30 years ago, the place would have been alive. The windows would spill light onto the lawn, the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign on the roof would radiate, the lawn would be tamed into obedience. Pick-up trucks with dirty mud flaps and confederate flags would fill the gravel parking lot, their inhabitants’ inebriated laughter spilling into the night. Now it was but a shell, a place for memories, a lifeless structure lost in the woods.

By pushing a filthy mattress away from the double doors and setting a tentative step inside, I broke the halcyon coma in which the building had been suspended since the 80’s. The bar clearly had left its zenith far in the past. A thick layer of dust and grime coated the floor, missing not a single inch of weathered linoleum. A misplaced step would send your foot tearing through the thin floorboards to the basement below, a place certainly not to be visited. Only a few remnants of the building’s lively past remained: a cracked shot glass, a broken beer tap, a dusty deck of Stud playing cards under a chair. A warped and yellowed poster of Playboy’s Miss August greeted me in the bathroom.

On the opposite end of the one-room bar the door had been removed, exposing the structure to the elements. In the square of light the doorless frame projected on the floor, nature had begun upon a steady quest of reclamation. Opportunistic stalks of evening primrose and ragweed crept through the door to colonize, protruding triumphantly through the ruined floorboards.

The silence was profound. The building was surrounded by the sounds of nature. The chirping of birds, the trees moving against each other in the wind. They were muffled, as if playing on a television in a different room. Inside, you only heard only your own muted footsteps and the song you hummed under your breath to keep you from getting too scared of the eerie loneliness.

Mixed in with the remnants of the bar’s past, there was an array of household items and personal mementoes that only added confusion. The back of the building was littered with couches. A CRT television set complete with fake wood vinyl sat in the midst of this archipelago of furniture. On one particularly overstuffed tweed loveseat sat a deliberately placed shoe box. It was not broken, decrepit, covered in dust but instead bore a crisp Adidas logo. For the first time since I had entered the property, I felt I was not alone. Here lay a time capsule of personal mementos left by an anonymous patron. On a mission of reconnaissance, as an intruder of a stranger’s keepsakes, a thief of solitude, I lifted the lid. The items inside dispelled all sense of anonymity, replacing it only with confusion. Inside lay two tapes: one a store-bought copy of Rush’s “All The World’s A Stage” and the other, a homemade recording of Jimi Hendrix’s set at the December 1979 Concert for the People of Kampuchea; a the ‘live-aid’ for war-torn Cambodia. A yearbook clipping from 1977 bore the face of a girl named Mary. On the back was a note from her, wishing the owner a good summer and that she would see him next year. The bottom layer was straight out of teenage boy’s high school experience: a green pair of plastic aviators, a Black Sabbath pin, a condom, and a collection of Thin Lizzy guitar picks.

I did then what I regret now, as it waved away the magic, dispelled the illusion of grandeur, abandonment, lack of human influence. I took both cassette tapes, tucking them in my coat pocket to investigate later, replacing the lid as snug as before. In a rush of guilt, feeling as though I had betrayed the building itself, I rushed out through the not-so-grand entrance, stumbled though the unkempt brush, and jogged back to the car with the same feeling in the pit of my stomach as when I broke my mom’s antique china set when I was five. I have not been back.