Vox Meditantis

Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

The other day, I walked past the new “Makers & Coders” space on Market Street – the one with the floor-to-ceiling glass where you can watch high school kids programming drones. A teenager was trying to navigate a quadcopter through a hoop, missed by a foot, and sent the thing clattering into a display of 3D-printed vases. He turned beet red, shoulders hunched, waiting for the reprimand.

I stopped dead on the sidewalk. I knew that posture. I knew that exact cocktail of shame and stubbornness. It was the same way I looked at eighteen when I dropped a bolt cutter onto a security guard’s car roof from the third story of the old Minerva Mills complex.

The hobby I’ve outgrown isn’t something you’d find in a brochure. For a solid decade of my life – from the boredom of high school until my late twenties – I was an “urban explorer.” That was the polite term. Mostly, I was a trespasser with a Canon PowerShot and a deficit of grace.

You have to understand the timing. I was born in ’88, which means I was five years old when New Corinth hit 127 murders and earned its “little Chicago” headlines. I grew up in a city defined by what you couldn’t do and where you couldn’t go. “Don’t cross Minerva Creek after dark.” “Don’t go near the riverfront.” “Don’t look at the guys on the corner.”

By the time I was sixteen, the violence had dialled down to a simmer, but the wreckage was still there. The Iron Works had been closed since ’78, a ten-year head start on my own existence. The city was full of these massive, rotting carcasses – textile mills, shipping terminals, the hollowed-out shell of the majestic theatre on Fourth Street.

I wanted to see inside. I think I wanted to understand the place that had scared my parents so much.

The problem was, I am physically incapable of stealth. My mother likes to say I was born with two left feet and a centre of gravity that shifts with the wind. I was the kid who knocked over the communion wine. I was the defensive end who tripped over his own laces.

Urban exploration requires balance. It demands you walk across rusted I-beams thirty feet above a concrete floor. It asks you to slip silently through gaps in chain-link fences. I couldn’t do any of that. I tore my jeans on every fence. I set off silent alarms by stumbling into motion sensors. I once got stuck – literally wedged – in a ventilation shaft at the old soap factory because I misjudged the width of my own shoulders.

But here’s the thing: I never stopped. That’s my other quality, the one that usually gets me into trouble. I don’t know how to quit. When I fell through a rotted floorboard in the bottling plant and sprained my ankle, I limped back the next weekend with an ACE bandage and a walking stick. When the cops chased us out of the rail yards, I spent three weeks mapping the security shifts so I could go back.

I told myself it was about history. I was “documenting the decline.” I have hard drives full of blurry photos of peeling paint and rusted gears, trying to capture the “authentic” New Corinth before it disappeared.

But I haven’t jumped a fence in six years. I haven’t set foot in a ruin since my daughter was born.

It’s not just that my knees ache when it rains, or that a thirty-eight-year-old man looks suspicious lurking in alleys. It’s that the hobby didn’t just leave me; the geography left the hobby.

New Corinth changed the locks.

The Iron Works isn’t a spooky cathedral of rust anymore; it’s the Business Park, all manicured lawns and keycard access. The Minerva Mills building, where I once dropped those bolt cutters? It’s luxury lofts now. You need a six-figure salary to see the views I used to steal for the price of a tetanus shot.

Back on January 15th, for “Polar Lines Day” at the library, I listened to the new residents talk about the “gritty charm” of the city. They love the aesthetic of the brickwork, the “ghost signs” on the sides of buildings. And I realised I don’t need to climb a fence to find the past anymore. It’s been sandblasted, sealed, and sold back to us as “heritage.”

I’ve lost interest in the ruins because they aren’t ours anymore. They belong to the developers and the university now. And honestly? I’ve lost interest in the danger. My tenacity has shifted. I don’t need to prove I can survive a fall from a gantry. I need to survive the mortgage. I need to hold fast to this neighbourhood while the property taxes climb.

I watched that kid in the window reset his drone, check the propellers, and lift off again. He was clumsy, sure. But he was determined.

I tapped the glass, gave him a thumbs up, and kept walking. I didn’t trip once.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.