An Urbexer's Rant

So before I start writing new pieces about urban exploration, I want to post up some older pieces that I've written that I think are necessary to put up.

NOTE:
The following piece was originally a letter to a reporter who wrote an article about urban explorers and all their "illegal/dangerous/stupid" activities after a local abandoned mansion was set on fire. She made no distinction between explorers and vandals, and so I got really, really mad (especially since my username on UER was mentioned in the article), and wrote a very angry letter to her explaining why we are different from people like her who just can't seem to separate legality from beauty, art and respect. I wanted to show her that we give more respect to property than the owners do and that the concept of "The New" (i.e. material possessions) is something urbexers hate and something that has taken over society. Urban exploring is a very noble and daring activity, and the feelings behind it are very much rooted in personal beliefs. When I read this over again and re-wrote it as an actual creative writing piece, I realized this is unlike most of my other writing. It's not funny; it's angry, hurt, frustrated and disgusted with the world. It has a tone of superiority reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk's style, which I love. I think urban exploration and photography are the only things I can really write about this passionately at this point in my life. All of this writing came naturally—I remember the actual letter-writing took about 20 minutes, and revising it and adding to it later took about half an hour (after I re-read that horrible, stupid woman's article online).

Here's the link to the article, you should definitely read it, and check out the comments at the end-- they're great!
Click Here for The Article That Started My Rant!

And here's my response:


Dear Ms. Stephan,

Real explorers don’t kid around. We kid around and we end up injured, infected, in jail, or dead. Urban explorers are often given a bad reputation by graffiti artists and subway surfers. You know, the ones who ride the subway trains like surfboards and end up getting impaled through the eye by a piece of metal sticking out of the ceiling. You can call us illegal. You can call us criminals, but we are every bit as noble as your boy scouts, journalists, photographers and policemen. We take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints. We are the ones who protect your forgotten treasures from the tourist wishing to collect knick-knacks that aren't theirs, the land developer wishing to raze the skeletons of your lives, and the ignorant so-called "artist" who sees these cracked and broken shells as just another canvas for their postmodern depictions of teen angst flowing from the nozzle of a spray can.
I've seen the ones who call themselves urbexers; sometimes it's hard to tell if their bullshitting or not. They usually are. Those are the ones who arrive on the scene and while I'm taking pictures of your past, they're in the other room pocketing "collectibles". Real urban explorers never collect; we don't treasure the tangible, and we never covet. We desire only to see, learn, protect and preserve in memories and photographs.
Our activities are not crimes, but duties. We are the ones who have taken it upon ourselves to document and preserve everything you and your society have abandoned. We know everything about you that you've forgotten in the haze of new friends, new jobs, new schools, new possessions, and new lives. We loathe The New: we see it as an infestation, a disease and an obsession. We've learned to appreciate The Old, and we detest those who can't understand why. We creep and crawl over your property because we care more about your empty shells than you do. We make them ours for a night while you sleep peacefully in your beds with the bulldozers crouching outside of your window, waiting for the next morning when this masterpiece of abandonment will be reduced to splinters. We are the ones who make sure that it still exists as a whole—in our photographs and in our souls.
What is it like? you might feel compelled to ask. It's safe to say that it's like nothing you know or ever could know. It's like knowing a secret that twists you so forcefully inside and out that your only option is to make it your obsession. It is like a previously dormant instinct, newly awakened. It is like we are the ghosts—the only ethereal radiance that haunts your forgotten hallways is the gleam of our diffused flashlights shining through the dust. It's like picking up a broken antique doll with a cracked porcelain face, staring at it straight in its eerie blue eyes and seeing it come to life in your hands and tell you volumes about every child that once stroked its now dirt-encrusted hair. Other times it's like watching the same doll get sold to a collector who repaints it and gives it a brand new blonde head of hair. You call this restoration. We call this discarding true beauty.
You could never understand what it's like to hold onto the top rung of a storm drain ladder and watch the water rise to your feet, and then your knees, and then your waist, and you try desperately to force open the manhole cover from underneath that you just barely reached in time, having tried two others already that led into the middle of busy streets full of people like you. People like you could never understand what it's like to enter a private world of your hands and the camera and the subject, all communicating silently as you step over broken glass on a rotting wooden floor to take a closer picture of something else you left behind. You could never understand what it's like to feel the adrenaline rush when you see a cop's flashlight or hear a property owner's voice, and what it's like to have to make a decision whether to run or explain yourself. We usually run, because people like you blink at us when we explain ourselves and wonder why we don't just join them in their bigger, better fucked up world of The New.
We are not impressed by your newer, "better" structures. We are explorers of your past, and we are interested only in that which has been lost, forgotten, abandoned, broken, ignored, destroyed, trampled upon and left behind. We find beauty in your ugliness; we are those others you've heard of whose treasure is your trash. While you slip into your silken slumbers, we are donning backpacks, cameras, gloves, harnesses, tripods and gas masks. Our dreams are your nightmares.
The horror movies you watch never meet our eyes because we refuse to let a fiction invade our reality. Everyone is afraid for a reason, but we are the ones who refuse to make your excuses a part of our lives, and it leaves us strong and thirsty for risk. For you, asbestos is something to flee from; for us, it is the herald of an adventure. Every dark passageway and dusty staircase you shrivel away from is the same one that we yearn to travel.
Our greatest find might be that mansion you drive by every day with its plywood barriers and crumbling Roman columns. Most of our discoveries are found not by searching, but by realizing. We might suddenly remember an ancient house that no one has lived in for years and the fact that it is less than a block away. These are the greatest discoveries. For a while we were just like you. We forgot we knew about them.
During the day we are just like you. We have jobs, families and schools. We give back to society the way society wants us to give back. But when the sun sets we have a different agenda. We are stealth. We are adventurers of the night, and our only obsession is to creep down the asbestos-filled labyrinths of your past. We know everything you don't know about yourself. We are unbreakable and fearless.
We are urban explorers, and we go where you don’t.