OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, DC
Back in March, we visited an abandoned mental asylum for children.

The District of Columbia’s mental health system once relied on a large, centralized bureaucracy that relocated patients to huge facilities far out in the suburbs. Forest Haven was reserved for the children and teenagers who had become lost in this system, unable to function in public schools and lacking the resources to pay for private care.

In the late 1980s it became clear that Forest Haven was underfunded, poorly run and downright dangerous. Mentally ill children were choking on their feeding tubes and being buried unceremoniously on the banks of the Patuxent river. Once the lawsuits mounted and the citizens of DC began to call for serious reform, the government took steps to decentralize the system and placed patients in smaller hospitals closer to their homes. In October of 1991 the children were loaded into vans, the employees took their belongings and Forest Haven’s twenty-some buildings were forgotten.

Today Forest Haven lies in a no-man’s land between two highways, untouched by the DC government since its hasty evacuation. It is invisible from any major road and far from any public transportation, which has helped to preserve the medical records, prescription drugs and broken children’s toys that remain strewn about the grounds. There are no fences, no guards and no signs marking what this once was or even that it is something worth remarking upon.

I first learned about Forest Haven through a Flickr gallery, but the only information it offered was the general location. I found it after an hour on Google Maps and the WaPo archives. Within a few days we’d assembled a strike team, gathered the necessary supplies and were poring over satellite photos in a suburban diner, the plan sealed in red pen marks and coffee stains.

There was nothing inconspicuous about this operation, but we managed to park our motorcycles without arousing suspicion and made our way through about a quarter mile of woods. I’m not sure any of us knew what we were getting into, but when we broke through the trees into that massive, post-apocalyptic expanse of dilapidated buildings it was clear this wasn’t going to be like sneaking into a neighborhood construction site.

After being greeted by a deer carcass under a disused container, our first stop was what looked like a medical ward. Forest Haven was vacated pretty quickly, but the first step inside gives the feeling of hundreds of people dropping what they were doing and leaving as quickly as possible – hospital beds rotted where they were left, fading artwork hung on the walls and children’s cubbies still had names on them. Somebody had spray painted “Psyco Room’s –>” in the hallway and penises onto a mural of Lucy and Shroeder.

The rest of the buildings were in a similar state. We checked them off on our satellite maps and took compass bearings to find the next target, walking through dorms, offices, kitchens, laundry facilities and everything else you’d expect in a place completely cut off from the rest of the world. Each was littered with the ephemera of daily life in a juvenile psychiatric hospital – board games, children’s drawings, basketballs, shattered televisions with “hue” dials on them. But for as much as these would remind one of the place this once was, it was the papers overflowing from file cabinets that put a human face on what happened here – clinical narratives of the lives of disturbed children interned at Forest Haven. Leafing through the pages one could read through the stories of kids that were doomed from the start, picking out the lines where maybe they could have been saved if only someone, somewhere had cared just a little bit.

Throughout the expedition we’d avoided one particularly threatening building, its fifteen foot high razor wire fence and new paint job suggesting that it might still be in use. As we got braver and closer it became apparent that the heavy steel door was wide open and nobody was home, so we walked in to find what was, for me, the most disturbing part of Forest Haven.

The first room was a doctor’s office with bright pink walls, scales, and piles of unidentifiable drugs on the counter. It was abandoned, but the calendars from 2007 and lack of broken windows made it clear that it was vacated much more recently than what we’d seen before. Further down the hallway were a series of locked doors with tiny clouded windows peering in on empty, featureless rooms. Even with the razor wire outside, I didn’t make the connection until I noticed something scratched into the glass on one of the doors:

“FUCK DR HILL”

This was a prison for insane children. Two years ago it held kids who were so disturbed that they were locked in cages among the crumbling remains of an abandoned mental asylum. I can’t even imagine the amount of trauma, conflict and tragedy that this building saw and the effect it must have had on the patients and poor souls who worked here.

After a full day in Forest Haven’s disquieting underworld we trekked back through the woods and stopped in a bar just on the other side. Not a single one of the employees or patrons had ever heard of it.

WASHINGTON, DC
The Maine Avenue Fish Market doesn’t belong in DC. It’s dirty, chaotic and delicious, stuck under an interstate in a weird pocket of the least interesting part of the city. Most locals have never heard of it and we didn’t see a single tourist, even though it’s only a ten minute walk from the Mall and one of the busiest Metro stops in the city. It’s probably a good thing too, because if everybody got wind of how awesome this place is they’d try to “revitalize” it like the rest of the vacant, sterile Southwest. Either that, or they’d start offering vegetarian options and the straights and hipsters would flood in like it’s Columbia Heights circa 2005.

There are proper “restaurants” down there, but it’s way more fun to buy food right from the vendors and eat it standing next to the river. Hawkers stand on their barges behind seafood laid out on huge beds of ice while people shout their orders from dry land. The fish probably comes from the same place as everything in Safeway, but the crabs are definitely fresh – unless they’ve been cooked, they’re still pissed off and fighting each other. We got a big bag of steamed ones covered in Old Bay along with shrimp, crayfish and a plate of oysters.

Then we went up in the old post office tower. I’m glad I did that before I left.

I’ve tried to write this post four times but I don’t know where to go with it, so instead of being all sappy I’ll just keep it simple.

August 30th is my last day in DC. On the 31st I’m leaving my apartment at 5am and going to Cartagena, Colombia. Three weeks later I’m flying from Costa Rica to Portland, spending a week with my family and flying out of Seattle. I’ll be getting to Bangkok on the first of October and I haven’t planned much further than that, but how about Burma? Seems like I should go see what that’s like.

GAITHERSBURG, MD
Maryland’s rural population rarely mixes with residents of DC and Silver Spring, and when it does they’re usually selling organic kale to hipsters who managed to get up early enough for the farmer’s market.

Regardless, most of us didn’t grow up here and still carry childhood memories of the fair. Mongomery County’s is everything you remember and a little more – produce contests, uncomfortable livestock, carnival games you can’t win and all manner of foods that should not be fried.

This guy told me his biggest hog buyer is a concrete company. Eighty thousand dollars worth of hogs in fact, mostly for the advertising. They write it off as a business expense and give the pigs to employees.

Did you know you can get up to 175lbs of meat off a 220lb pig?

Agriculture is sort of horrifying to everyone who’s never lived outside a city, but the Meat Goat Club’s morbid posters go a little further than I expected.

This woman tried to sell us a fifteen hundred dollar cookware set on the grounds that it would make us skinny and healthy. Also they’re made in America and I think you’ll all agree if we don’t buy American we won’t be American much longer? Plus, with all the money you save cooking at home you could buy a car and hoo-boy who doesn’t need another car! Hey when I open this pot, can you guys all act really impressed? Just act really impressed, even if you’re not at all.

Some guys from North Carolina showed up with their racing pigs and down-home act, which ended with a terrified woman having to kiss a Vietnamese potbelly on the asscheeks.

After a bite of that deep fried Snickers, I think I’m good on fairs for a few years.

Back in March four friends and I rode our bikes up to Forest Haven, a long abandoned institution for the mentally retarded. It was so cool. I kept feeling like the place was too eerie, epic and naked not to have any stories buried under the kid’s wheelchairs and medical records, so I tried to make return plans a couple times. It never panned out though and I sort of forgot about it.

Well, dammit.

Closed D.C. Facility Searched for Remains
LAUREL, Md. – Investigators searched a former District facility for mentally retarded adults in Anne Arundel County on Wednesday, looking for remains, ABC 7 News has learned.

They didn’t find any, but who knows. To think I missed something like that makes me feel like I need more adventure practice.

My apartment was almost destroyed by an enraged house guest wielding broken glass and furniture (you know who you are), but the damage was minimal. My pitiful French bicycle, however, suffered a few wounds to the kickstand and it had to be amputated.

I never feel quite as impotent as I do in a bicycle shop. I don’t think anyone in the supermarket ever treats me like a poser for eating food.

DC was doing alright today, though.

I didn’t know about it until the night before, but every Memorial Day thousands of motorcyclists ride around the Mall in memory of all the soldiers who went MIA in Vietnam. Some believe that a few remain alive in Vietnamese prison camps, like in Rambo: First Blood Part II. But, probably not.

We met in the Pentagon parking lot and the place was so full of great looking people I couldn’t put the camera down. My poor little bike didn’t look like much next to all the Harleys and Goldwings, but the rolling high-fives felt just as awesome. Way too many pictures to put here, but the rest are on flickr.

“HEY are you guys looking for something?
“Meaning, maybe? No, we’re fine thanks.”
“Oh, okay. You all just look like there’s something wrong with you.”