One evening after a concert, before heading home, I scoped out a nearby condo under construction. To my surprised delight, the security fencing had a big welcoming gap in it, and the building had a big welcoming opening in one wall. I entered, found the stairwell, and climbed up twenty flights, the concert program still clutched in my hand.

Even a twenty-storey building feels pretty tall when it is the tallest thing around. Looking north towards downtown, with the junction of Main, Broadway, and Kingsway at my feet:
 

There were a dozen trees planted on the roof, obstructing the various views. Nevertheless it was a balmy night, and I drank it in.

"I am not a brave man at all, but a cautious, even timid soul who makes himself pull off one stunt after another for his own good. And I entered the lonely darkness thinking: Public space should not be like this; all the world ought to be mine. But how can I make it so?" (61)

"Every time I surrender, even necessarily, to authority which disregardingly or contemptuously violates me, so I violate myself. Every time I break an unnecessary law, doing so for my own joy and to the detriment of no other human being, so I regain myself, and become strong in the parts of me that the security man can never see." (97-8)

-- From William T. Vollmann's train-hopping memoir, Riding to Everywhere.

On a recent long weekend, I lackadaisically bicycled past some "Authorized Access Only" signs into this huge construction area.

There were a number of vehicles parked about, and a train shunting nearby, and some machinery humming away, so I expected at any minute to be called out to and sent packing. At lollygagging pace I circled the perimeter, getting gradually closer, before finally dropping my kickstand and wandering inside.

The place was deserted.

There was something magical about this location. First, it was huge. Second, it was vacant and unfinished, which made it feel like a brand-new ruin. The concrete floors were covered in the thinnest layer of rainwater. Wind ripped through the wooden walkways a dozen storeys above, causing tatters of plastic to flutter and flap.

Third, these silos were so smooth and simple -- big concrete cylinders -- that they felt more like alien or druidic monuments than serviceable structures. They were somehow at once reminiscent of cathedrals and of a streamlined video-game world.

I wondered vaguely about the differing orders in which they were being constructed -- some had columns in place for the funnel, but no roof, others had a roof but no columns -- but I didn't speculate for long. If I had had a tour guide, I would have listened attentively, but my enjoyment of these spaces had almost nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. The fun, as always for me, I suppose, was in trespassing, and in being inside a big strange thing I'd never seen before up close.

After the cylindrical ones, I ducked inside the tall cuboid one, half looking for a stairwell. (I was not about to climb sixteen flights of external scaffolding stairs in a high wind.) But these structures are not built to be climbed. In fact, the tall one didn't look like it was built to be entered by humans at all. In any case, its flooded gravel floor, littered with detritus from the construction going on sixteen storeys overhead, revealed that it had not been entered for some time.

I guess I speculated a little; but I learned nothing.

I got back on my bike and, grateful, gleeful, returned the way I'd come.