Editor’s Note:  With this post, writer Shay Hill joins Bayou City Press as a columnist. This column was originally posted on Shay’s blog and appears here in a slightly modified form. Check out Shay’s bio and background on Bayou City Press’s contributors page.

Under the heading of “How on Earth Did I Not Think of This Sooner?” I bought a $50 boat at Academy and took it down Buffalo Bayou one recent morning to take care of some old business.

These days, the area is all jogging trails and Segway tours, but frequent ramps, docks, and mooring posts along the way reveal the bayou’s not-so-distant utilitarian past (and downstream utilitarian present) as a route for more than storm drainage and invasive aquarium species.

And there’s this ladder, smashed flat near the water by blunt-force iteration of steel-hulled, twentieth-century commercial endeavors, leading up to an open door.

I’d been up there before, but I hadn’t used the ladder. At the time, there was a steel door at street level that someone forgot to lock. That door was itself behind a set of larger bay doors that were, for a moment in 2014, open to a small parking lot.

I was passing by and dashed through this “window of opportunity.”

As it turns out, that window metaphor is popular for a reason.

While I was inside, the window closed. I was locked in and (I assumed) on camera. Wondering while I wandered through the higher floors of this dark, abandoned building, I found a storage room that was still very much well lit, in use, and under surveillance.

I considered jumping off the roof, and I considered the ladder, but I found an easier way out. There was a door on the bottom floor, secured from the inside by a padlock hasp. Out of convenience, I suppose, someone had replaced the padlock with a piece of rebar⁠—he’d never expected to be locking anyone in.

I removed the rebar and opened the door to a small patch of bank along the building’s foundation, then edged across the base of an adjacent building and climbed a razor-wire fence to freedom.

It wasn’t without effort, but I wasn’t trapped, I wasn’t arrested, I wasn’t wet, and I hadn’t broken my leg jumping from the roof.

There’s a point to this story, and I promise I’m getting to it. (Here’s a hint.)

I felt pretty bad about leaving the door unlocked behind me. Not only because it was a shitty thing to do, but also because it was a chicken shit thing to do. I could have jumped or swum, and left things exactly how I’d found them—it wouldn’t have been the first or the last time I’d jumped in Buffalo Bayou—but I didn’t. I literally took the easy way out.

The following Monday, I left an anonymous note with the business upstairs, something along the lines of, “Hi, I’m the guy who was trespassing in your building Friday. By the way, I neglected to lock the door on my way out.”

Maybe they read it, but I could have done a lot more. And it’d bothered me a bit ever since.

Of course, I went up the ladder this morning.

I didn’t want to “sneak” into the building in full daylight—even less so in a crowded downtown, two blocks from the city jail, leaving a lime-green, inflatable watercraft tied off outside the entrance—and much less so exercising my 2nd Amendment rights: I make it a rule to eschew minor (much less conspicuous) legal infractions when I’m “carrying.”

But I was once again presented with a window of opportunity, so I broke my rule and climbed up.

To my relief, my shameful retreat from my previous visit had not turned the building into a tramp camp.

My note hadn’t worked: the door was still unlocked. But apparently that razor wire had been more of a deterrent to anyone getting in than it had been to me getting out.

I didn’t explore far, but everything—EVERYTHING—was as I’d remembered. Even the rebar was still there, leaning against the door frame, exactly where I’d placed it years before. I pulled the door tight and replaced the “lock” I’d removed in 2014.

Conscience cleared.

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