There was snow on the ground this time but by the way the sun was shining it might as well have been spring.
That's Iowa weather for you.
Regardless, it was still cold when our boots touched the ground in Popejoy.
Another nameless town with no one living there.
These places might as well not exist at all by the signs of life you see. It was bright and clear, houses with their drapes open, cars in driveways, but not a single person.
The school looked eerie, even in broad daylight, as it stood tucked behind a park and a dead end. The windows were blasted out and some were boarded up.
An article of clothing acted as a makeshift flag as it flapped in the wind; stuck in a cluster of trees that were growing in the entrance of the school. We drove to the back so the car wouldn't be a sore thumb.
All around were houses and a field that went on for miles. The white of the field burned your eyes as the light reflected off it. I was nervous but had to laugh at the sight ahead of us.
The whole entire back part of the school had collapsed into the basement. Mounds of brick and trash made a treacherous pit easy to snap your neck on.
It was eerie, as it always was, the morning breeze was the only noise that accompanied the place.
St Nick brought another guy with him, Yakob, the tall cool one from the east. He wore wrap around sunglasses and looked out of place in our group but he walked right with us down the pit; slipping all the way down.
St Nick had wanted to see this little building, that must of been a back exit door, in the pit. The snow had covered a lot of what you were walking on so nothing ever felt like ground. The building had a stairwell that had large slabs of plywood smashed inside and bricks covered the floor. It sloped down into the pit like an access way of some kind.
We walked out of the pit and into the front door, a moldy teddy bear growing out of the ground greeted us, we slowly walked on the floor that was covered entirely in glass. These places always started with a stairway. The wooden doors of both up and downstairs were either thrown off the hinges or hanging on still. We walked downstairs and was greeted by a friendly swastika painted on the walls with the words ''Turn Around'' scrawled up the stairway in cheap spray paint.
The rooms of this place were almost unrecognizable but the walls were still held up by beams. Places in the ceiling had bottomed out and revealed rusty wire up in the air. A table covered in ceiling debris almost blocked the door into a corridor. The floor was empty except for the normal decay of brick, elements, and random crap strewn around.
As I admired this fan that was still moving from the breeze, St Nick moved across the floor, cracking ice and pieces of brick under his feet. He pointed out that the other staircase was blocked off by a pile of ground up cinder block and logs of wood. A garage door sat mutilated as it still hung on the wall.
We kept going through rooms around the floor until we found ourselves at a stairway covered in roof, wooden beams, and brick; a dead end.
The only place to go next was down so we headed down into the even darker basement.
Someone must have chucked a whole entire TV down from the main doors. It laid in pieces and it's glass made huge chunks easy to fall onto; right by an upside down children's chair with its legs shredded into sharp edges.
''Yep. That's gas.'' I answered St Nick as he came out of this room holding his nose. I personally liked the smell of gasoline. It was an old boiler room, it's tanks long rusted, and it's contents bottomed out onto the floor. The whole floor was discolored and still soaked with gas.
''This where you take a girl for your first date out here'' said Yakob as he shook his head and disappeared into another part of the building. I couldn't figure out where St Nick was finding these guys.
We were just wandering in this place, maybe the daylight offered that type of courage, I walked into this one room.
It's walls were peeling like potato chips off the wall and all I could see was an animal carcass hanging out of a window. I couldn't see to my right as the wall was a blind spot and I was just waiting to see a junkie chowing down on a hunk of human meat.
The corner was empty and it was just a raccoon in the window. It had long been dead and it's gybes had been out of it's sockets but it did look placed there.
For all I know, this could of been the town cult meeting hall.
''This must of been an elementary school because the colors are a lot brighter than the last place we were at. Then again, these places were all ages.'' said St Nick as he wandered through a corridor. I think he was right, there were low hangers that had fallen off the walls that looked like an elementary school.
This was the second half of the basement and where it had collapsed.
Huge sheets of brick, held together by concrete and wire, layered inwards out towards the direction of the pit. It didn't look like the work of demolition. This place was slowly eradicating itself.
''I don't think Asbestos can kill you. It's definitely not good for you.'' said St Nick.
''It can overtime'' replied Yakob.
It's not like any of us wore masks anyway.
We finally went upstairs and saw that this had been the top floor. Morning light bled through an empty window frame and hit a row of broken windows that had been gathered and stacked against a corner.
By the stairway was beams of wood and a trashcan full of glass. It had looked like someone had tried to do something here but quickly gave up.
I knew that this was the most dangerous floor to be on but I had to keep on.
Someone wrote PROM on the wall and I wondered who came here to make out and vandalize on prom night. Probably too many people.
''Ask me about my wiener'' read off St Nick. He was reading off a chalkboard that was in a room upstairs. The thing was covered in scribblings of people coming in and out of the place. It almost seemed like a rite of passage through the place. Peoples names accompanied dates ranging from 2013 to some as recent as June of last year. Someone even had an entire party here on May, 5th, 2016
We walked onto a large, spacious, room that overlooked the other side of the building. We could see through the whole town from there.
We walked over to a room that had a moldy bed from someone sleeping in it or having sex. These places become large traphouses to the daring.
Across the room had a chair hanging from the broken window frames and a destroyed VHS tape of a lost Star Wars episode. This must have been where George Lucas had given his soul to Walt Disney.
St Nick even found research studies of brainwashing material and the amounting evidence was piling.
I looked down the staircase by the window but it was covered in piles of insulation and the door was replaced by plywood.
After some struggle, St Nick had rammed open a door stuck in ice as it was covered in old novels, children's toys, and another destroyed TV. Yakob found a potato peeler that he held onto for protection and later chucked out into the grass outside.
The principal's office had no window ledge anymore and was just a hole in the wall.
I poked my head out there and felt the morning sun beam down on me.
There was a long day ahead of us but I knew I would never see the place again.
It stood in the silence of another winter to be seen by another passerby.
Another that would look at it and forget it again.
Part Two:
WAS THERE EVER AN END?
We headed west and went even further than I had before. Civilization was ending and I knew I was in West Iowa again.
The sun peeked over the rows of corn, we passed through town after town, the same had always been there.
Faceless people drove the highway and figureless humans walked around invisible towns.
The things that first drove them there had disappeared, they don't know what to do after that, so they sit there and let themselves become reclaimed by the elements.
They dissipate into the blue sky, their ashes are scattered over the field, another hole in the ground, and the blood is swallowed up by the land.
It had felt like we had gone through all the conversations, we had been silent for hours now, and we approached another town.
It was different; people existed here. The literal place was called Pocahontas. I don't know why. I saw young women and men walk the streets. The place was clean. The houses were all kept up and kids roamed the streets.
The highway cut through town and the agriculture business coming through was the only thing keeping the place this well.
We drove downtown and all the buildings were symmetrical with the town hall like an old western town.
The bars were all closed and so was everything else except a restaurant and gas station. It almost seemed like summer with all these kids wandering around.
We went into the restaurant, Family Table, and it was a home cooked style place.
The inside looked retro, grandmas played rounds of cards in another room, and a few others nodded and waved at us.
Our waitress was a nice girl and quick too. The wood paneling and coat rack reminded me of a church ice cream social or something.
I had a bacon burger and the tip jar was a tiny pink trash can.
Part Three:
HOMAGE TO YOUTH
In the country, mail trucks look different, they usually just use someone's car.
They put a little yellow cop light on top and a sticker on the sides of your car and your a mailman. They kept passing us as we got into town, someone was busy fiddling with the large mailbox, probably for the whole town, right by a row of houses.
This town was small but very busy. A stretch of road that was used as a main road was where the school was.
This was the biggest one I had seen. It even had a gym and five stall garage.
Before this, they had all been short buildings with a few floors but this was a high school like the one I had went to.
It was right out there in the open, the ground around it looked driven on many times, and we parked right there in the middle of it in the middle of the day on the busiest road. I got nervous fast.
We moved behind the garage and waited as St Nick whizzed on the back of the building. Yakob and I took notice of the junked out Chevys in the back. They were empty metal coffins now.
There was a huge field, like the last, behind us. We could see semis crossing the highway from there.
I didn't want to go into the building by the front door, even though that all the doors were wide open and not a trespassing sign in sight, so I opted for a gangly door in the back, behind a small tennis court covered in tree limbs, and looked in.
The ground was slowly disappearing, I didn't know how far it went if the floor caved, and there was a makeshift ladder made out of a metal bedpost. I climbed it and realized that the ground was the deepest that it'd go. It felt solid enough.
I was standing in an old staircase that was now a pile of wood and brick. Part of the ceiling was collapsing from water damage and water dripped down on the ground below.
We looked at a huge empty room. The ground looked sketchy. Just looked like ground up dust but I walked on it anyway.
We had come this far and this was the most promising. I went slow until I felt concrete and found myself in a corridor.
Light crept in through the smashed in exit doors and I looked into what had been a boiler room.
The electric furnace was a red massive piece of machinery. The concrete beneath and around it had buckled and is now just piles of large slabs of concrete.
We went through all the rooms in the corridor; a men's and women's bathrooms with showers, some even still had showerheads, and a bunch of empty rooms that were unrecognizable.
After wandering the corridor for a few minutes, we figured that the large room we were in, when we walked in, was the cafeteria.
We found the kitchen and it still had a fridge with a list of foods on the side. ''Polish sausage, nonfat dry milk, material added'' read off St Nick.
We went out of the corridor and into another hall. I turned and saw that the exit door had its windows smashed out and debris blocking it.
I felt like someone was just going to come out of the shadows at any moment or a voice come charging at us but they never did. I looked ahead and saw a beautiful sight.
It had been the entrance to the gym and it reminded me a lot of my high school. I saw the brown tile on the sides, the concession stand, and the gym doors.
When I was in elementary school, I used to dream that the place was abandoned like this so I could do whatever through the old halls and that's what people did.
The doors leading outside were boarded up and had piles and piles of theater costumes, alcohol bottles, and more crap piled against them.
There was an overhead window, now long gone, that lit up the hallway. A puddle had formed on the ground below and had started growing mold on the tile.
Someone broke the trophy case and wrote ''bring back the school'' on the wooden wall.
The wooden doors, leading to the gym, were still open. I could hardly wait.
The gym was huge. There was a large stage towards the other side that still had it's curtains hanging from the ledges.
I turned and saw that the bleachers were rickety. There was graffiti sprawled all across the wall above.
It was mostly remarks to people they probably hated while going there but there was also a date of April 1999.
I would see it all over the building and I wonder if the place had only been abandoned since the mid 90s.
The floor had looked weak but we reasoned that gyms are usually built on ground level. It was covered in destroyed wood, long exposed rolls of film, and random things from all over the building thrown around the place.
The ceiling had overhead openings that gave the place an eerie vibe as we walked through.
The stage had been covered in snow as the ceiling above had bottomed out. It's floor was gone and we could see a ten foot drop. Nick and Yakob tried getting on it but they reasoned that it wasn't worth it.
We backtracked a little, St Nick almost spewed at the sight of a moldy bathroom that it's floors covered in ice and who knows what else.
The tile in the bathrooms were still in good shape even though everything else was destroyed.
We went across the hall, past the gym, and into another corridor.
It was covered in glass and broken overhead lights. I turned and saw, in the dark, tinted light. I couldn't figure it out because the electricity must of been cut long ago but we found that they were built into the wall so that the light from outside would shine through into the yellow, red, and blue tiles.
We went through the attached rooms besides the corridor and found more graffiti on a chalkboard. These were couples names and other explorers that had walked here through before April 1999 by a few months.
The wall besides the connected rooms had little tile windows with curtains still attached to overhead drapes.
Before heading upstairs, we found an old band room and storage room.
There was a desecrated Peanuts mural on the wall, painted by the class of 1985, and sheets of music all over the ground.
We almost trampled on the corpse of another raccoon on the way up.
The second floor was a typical, old, classroom hallway. It was like my elementary school before it got torn down.
The classrooms had wooden flooring that had curled from water damage and the chalkboards were slowly disappearing. Some rooms still even had orange carpeting on the ground.
Whoever was doing graffiti up there had a fascination with a guy named Kyle and crude sexual remarks.
We went up the last floor, 3rd floor, and found that it had turned into a literal barn.
The ground was covered in hay and feces of all kind. There were piles of it on the staircase leading up, the walls, and in almost every room up there.
The sun was starting to go down and had gone through the broken out windows.
The smell was intoxicatingly disgusting and the batteries to my flash on the camera had died.
The ceiling was even caving in with hay. It had looked like someone had gone nuts up there.
I finally spotted the principal's office, with a secretary's desk, and even in the office was hay. There was a wood working room with overturned tables and more hay.
One of the more humorous graffiti on the walls was about where Nazi women go.
Other than that, another classroom covered in glass and a riddle written on a wall ''1,2,3,4, Rene's at the door, ready to make an entrance so back...'' maybe it was the country rendition of Nothin But a G Thang.
We went right out the front door and even decided to go into the garage next to the school. It was a dust ridden place.
It must of been a place for a class on mechanics; old gas station signs and metal sewing machines lay everywhere. There was even an old woodworking machine and riding mowers.
The place had about eight different vehicles in the stalls. They were all covered from the insulation of the ceiling giving out.
Someone scribbled a date from a month before on the dust of a window. St Nick was dedicated to the exploration. He lumbered over the dust ridden things and tried to play a broken piana. We requested Homage To Youth.
By this point, I could feel the disease of these places filling my lungs. The cuncer was thick in the air and I was ready for the clean air outside.
I breathed in deeply outside and looked across the bare highway.
Cars, trucks, and semis passed us and not one stopped to say anything to us or ask.
Nothing.
Nobody cared.
We were out in this nowhere country and only so much light was in the sky for the ride home.
I sighed, looking at the school, the place must have been a big piece in these people's lives. At least in the youth's eyes. It was probably somewhere to go and be.
Nowhere else in the town looked like it could offer the same. Only houses and an abandoned gas station across the road.
This town was finished and it wouldn't have to take long before all the people die off in the town and realize that they've been dead for this long.
Probably no one even notices. Another name in another paper.
St Nick signed for me to get in and it wasn't long until we were back on the road.
I looked behind me and saw the town disappear before my eyes.
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