The Point and the Power of Abandoned Places Part 1: Questions and Answers
The country drive between the quaint town of Port Austin, Michigan and my in-law’s cottage near Port Aux Barques Lighthouse on Lake Huron takes twenty or so minutes. At about the halfway point on the drive a dense and dark patch of woods and weeds appears and then is just as quickly gone. If you’re not looking specifically into it as you pass, you don’t see the outline of the abandoned house that has been swallowed by this thicket.
My wife, because she had been passing by this abandoned house since her childhood – it had been vacant since her earliest memories but the trees and weeds had not yet swallowed it so thoroughly— knew to point it out to our children, my mother and me when we visited my in-laws a number of years back.
We took several drives between their cottage and Port Austin during that stay, and each time we slowed down and strained our eyes to make out that shadow of a house buried deep within branches and green. And every time – especially that time we passed it at night – my son begged us to stop the car, get out and “investigate it.” He was eleven years old. Meanwhile, my step-daugther, a year younger, begged us not to investigate it – especially that time we passed it at night.
The day we departed their cottage for the long drive back home to Illinois, my wife, mother and I decided to grant my son his wish. 
I parked by the side of the road by these woods and my mother and I invited him to get out of the car with us to investigate more closely – which, my mother stressed to me as much as her grandson, meant “only so far as it felt safe to go and no further.” My wife volunteered to stay back, but to all of our surprise our daughter said she was a little scared but wanted to go, too.
So the five of us – with me the male superhero of our story leading the way and hoping to appear rational and fearless, though I’d secretly already convinced myself I had seen something half-human climbing in the trees above the abandoned house and it would probably eat me – made our way cautiously into the woods. Just a little bit in. Avoiding high weeds and snaking our way along some long-unused path of lower weeds.
And then, at my son’s whispered begging and to only modest protests from my step-daughter and wife and with continued cautions from my mother, just a little further in.
And then further in.
Until we were standing just a few feet before and then creeping around this two-story ghost that smelled of soil and moldy boxes.
There would be no real “going inside” because the inside had mostly become the outside, and vice versa. The structure had no basement but instead rested on a concrete slab with multiple large cracks through which giant weeds and small trees grew. And though the entire weathered wood skeleton of the abandoned house was still in place, there was more lack of the stuff that makes up walls left than there were walls, and the entire second floor and roof had collapsed or been blown away.
And yet in what had been the kitchen we still saw a nearly rusted-over refrigerator – the smaller kind with rounded edges from perhaps the 1950s, its door permanently forced open by branches and years of blown dirt piled inside it. There was an equally old porcelain sink lying on its side half-submerged in dirt in that same room. Dirt nearly a foot thick in some parts now covered the floors in what had been other rooms, perfect for growing all the weeds but forever concealing any other remnants of the living that once occurred in that house.
Now, I know this is all sounds like the setup for a B-grade horror film that rakes in $50 million through DVD rentals. And yes, on several occasions when my kids weren’t looking I did indeed toss sticks and stones at the abandoned house’s support beams and that old refrigerator, insisting afterward no matter how hard they asked that it wasn’t me. And yes, come to think of it I may someday write a B-grade horror movie screenplay that starts out this way just to see if I can nab part of that $50 million.
But that is not the point of this piece.
There is no action-packed ending to this true story at all. No angry spirits chased us away from the abandoned house. No half-human up in the tree swooped down and tried to eat me (though it may have if I stayed there much longer.)
Instead, the five of us investigated. We talked to one another in whispers. We pondered. And in some way, and each in our own way, we gained from this abandoned place.
And that is the point of this piece:
The questions my son and step-daughter asked us as we peered into and through this long abandoned house that had once been a home. The questions we asked them in return. The questions we asked ourselves. And oh, the answers .... and how it all impacts you...
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Scroll down past this first set of amazing abandoned places photos below and click on the link there to read the powerful Part II conclusion of this piece -- and to see even MORE amazing abandoned places photos....
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Abandoned Bicycle
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Be sure to check out the 29 even more amazing abandoned places photos now ...
Read the Conclusion of "The Point and the Power of Abandoned Places" Essay Now & See Even More Amazing Abandoned Places Photos