In my hometown of Chanhassen, Minnesota State Highway 5 is the gateway to everywhere. Cutting straight through the city, it proved to be a moderate hurdle to master when I first started driving. Since then, I’ve driven it countless times in both directions and learned to endure its many cruel stoplights.

While taking 5 back to my parents’ house recently, I spotted something I had never seen before. A fair distance from the shoulder, a timeworn roof barely jutted above the tall grass. An ancient wooden farmhouse resided there, nestled under giant, wild trees. Why hadn’t I noticed this before?

Throughout my youth, my friends and I would hop a nearby creek and scale a massive hill that overlooked our neighborhood. After an hour of sweating and tripping, we would finally reach the summit. There we would race through corn stalks and climb up our respective trees.

One day, while making our descent down the opposite side, my friends and I came across a small abandoned farmstead. Complete with a barn and silo, it had been all but hidden by the large trees that had overtaken the property. Although much of the roofing had collapsed and exposed the buildings to the elements, a faint spirit of vitality still pervaded the area.

Antiquated appliances littered the yard alongside broken beer bottles. We obviously weren’t the first ones to discover the place or use it as a hangout. Even then, I recall treading on the warped floorboards with an almost sacred reverence. I wanted to know the history behind the torn wallpaper, the discarded clothing. What causes a family to only half-desert their home?

I’m currently reading an incredible book called Working by Studs Terkel. The book contains hundreds of oral accounts from real people who candidly talk about how they feel about their jobs. Because the deserted farmstead that I frequented as a kid is now the campus of the new Chanhassen High School, I wondered recently what the workers thought as they leveled the dilapidated buildings. Perhaps they felt the same way as Bob Sanders, a strip miner interviewed in Terkel’s book:

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about my work. I’ve never really appreciated seeing ground tore up. I think about it all the time. You tear somethin’ up that you know has taken years and years and years … and you dig into rock. You see things come out of that bank that haven’t been moved for years. When you see ‘em, you have to think about 'em.

This past holiday weekend, I unhooked my sister’s bike from the rafters in the garage and rode to a small business park off Highway 5. Ditching the bike in the thicket behind a chiropractic office, I made my way toward the farmstead I had spotted earlier. The following photos come from my modest cell phone – the afterthought of an impromptu excursion.