Walking Backwards
Thursday 04/21/2005 11:30 AM
 Following the old path into the heart of the overgrown grounds at The Asylum. (2005) File Under: Asylum, The; Cemeteries; I Took This Photo! |
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At any given time when you're following the half-buried, half-obscured sidewalk-cum-trail into the heart of the overgrown grounds at The Asylum, it seems there can't be more than 10 or 15 more feet before you hit a green, thorny wall of entanglement.
But carry on my wayward friend and trust there are treasures buried in the vegetation. It's like walking backwards as your imagination rolls back first the years, then the decades. Everyone knows about the old abandoned mental hospital, but what everyone thinks are just woods in the back are actually the former grounds. Here there were gardens and bushes and the perfect place to go for a stroll or be pushed in your wheelchair on a balmy spring afternoon.
Imagine the daydreams, the fantasies, the quiet idylls that played out all around you, powered by the simple-minded, the deranged and the dismayed.
I remember a story about a jazz player who got so deep into his music that one day he stayed there. He ended up in a place like The Asylum used to be. I've long since forgotten where I heard about him, but as you wander through this mad scientist creation of long-forgotten garden assimiliated by North Florida jungle, isn't it easy to hear a crazy sort of jazz trilling, beeping and honking away? Every blade of grass a horn, every vine a reed, every sapling a bass, every tree a drum. All twisting and growing in their own way, but coordinated in their shared chaotic key of green.
There is a shape up ahead — an artificial shape — but before we get to that, we'll take a closer look at a vestige of how things used to be.
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