Every time I walked by the place, I squinted through the limbs of old pines for tantalizing glimpses of the overgrown ruins within
When I moved with my wife and youngest son into an acreage neighbourhood just outside Edmonton nine years ago, we discovered that one of the other properties a short walk down the road was an uninhabited ruin. Other neighbours told us that not long before we arrived a fire had gutted the place and forced the family to abandon their home. During the intervening years of solitude, the property, roughly 3.
The term “involuntary park” was coined by American writer Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk pioneer and author of one of my favourite science-fiction stories,Mr. Sterling defines an involuntary park as one created by human-made natural disaster: an area so toxic or otherwise dangerous – to us, if not other forms of life – as a result of human activity that it is off-limits and has been allowed, by accident more than design, to return to a state of “feral” wildness.
I’ve never visited any of the world’s famous abandoned places, most of them for obvious reasons. But I couldn’t stop thinking of the unintended – and untended – little wilderness just down the road. The disaster that created it may have been an accidental house fire, not an environmental calamity resulting from human encroachment as such, but the result was much the same.
A nowhere of trees, buzzing insects, flowers, chittering birds, wind in the leaves, the glimmer of water, and one human, the only thing that wasn’t supposed to be here. I reassured myself that my intentions were benign. I hadn’t come to take away anything but impressions. The splintered driveway bloomed with tall hogweed and fireweed. A stagnant moat ran around part of the perimeter. I kept away from its crumbling stonework edge. To my wonder, I discovered a greenhouse tucked away among thick undergrowth. In the damp cave of the interior, the shelves and trays were engulfed with wild plants climbing and cascading everywhere.
Place Nature Zone Nothing Tarkovsky House Rain Property Korean Demilitarized Zone Tikal Chernobyl
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