prison break-in, part II

Getting into the buildings was a more difficult challenge. Not only was every door we tried locked, but we kept going down passageways between buildings that dead-ended in imposing stone walls topped, also, with razor wire. A close maze of trailers had been laid out next to one of the main buildings. At first I thought we were looking at construction trailers, but quickly it became evident that they’d been there a long time and were built to house inmates. We extricated ourselves from the labyrinth and made our way in a large arc around the building complex. We’d need another point of attack. I think we walked through what had once been an exercise yard, the vegetation was high, and found what was left of a road leading around and down. More locked doors, and windows – a usual point of attack for break-ins – were all barred. It was, after all, a prison. Finally, in what looked like the hospital building, a door leading downstairs off its hinges. We descended into the bowels of the building, pipes, dirt floors, cut off from any outside light. Just keep walking, we knew, and usually such tunnels would emerge into some part of the building. And it did. Coming up out of Alice’s rabbit hole, we found ourselves in what looked like the administration building. It, as we suspected, was connected to a prison building, and it, as we hoped, was connected to other prison buildings. We were inside.

Most interior doors stood ajar, many removed from their hinges or with the locking mechanism cut out. The doors to our prison were thrown open.

A building unattended deteriorates swiftly. Many think that no activity would be good for a building, nobody to cause any damage. But just the opposite is true. Once a window is broken – and a window will always be broken – wind and rain wreck havoc. Water is the enemy of order. Paint peels quickly, leaving an expanding layer of chips on the walls and floors. Papers are blown around, wood and even metal begin to decay, animals get in the building and live and die, vandals rip out anything that was left and tag the walls with territory marking graffiti, furniture is rifled through, plant life takes hold. Rust, mold, dirt, even sunlight rapidly eat away the thin veneer of order that contains our lives.