive maneuvers. We just had not made the connection.
Someone made a mistake allowing that newer photo to appear on Google Earth, but as with all things monitored by lidless eyes, things eventually catch up.