u/Runo_Slinger

I am a, I would like to think, moderate appreciator of tea, but I am struggling with finding words to describe certain teas as a flavor without referring to other teas in some cases, especially with Pu erh teas which I enjoy but struggle to describe the flavor of the liquor. With oolongs and blacks, my usual go to easy sippers, I can pick up aromas or notes fairly well, and with most foods and beverages I am told I pick out taste and scent like a hound, and with greens, though not my favorite, I have it occasionally can pick up aromas, astringency, floral hints, grassy notes, and the like (though less well), But with Pu Erh, generally, I find myself saying (with the few types I have had) “It kind of just smells and tastes like Pu Erh- maybe a hint of old books?”

When I began writing about my time at Camp E, I had been excited to breathe a little life into these old memories and share them. I even went back and took a few pictures at the old place for you folks, pardon the nasty weather, it is when I could get time off. (See comments)(Note: I began working on a farm and have been too busy to write, so this will go up a mite later than I thought).
I am less sure now if I went to the right place to relate all this, I have not seen much interest from folks, but it is no time to be petty. I have decided not to tell these quite in order for convenience. This instance was not in itself very frightening exactly, but something about Camp E itself, and the circumstances of the work, made me feel a certain unease.
I was an intern for my local coastal environmental protection organization, and at such a small operation, I was expected to do a little bit of everything from the very beginning. Nothing could have prepared me for this job though, I was told I needed to go through some donations by an important contributor, and I would get an office to do the work. 
I was elated; at just 19 years old I would be working on and producing official documents in my own office, feeling every bit the business man. When the truth became clear, I admit I felt cheated. I had been tasked to be an amateur archivist for a series of reportedly useless documents. 
I was expecting a book of assets from some generous businessman. I was informed later by the board that an old architect with a practice in town and a soft spot for our nonprofit had died, we will just call him Rospos. Rospos had left us a different kind of treasure, a great plastic bin, and a ratty cardboard box, both brimming full of rotting and yellowing maps, charts, and poster boards. With this bin in my arms, a grinning old man with wire rimmed glasses and a bristling walrus mustache led me through the familiar gates of Camp E. He led me to a long, yellow painted building beside the gated entrance, and at the base of the rise where the museum stood.
The long building was tired, her tree-shaded roof scattered with massive round-edged islands of moss, and the windows grimy with age.
The man led me in beyond the door, which was propped open by a filthy plastic chair. The inside was a sorry sight, the hallway was littered with dried leaves, trampled posters with muddy boot prints, with bags of ice salt, grass seed, and lawn fertilizer stacked against one wall. The linoleum floor was cracked in places where a golf cart sat, with an open case of water bottles, and a piece of printer paper reading a scribbled reminder to recycle our bottles. 
The gate man led me in and turned on the lights. The overhead lights clicked to life, they were an ultraviolet purple, and I noticed that some of the cobwebs glowed a plasticky lunar-green hue. As I reached a heavy wooden door, I waited for the caretaker to unlock my coveted office. I observed a decaying cork board on the wall beside it, which still held one weathered old poster for a now abandoned fundraising attempt by the museum; Besides a menacing silhouette of a watchtower read: “Base Of Terror” and a set of dates with a ticket price. At school I had always heard about when folks had turned Camp E into a Halloween walkthrough for a few years. Like everything there, that effort had been half hearted and incomplete. Creaking broke me from my thoughts as the door to my office opened, “Your office awaits, friend.” the gatekeeper said; with a joking flourish.
I knew this man for a few years, and this brought a smirk like so many of his words had done. “Your guys rented out this room for storage and the like, desk by the door is yours, bathroom is in the back, it ain’t pretty but she’s safe.” He had said something like that, I set down my bins and accepted a small lanyard of keys with a grin and a nodding bow. 
The gatekeeper left with a reminder; “If you need me, I’m usually in my own little office right over there.” pointing with a wink over his shoulder to his chair in the doorway beneath the roof lip, with a metal patio table beside it, enthroning his unfinished Pepsi, and a paperback novel.
I thanked the man and placed my bin on the floor, surveying my little kingdom. The room was narrow and cluttered, two tables and a desk lined a glass window with slots and speakers, a ticketing window. The room was cool and musty, quite unlike the hot, muggy, sea scented air of the humid Jersey Shore afternoon beyond. There was no sound of an air conditioner, but as I flicked on the light within, a faint hum began as life coursed into the flickering fluorescent bulbs overhead.
My office bore old and thickly layered green paint on scuffed walls with occasional holes and gashes in the sheetrock, an unremarkable floor I am inclined to say was carpeted. Old gray-brown filing cabinets of corroding metal, and a plastic screw-together cupboard bearing our branding, were loaded with unsold beer cozies from a fundraiser, portable ponchos, clipboards, science equipment, cardboard boxes of financial papers, lessons, event decorations, as well as stacks of commemorative cards and coasters, printed with submitted photographs of local birds. 
After poking around the storage closet in the hallway, full of extension cords, milk crates, a possibly real chainsaw, toolbox, and halloween decorations (I may have jumped when I turned on the light), I returned to my office to make myself useful. 
I sat at my desk, and began to examine the chaotic trove of our newly dead valued donor. My job was to archive, catalog, and sort these donated papers for my superiors, and make the material accessible by writing a detailed summary of everything that we had. When I began, I did not even take out my laptop, or begin making labels yet. I simply began removing, shaking mouse scat off of, cleaning, and floor-flattening massive rolls of yellowing and water damaged maps, water warped posterboards, scans of sea charts from days I associate more with pirates than coastal reinforcement infrastructure, and strangely; what I can only assume is every blueprint of his house ever made, drawn by hand, machine, and somewhere in between, growing and changing with his life. Tracing paper and clear plastic layers were staples atop some, and others were covered in chicken scratch notes in the margins like: “4 in. PVC lining under conc landing” and “hide attic 2 door with existing closet construction see detail C3”. 
I opened my laptop, started a new spreadsheet, and named the first category “irrelevant”. I spent the rest of the day assigning each copy of that man’s house plan a serial number, a short description, a category (the same category), and stacking them in a filing box. It seemed like he hardly changed anything but his attic and roof at the front of his house, and his porch/ entrance, which always seemed to be sinking lower, and needed raising higher. By the time the evening came about, my eyes were weary, the gatekeeper had switched to coffee, and I had given myself permission to stop at the first half of his damn blueprints, the rest would wait until the next day. I will stop here too, it’s been more than a month and it feels like I’ve let this part go on well and long enough.

I am in the process of writing a story covering several volunteer experiences at a facility that gave me some delicious horror fodder, and I am worried if I write “I swear this actually happened” on something in this context it could shoot me in the foot or the other way around. I neither desire to sound schizophrenic nor to write actual experiences as if it were a fantasy, and it seems like that’s a most delicate tightrope indeed.

Before I say anything else, I must stress that my every word is truth, or as near as my memory can take me. After years of reflection, and urging from friends, I have decided that I should put pen to paper, and tell folks what I saw.

Before I tell any stories, I suppose I should tell everyone about the place. I know folks who still work there, and many of them are good friends; so let’s call it Camp E.

Camp E is an interesting mess, a huddled mass of steel, wood, brick, and concrete. She is a living corpse, clinging to a sandy bank held together by forest, losing a slow fight with a filthy bay.
I went to school in a house not far away from her sprawling complex, only a short walk from her twin walls of sick trees and barbed wire. Her massive satellite dish a lighthouse, declaring her refusal to die to an inattentive universe.

Camp E lives, (if a life you call it), a bizarre existence of contradictions. It was once a military institution with a proud history of service, and defended the United States from a looming threat that in Europe, held my family in Auschwitz. A road about the base bearing the name of the genius who made her proud role possible. When the army left, Camp E was at once abandoned to the elements, and carved up still living by greedy, grasping hands. 

The barracks did not all share one fate. Those barracks and other outbuildings became apartments and rented offices, still others crumbled, picked apart, burned, and rotted; their skeletons becoming graffiti canvases, drinking hideouts, and skateparks with the help of my classmates.

The central buildings were divided among many organizations, a cluttered and chaotic makerspace that moonlights as a podcast studio, a model train club, and a space observatory to name a few. In the grandest of the old, hulking monuments to faded glory, lived the crumbling, overburdened museum; starved for funding and leasing out half of her space to all of these hungry competitors.

For many years, I would volunteer in this living carcass, under many titles and organizations, always unable to leave the strange world behind me. 
Perhaps I spent too long beside the bay, I always felt like a deep sea eel beside a whale’s carcass; unable, or perhaps afraid to plunge into the empty darkness beyond.