Chapter 46: Allen Ginsberg, Alan Turing, and Cement Espionage
Cement Estate Document Storage House
Hudson Valley, NY
Dylan doesn’t seem too concerned with “getting caught.”
“We’ll just go until we can’t anymore.”
The path up past the kiln parking lot includes an abandoned shack. Dylan’s the leader of this voyage, and that’s our first stop. Inside, I find an old, empty packet of cigarettes while Dylan marvels at the architecture.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know any of this was here,” I admit.
“Just you wait.”
The earth is dead, but the sky looks teal as Dylan and I wander across the soaked, brown carcasses of plants and weeds, scattered out as far as the eye can see. It’s the first warm day in months. In his grey knit cap, Dylan saunters slightly ahead of me while I lolly-gag my wannabe Timberland Nikes through the sludge of the corpse terrain.
We have a single destination in mind though I don’t know it at the time: a document storage house (at least, that’s what I decide to call it once I see it for the first time) in my upstate NY town, an expedition that starts at a modern, very real document storage facility, and tiptoes past an old cement plant operation, complete with a lengthy row of silos that are smushed up against one another, about a tenth of a mile from the strange document storage house in the middle of the woods. The space, according to Dylan, is filled with, get this, empty storage boxes, rusted, and in my fantasy, they’re from the 1940s and ’50s although I can’t know for sure (which isn’t the point anyway — the point is to let my imagination be free, the healing practice that started when I was a kid at the abandoned dairy farm in my Colorado hometown, 30+ years before). The entire property has a rich industrial and cultural history, which isn’t really my focus, for now.
For now, I’m skirting reality and enjoying a reverie full of espionage, mystery, and intrigue.
(I do, in fact, look it up later. I always do after a traipse-about an abandoned space.)
Let’s start with that factual foundation: the mid-Hudson Valley is the home of cement. It’s okay to feel jealous of our claim to fame. Get it out now. You’ll feel better. Hydraulic cement, to be precise. Like Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue in modern American culture, cement in this region (I’m being vague on purpose, I don’t want to give away the actual place, you can likely find at least the area I’m talking about on your own) has become interchangeable with hydraulic cement, commonly referenced as such by the cement industry and high-profile geologists alike, especially back in its heyday, between 1825 and the late 1800s, when demand for this particular “brand” of cement plummeted and demand for the more evolved kid in town, Portland cement, skyrocketed. Particularly during the Industrial Revolution, cement from the mid-Hudson Valley was the name of the game, rapidly (and profitably) finding its way onto construction sites across the country, notable projects such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty pedestal, and portions of the United State Capitol (among others), all using the high quality mush to create mortars, stuccos, lime-washes, grouts, and concretes.
All good things must end, though, and by 1970, every cement mine in the region was shuttered and left to rot. If you pay attention as you explore anywhere in the mid-Hudson Valley, you’ll see how true that is. It really is a beautiful place, even its abandonments.
As Dylan walks me underneath a couple of the forgotten silo towers, it dawns on me that I’m living out a childhood fantasy of living near the Catskill Mountains. As a kid, I watched, on repeat, a VHS tape that boasted three of Will Vinton’s Claymation shorts, including his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Rip van Winkle. “There’s magic in the Catskill Mountains,” the narrator (Will Geer) warns at the beginning of the movie, “And folks who lived here felt it all around them.”
The instant I heard that, I was hooked on the idea of someday visiting the Catskills. Not in a million years could I have pictured myself actually living here among that kind of magic.
Will Vinton wasn’t wrong; it’s pure magic here.
I often play pretend here as an adult. Maybe not so boldly as to go full Dungeons and Dragons on your ass, but inside my head, I’m imagining conversations with ghosts who’ve been laid to rest up in those mountains. (To be fair: they aren’t actually mountains. Geologically-speaking, they’re technically what’s called a “mature dissected plateau,” essentially a flat chunk of land that’s summoned out of the ground then eroded by water over a long, long time.)
Those ghosts tell me secrets about places just like this one.
As Dylan and I leave the smokestack cluster, he says, “And now, the house.”
Sorry, the house?
“Oh, yeah. There’s a house. It’s got a bunch of old boxes in it. You’ll see.”
Perhaps it’s my recent rediscovery of Hitchcock’s espionage films, including Foreign Correspondent, Sabotage, or Torn Curtain, but my brain doesn’t even have to think about it. Immediately, I’ve stirred up a story in my head about the secret document storage facility. I somehow dreamed this was how today was going to turn out. Ancient cement facilities are certainly cool, but an empty house in the middle of the woods that’s filled with empty metal boxes?
Yes, please.
Curiously, against the backdrop of this oncoming imagination stomping ground, I hear the song “Houses,” Judy Collins’ voice, made of liquid silver, billowing off the Catskills though I can’t see the hills themselves. We are in the middle of the woods, after all. Nevertheless, the song’s crept into my head, and I don’t mind the discrepancy in fantasy. That’s the nice thing about playing pretend. You get to paint whatever picture you want. I think about the time that I interviewed Judy Collins and made her laugh when I referred to her and Stephen Stills as the original Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake and got to hear her talk shit about the president at the time. (This was February 2020, you can do the math.)
Then, we’re there. It’s a three-story white building, indeed, a house, in the middle of the woods. At least, to you, it might resemble a house, but to me, it’s an abandoned document storage facility, top secret, packed to the brim with empty metal boxes that are scattered throughout all three floors of the house as well as the outside perimeter of the structure. I think about the officious politics of the American government on an international scale, and the voice of Allen Ginsberg pops into my head:
America, when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
His poetry pinballs around in my brain as I pick up a rotted purchase order from October 25, 1962. It’s laid across one of the many metal boxes strewn about the yard. 25 years and a day before I was born.
I place the yellow scrap back onto the ground and step foot into the empty imagination palace, worn and withered from years of disuse. There’s a slight draft which is to be expected. It is still winter, after all, though today feels like late spring. The room is drenched in artifacts yanked straight out of another lifetime, a 1950s newsroom or 1940s office, including a vintage Sensimatic from the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, circa 1950.
My focus, however, lasers in on the piles of black storage boxes scattered throughout the house. Literal piles of them in some spots. Dozens and dozens of metal cases, askew, empty.
I sense Dylan is ready to move on, and I know my time here is limited, so I make a break for as much of the house as I can get under my belt. I could spend hours inside this vacuum of time and space. In spaces like these I can collect myself again amidst the chaos of the world and reflect on my part in it.
I glance back down at the Sensimatic and think of another Allen, just with a different spelling, famed codebreaker Alan Turing. He sits in front of me, totally unaware of my presence, typing away. The Sensimatic has transformed, in my fantasy, into a “bomba kryptologiczna,” the machine which Turing used in World War II to speed up the decoding German ciphers. Turing’s crucial role in cracking the codes of the Axis of Evil eventually brought an end to World War II, with the Allied Nations defeating Germany, Japan, and Italy.
Yet, despite his humanitarian contributions (ending the Holocaust and the travesty of war), Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for “homosexual acts.” As punishment, he began hormone treatment, also called “chemical castration,” rather than face prison time. Though his 1954 death was ruled a suicide, evidence from the British inquest is consistent with accidental poisoning from the cyanide that was used as part of his castration. The Policing and Crime Act of 2017, informally referred to as Alan Turing Law, retroactively pardoned persons who had been convicted of such “homosexual acts.”
He is my elder, and despite the public pardon, we can never atone for his wrongful death.
Perhaps that’s the main reason I spend so much time wandering around abandoned buildings. Perhaps they help me reflect on where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re headed, supported by an infinite imagination stepping in and helping to guide me through it all.
I push a button on the Sensimatic as Turing stands up, walks over to the ghost of Allen Ginsberg, and the two walk out of the house together, fading into nothingness. After quickly poking my head upstairs, I follow suit and follow Dylan off the property. As we reach a gate at the edge of the estate, I hear barking. A man in sweats with a sweet-faced dog has been following us, calling after us. We’ve trespassed, a fact that he lets us know once he’s reached us. I try to keep from smiling because I’m so full of energy and excitement, knowing that I’ve gotten to time travel again today and see a small part of the world most others never will.
The man drones on about trespassing, but my brain tunes out and back into the sound of Judy Collins, her voice once again echoing off the inclines of the Catskill Mountains in the distance.
