ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
Thomas Wharton’s latest novel is The Book of Rain.
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 3.5 hectares of treed, sloughy land surrounding the remains of a house and garage, sat untenanted behind a fence, growing more and more lush and tangled, an undisturbed mini-biome for insects, birds and plant life. A large “NO TRESPASSING” sign hung on the gate.
I privately dubbed the place “the Zone,” after the forbidden area of the same name in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction mindbender Stalker. I always tell people who haven’t seen the movie that it’s three hours long and nothing happens – but it’s the most gorgeous, strange and disquieting nothing in all of cinema.
And there, not far from my doorstep, was a no man’s land straight out of the film. Every time I walked by the place, I squinted through the limbs of old pines and knotted foliage for tantalizing glimpses of the overgrown ruins within.
The term “involuntary park” was coined by American writer Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk pioneer and author of one of my favourite science-fiction stories, Swarm, which was recently adapted for television on the Netflix series Love, Death, and Robots.
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. In these places nature gets on with things in our absence, and usually thrives.
The examples provided by Mr. Sterling include Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, aging toxic waste dumps and abandoned military test ranges. These sites “are not representatives of untouched nature, but of vengeful nature, of natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse,” he writes in an online article, The World is Becoming Uninsurable. I disagree completely with Mr. Sterling’s odd notion that vengeance is something nature is at all interested in. And in my view nothing is being “reasserted” either when a site is left to the plants and animals. The thing that was there all along just becomes much easier to see.
A comprehensive list of such parks might include the Mayan city of Tikal, abandoned after cinnabar mining released mercury into the inhabitants’ water supply; Epecuén, a popular tourist locale in Argentina until a nearby dam burst and flooded it under 30 feet of water; Wittenoom, a town in Australia poisoned by asbestos; and the village of Namie in Japan, with most of its inhabitants forced to relocate after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011.
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. Our neighbourhood Zone was not much larger than a downtown urban green space, but it was involuntary for sure, and so enticingly Tarkovskian. And it was right here.
One afternoon on a walk past the Zone I could no longer resist its call. Looking around to make sure no one was coming along the road, I jumped the fence and plunged in. Paradise is no longer a place we were booted out of. It’s a place we have to break into.
Within the stockade of pines, the sun-warmed air was fuzzy with pollen and dust. It was so quiet. A gorgeous secret. Nothing was happening all around me, just like in Tarkovsky’s Zone.
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.
Unlike Tarkovsky’s Zone, this one contained no otherworldly “traps” but it was dangerous enough, the waist-high grass laden with boards and pieces of wall with nails sticking out of them, as well as fragments of glass, plastic and metal. A bathtub sat rusting in an open patch of barren ground. A rain barrel stood leaning nearby, the only fixture still doing what it was made for: collecting rain. I moved slowly, cautiously, like the anxious protagonists of Tarkovsky’s film.
A hawk up in the trees began shrieking a warning about my presence. I vaguely wondered what other creatures might have taken up residence here. Coyotes maybe? Surely not a cougar, or bears. It was too close to the city for that, right? Suddenly this little expedition into the unknown didn’t seem like one of my better ideas.
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. Adjacent to the greenhouse, behind a ruptured privacy wall, a snug patio still held lawn chairs around a glass-topped table, as if someone might come out of the house at any moment carrying a jug of lemonade.
Part of the main house itself was still standing, at a defeated angle. What had once been a home had been torn in half by some great clawed machine, probably during an early attempt at demolition. Parts of the interior, including the kitchen, stood exposed to the open air. Shards of glass hung in the empty picture window from a thread of loosened caulking, like jagged streamers. Gingerly, I climbed the unmoored concrete steps to the front door. When it didn’t collapse under me, I let out a relieved breath and contemplated going inside. Given the slumped and rickety state of the place, I decided against it.
I spent a couple of eerily enchanting hours in this liminal realm before I finally crept back out, hoping none of my neighbours had spotted me. Over a few weeks, I sneaked back in several times. Once I went when it was raining. I silently watched the droplets plunking in the rain barrel. I felt something in this place that I had felt nowhere else: a curious mix of sadness, fear, longing, wonder and peace. All of it spiced with the dark delight of being an unlawful intruder.
One day when I set out for a trip into the Zone, I was dismayed to see vehicles parked in the driveway. Men in hard hats and safety vests were roaming the property. Someone had bought the place at last, and the cleanup and reconstruction had begun. My stolen idylls in a postapocalyptic garden were over.
Nature still lived there, of course, after the new house was finished and the owners moved in with their two dogs, five cars and motorhome. A nature that was once again neatly, tastefully curated and contained. But I knew what it had been. I was the only person who really knew. I still dream that one day, I might dare to knock on the new residents’ door and tell them of my sojourns here, before they came and settled in. If they were willing to listen, I’d reveal what I discovered, what I’d seen. The glimpses I’d been given of the world waiting in the wings for the day we vacate the premises, our habitations and our bodies never more than a misstep away from falling into the waiting arms of whatever other life can find a use for us.