“Vacation, meant to be spent alone” – Belinda Carlisle
As stable as their lives may be, most humans cannot resist the urge to escape. Stability is the most you could ask for and yet it just as well curdles into mundanity given enough time. In more generous years, travel was a means of self-care. A way to leave your stressors behind through the benefit of physical distance. What is more tantalizing than the freedom to try a new lifestyle for a week or two before returning home safely. We have all been thrust into a new lifestyle this year, but not one with any foreseeable escape. For generations of people, “getting away” has never felt more difficult. It is not just obligations and finances that we must juggle, but also a tangible danger from people and the disease they carry. Routines dominate us as there is simply nothing else to do.
Amidst a truly displaced world, I have found solace in the most desolate of places. Inside a lifestyle where time is imperceptible, I have been brought down to earth by the towns time forgot. The ghost towns and vacant ruins scattered throughout New Jersey don’t quite resemble an all-inclusive resort vacation. However, the peace they contain is crucially less contrived than that of a poolside excursion. The company of others is not a prevailing factor in Walpack, NJ, Population: 12. The serenity is universal… or at least reaches far beyond a distance of six feet.
Admittedly, the sights to see are more downcast, dour, and antiquated. Not everyone will find the company of ship cemeteries therapeutic. However, in a time where boredom lurks beneath the surface of even the brightest day, sights that are by equal turns dilapidated and unprecedented have revitalized me. There is a damaging inertia present in the generalized concept of isolation. The encouragement to stay indoors, stay still, let what obligations you are still able to perform consume you. Yet such narrow confines on what it means to live are not receptive to the human spirit.
For me, surviving 2020 has meant finding isolation on my own terms. Wading through the most vacant sections of New Jersey and New York has gratified my desperate urge for seeing something new. It is no doubt a paradox that the fargone remnants of architecture and townships qualify as “something new”, but so be it. A depressant sort of peace radiates from these settings. The once occupied, now ancient, churches and post offices remain uninformed by recent context. They are a preservation of a simpler life even as our own lives drift into uncertainty.