ice climbing in dead malls

Imagine that the collapse of the global financial sector and the resulting dramatic decrease in consumer spending have caused scores of retail chain stores to declare bankruptcy. Malls everywhere are shuttered: a constellation of abandoned cathedrals to capitalism stitched across the American landscape.

And then imagine, as but one adaptive re-use, they are turned into ice-climbing clubhouses. Where people once gorged thousands of calories in one serving, people now burn those same calories in the Food Court. Where once the multi-carded and the debt-ridden found comfort in materialism, they may experience the same adrenalin rush from the prospect of multiple compound fracture, if not death. Where once they hopped from store to store in a zombie-like delirium, there, in a kind of Waldian introspection midway up a simulated glacier (a frozen New England lake geologically reconfigured?), they are now considering a fundamental alteration of their lifestyles, a change for the better.

Pruned