The limber shrubbery was extra flexible this Spring due to the quickly thawing soil, which combined with the unseasonably warm atmosphere, seemed to have awakened all of nature's vegetative joys from their winter slumber a few weeks early. It was only 8:00 AM but once the sun topped the horizon the temperature quickly climbed, followed by its accomplice, humidity. The latter of which caught me off guard as my sweatshirt quickly became saturated in sweat and my cotton socks transformed into a soaked foot sponge. At this point, I won't dare detail the condition of my salty underwear, as I'm sure you get the gist.

The plentiful plant life abound easily absorbed the ground water permeating out from the recently defrosted soil, causing all of the vegetation to grow with vengeance, much of which was already sprouting leaves and buds, despite Winter only having officially ended just a couple of weeks past. All of this pleasurable weather lead to a dense new growth forest full of thick weeds and bushes that sprout up seemingly overnight, which proved to be quite laborious to bushwhack through. I took out my phone to get my bearings straight and what looked like a relatively clear old coal rail bed spur on Google Maps, turned out to be, in reality, an overgrown copse, ridden with questionable ivy, which may or may not have been of the poisonous variety; for it certainly gleamed and shimmered under the sun in leaves of three, but I never did get any rashes.

All of the plant life surrounding me remained cocked and loaded, thanks too, yet unbeknownst of my exploring partner and tour guide for the day, Lerch. As he walked just ahead of me he unknowingly set the elastic Spring vegetation taunt in place, like a mouse trap ready to snap back as I walked past. Lerch had no idea but each branch, stick, shrub, twig, and thorn bush thicket he walked through, in return, whipped across my arms and legs as I attempted to push through the dense overgrowth toward the brick smoke stack in the distance, rising up over the greenery like a long dead tree trunk.

I've known Lerch for years now, but at the time of this adventure he was a new accomplice. He is an interesting character and certainly a bit of an enigma of a human-being at first sight. Abnormally lanky yet full of energy and curiosity, he's dapper and sharp in appearance, often adorned in a suit and tie, dressed for business but always ready for an adventure. His voice is as deep as he is tall. He's a slender man no doubt, perhaps more akin in appearance to Slender Man, just with a far kinder prerogative; abducting souls if only to bring them on an adventure of a lifetime.

While standing at a full six feet seven inches tall, his stride is unmatched against my five foot eight inch walking pace. His height claims an advantage for he soars effortlessly above the brutal Spring flora, ripe with thorns, itchy pollen, and trip wire like vines growing at ankle height. I am infinitely jealous at the ease for which he cruises through the thickset woods, as I in turn am left to cover my face with my hands as to avoid being blinded by a barrage of pricker bushes. Attempting to walk forward while at best staring through the cracks between my fingers, meanwhile Lerch just stampedes though the weeds.

If it weren't for the neighboring houses remaining just a few hundred feet away, adjacent the overgrown rail line we were "hiking" through, I'd have been screaming obscenities this entire time. But we had to remain quiet for the nosy neighbors would be sure to call the town po-po, whom are no doubt comatose within their station, twiddling their thumbs and tossing their guns whilst awaiting a call to do something, anything. Yet here we were, two buffoons walking down an ungodly overgrown rail line once used to haul coal to the hospital which now exists as an infamous abandoned ruin ripe with stories of corruption, greed, and abuse; a true New Jersey romance novel. But we weren't braving the thorns of the wood-line at 8:30 in the morning just to get caught or be turned around, we were here to experience Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital one last time before the physical brick and mortar buildings encapsulating her stories of misconduct fell victim to the wrecking ball, to be forgotten forever.

As time proceeded, the rail bed thickened even worse. No longer could I spot Lerch, for the suburban wilderness had swallowed him I feared. I could however hear the crunching of detritus and the snapping of the occasional twig, emanating from ahead, which remained as my only audible clue to continue pushing forward in some sort of half-assed straight line. With thorns scouring my face and slicing my cheeks I did my best to keep cutting the distance in half between the abandoned hospital just ahead and the meddlesome neighbors directly to the left. I knew we were getting closer to the hollowed hospital campus as a barb wire topped perimeter fence soon appeared out from the woods line and began to corral me in. Fortunately, the chain linking was riddled with more holes than allegations of corruption and Mafia political ties surrounding Marlboro Township, the very municipality the hospital was constructed upon.

Reaching a clearing in the brush, I again spotted Lerch, he was leaning up against the swiss cheese fence with a smirk spread wide across his face. "We're here!" he exclaimed jubilantly to me. I could see we were in a wooded area directly behind the old power plant building which was blown open wider than Chris Christie's gullet at a Chinese buffet. Lerch explained to me that once inside the power plant it was to be an easy walk down a utility tunnel which would provide us with undetected subterranean access to the entire campus via a labyrinth of steam and patient tunnels which connected all the buildings. However, those solid sounding plans quickly eroded away when it was discovered the steam tunnel access point in the power plant was flooded with water, nearly three-quarters of the way to the ceiling, extending for about one hundred feet, or least as long as my flashlight beam could illuminate.

I looked over at Lerch, he had an aura of bewilderment sprawled about his face. "I've never seen it flooded like this before" he said. In such a demeanor of seeming defeat, I suggested that we could perhaps attempt to run across campus and try to enter one of the numerous patient cottages through a window. However that was a risky move, an idea that was immediately shot down, for the campus was overgrown and full of winding roads, crawling with both private security and town police looking to hand out easy bait trespassing charges rather than intervene the more nefarious crimes no doubt occurring elsewhere. It was in this moment of defeat that an idea of desperation crossed my mind. "Lets just get down to our boxers and wade through the water" I sort of jokingly yet seriously suggested to Lerch. "You know that just might work" he surprising stated back.

Before committing to such insanity, we both decided to take a closer look at the tunnel and realized that it was more so full with a thick milkshake like slurry of diesel oil and spoiled sewage sludge, topped with a glistening sheen of a rainbow sprinkles than it was actual groundwater. It was clear if we entered this hell pit with any amount of skin exposed, we'd be exiting at best with no limbs and stage four cancer. Our best bet now would be to devise some type of makeshift waders. Fortunately for us, we had an entire power plant to ransack for supplies. Relatively quickly we were able to find a box of garbage bags but they were the thin, shitty cheap-o kind. While Lerch continued to search, I doubled a pair of the trash bags around my shoes and dipped my left foot into the oily tunnel water just to test their abilities. Within a matter of seconds my boots ripped though the thin plastic material and my feet were soaked with cold questionable liquid. This would not work, we needed a thicker material that we could wear like red-neck hip waders.

"Hey buddddy, look what I found" Lerch yelled down to me, from a second floor above the main boiler room. I ran up the stairs to meet him. Lerch managed to find an entire janitorial closet full with these thick yellow plastic bags designed to dispose of industrial garbage such as asbestos tiles and sharp metal material. "This is perfect" I exclaimed! The yellow bags were large enough that I could wear one on each of my legs and they easily extended up to my hips. Lerch being a lot taller wasn't so sufficiently covered but still, they would suffice. We toughed the bags down stairs to the tunnel entrance and prepared ourselves for what could be a unique drowning experience.

With a bit of squirming, I donned two of the yellow bags, one for each of my legs and stepped into them (shoes and everything on) like a burlap sack. Luckily, Lerch had with him in his backpack a roll of duck tape and began to tape the upper part of the bag to my waist line. I looked like a depraved, drunken, hunched-back Big Bird and Lerch, he looked even more wicked and absurd, like an overgrown man child wearing baby clothes for some type of fetish meet-up. But this would have to work, it was our only plan, a last ditch effort.

I stepped into the tunnel feet first and immediately the pressure from the water pushed all the trapped air out from within the yellow bags and suctioned the plastic around my legs and torso. I briefly panicked because initially I thought water was pouring into my makeshift waders, but it was just my skin adjusting to the cold water as it pushed against the yellow plastic material which successfully guarded my skin from liquid contact but no-so-much temperature. Now, Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital is unique in which the steam pipes run along the ceiling of the tunnels as opposed to along the side. This posed us an advantage as we clasped onto the steam pipes from the ceiling and slowly monkey-bared our way down the tunnel while bobbing about in our yellow Big Bird suits.

The downside was that the water below was scary, dark, and deep, at least four feet and the bottom was full with all sorts of sharp metal shit that could easily tear our Big Bird exo-skin and leave us totally fucked. Thus, we had to tread slow and feel around for sunken foreign rusty objects as to avoid a Titanic like catastrophe. Lerch's height gave him the advantage here for he was able to move from the ceiling pipes far easier than me, all the while propelling and thrusting himself forward through the water with ease. Myself however, I wasn't quite so lucky, as while dangling from the pipes by my arms, I became very buoyant and began to float against my own will, as the yellow bags turned into a life vest and worked to float my body to the surface as air had gotten trapped within them. I really had to fight to keep myself upright and standing. All I could hear was the sound of water splashing and sloshing around. Chunks of rust disturbed from the pipes above rained down over our hair and covered us in grime. To make things worse, the water line in the tunnel was just mere inches from the top of where the bags met my torso so I truly could not afford the water to become any deeper.

I let Lerch pass me so he could asses how much longer of this flooded steam tunnel hell we would need to traverse and if the water got any deeper. A few minutes passed by, as I bobbed in silence listening to the ghostly echo of the water line lapping against the concrete tunnel walls. In this solitude and silence, my thoughts wandered to realizing that no one would ever find us down here, ever! Soon however, Lerch's booming voice echoed through the claustrophobic cement tunnel breaking the lull of quietness. "We're good, you just have to make it about twenty more feet, then the tunnel goes around a bend and up hill and is no longer flooded" Lerch yelled down to me from somewhere within the darkness.

Again I grabbed the steam pipes running above my head and sloshed myself further into the blackness. Eventually I could tell the water was becoming shallower as my feet were making contact with the cement tunnel floor below. As I rounded a corner I could see Lerch hunched over and standing with his flashlight within a now completely dry tunnel. He was still wearing his bag waders, tainted with so much sludgy oil residue that they were barely even yellow anymore. I laughed to myself as he looked like a near dead pelican caught in a terrible ocean oil spill.

"You made it buddy", Lerch exclaimed. "Hell yea!" I answered back. "I can't believe we even contemplated about doing that in our boxers" Lerch light heartedly joked. "Yea, fuck that man, what an absolute shit show that woulda been" I said, my voice reverberating down the tunnel. While stripping down out of my suit, I tried to take my mind off of the fact that this was only 50% of the adventure, as we still had to "float" back though the tunnel to exit, but at least we knew what to expect upon leaving. In the meantime, we had an entire abandoned hospital campus at our pleasure to explore and I can guarantee no one has ever "bobbed" down the lazy river tunnel at Marlboro before.