30 Days in Prison and $1000 Fine. Crap.

I have always been a history buff; in particular I enjoy experiencing the places where history took place. I like walking in the footsteps of those who were there before me and I like to try and take my mind back to historical moments. I went on a bit of a historical misadventure the other day, seeking the opportunity to do all that I had just described, but when I did so I went to a very scary, sad place.

While searching for abandoned historical buildings on the internet (AWSOME places to explore and search for ‘treasure’) I came across a place in Salem call the Fairview Training Center, which had been abandoned since 2000. Since its construction in 1908 as the “Oregon State Institute for the Feeble Minded” it has held many thousands of Oregonians, beginning with 39 adults and children transferred there from the Insane Asylum (yes, that was what it was called). There were several reasons why exploring this place was of interest to me besides the wicked cool buildings that still (barely) stand there. First, as someone who works with the chronically mentally ill, I spend a lot of time and energy contemplating the best ways to interact, treat, and love people with severe mental illness. While I didn’t expect to find any good ideas at Fairview, I believe in the adage that in order to know where we want to go we have to know where we have been. The second reason I wanted to explore this place was that Fairview was pretty equal-opportunity in its incarceration of individuals with brain troubles. It wasn’t just the mentally ill that lived there, there was also the developmentally disabled and epileptics (the term they used when it was first built was “children with idiocy”). You see, had I been born in a slightly different time period, a time that wasn’t privy to the neurological know-how and medication we have now, I could have ended up there.

A former patient explains: "My parents took me out to Fairview and it's like a gateway to hell opened up." In fact, stories of abuse and mistreatment, murder and rape, abound from Fairview. People went missing on a fairly regular basis, either because they ran away and were never seen again, or because they died and were buried somewhere that no one can remember. Others were never buried; they drowned in wells and decomposed there. Like any such place, Fairview is rumored to be haunted, blood running down the walls, mysterious people walking across the grounds, that sort of thing. Personally, my bet is that the latter are just trespassers such as me and my friend.

General consensus of the time was that individuals with mental illness and brain disorders were basically a waste; they weren’t capable of learning, they weren’t aware of their environment, and they weren’t able to give or respond to love and kindness. Sadly, there are many who still hold this view. In fact, I would say that the view is still rather prevalent, only in a muted form. No entertainer with any common sense would make a comedy about an AIDS patient and the humorous way he or she goes about taking her drug cocktail, but we make jokes about mental illness all the time. The Oregon State Hospital is another example of this muted contempt for the mentally ill. It is simply NOT an environment in which most people will be able to get better or progress towards health, but as a society we value it not for its therapeutic function but for its containment function. Now, I’m not a prude, I make crazy jokes just like everybody else, but it’s because people are funny, humanity is amusing, not mental illness.

So anyway, the grounds of Fairview, as they stand today, were equal parts fascinating and sad. I climbed up (and slid back down-fun) what I presume to be a laundry shoot. Inside some of the dormitory (?) building were what looked like cages, though they supposedly stopped using those in the 1980’s. Some of the original buildings were absolutely beautiful, but they are also falling apart. I wanted so badly to get inside, and I could have, but not in a quiet or inconspicuous manner so I thought better of it.

As my friend were making our way toward an actual open door (awesome!) we were stopped by security (lame!) and told about how they were prosecuting and all that jazz. He mentioned also that the Navy was training there with dogs and live ammunition, but I don’t believe him. We managed to get off with a dirty look and an order to leave, which is good because trespassing there is a Class C Misdemeanor with the above mentioned punishments (see blog title). I am still fascinated by the place, and I will be back.

I tried to add pictures, but I'm not that smart.