CHYDARU
CHYDARU, December 2023
At the edge of the Hendrick’s Building, a satellite office of the University of North Carolina, stands a series of dilapidated buildings that stretch down a hill to the Mason Farm Biological Reserve, a swampy wildlife area run by the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
If you follow a nearby trail to the bottom of the hill, you’ll find a barbed wire fence from which hangs a sign:
UNC-CH CHYDARU FACILITY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
The fence is cut in several places, the padlocks rusted. Inside the gates, you’ll see a series of small, crumbling buildings, bungalow-like, and inside those buildings you’ll find concrete floors covered in leaves, alongside broken and rotting dry wall, black mold, and barrels turned on their sides. Rat snakes slither through high grass. Trees something out of Lost.
I’d been living in Chapel Hill for seven years by the time my wife “discovered” CHYDARU during an early COVID hike.
“You’ve got to see this,” she texted me with pictures. “It’s insane”
I’d known about Mason Farm–it’s right there on Google Maps near our house–but I’d never bothered to look into it, because I wasn’t an “outdoorsy” person, especially since I’d moved to the south, with its swarms of mosquitoes and ever prevalent copperheads. But, like a lot of people trapped inside during those first few months, I’d started hiking and fishing and finding ways to be outside of our house without getting sick.
When we first discovered CHYDARU we naturally looked at Wikipedia, which said it was an acronym for the Chapel Hill Youth Development and Research Unit, which opened in 1964. It was “an experimental youth prison operated by the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and the North Carolina prison system.”
Creepy. You never want to hear the words “youth” and “experimental” sandwiched together. The prison only lasted a year. Later the facility housed other university offices, then became a storage unit for radioactive waste, and then an aviary. But that was all gone by the time we found it during the spring of 2020. We started telling others about it, giving people something to do while all the offices were closed, while we were all buying blackmarket toilet paper in empty Walmart parking lots. People who had lived in Chapel Hill for 25 years had no idea it was there. It was like our own little mystery.
Which was something I needed, because I was incredibly bored, and stressed. Most days, my wife worked in her office upstairs, Zooming with patients (she works as a pediatric dietitian at UNC hospital), while I stayed downstairs with our three-year-old. I was still teaching three classes at UNC, but had moved everything to an asynchronous format, because I couldn’t keep my son alive and hold class at the same time.
After my wife went upstairs, I took our son out before it got too hot. The playgrounds were all yellow taped, so we hiked along urban trails, stopping at stream beds to look for crayfish and worms. We went fishing at a nearby pond and I Tom Saywered a stick and line to a hook and let him cast (he even caught a few sunfish). We hung out in the grass and looked up at clouds. We talked about “the germs.” He liked being home because he got to watch TV in the afternoons while I graded, but he also missed other kids. Soon we started meeting neighbor children at a nearby park and ride, so they could run around or ride big wheels and balance bikes. One day my wife chalked into the asphalt “pandemic playground.” For long stretches of the day I talked about Dora the Explorer and Daniel Tiger. I worried about my sister, who was COVID nurse, and my mother who was old. I wondered whether COVID could cause long term damage to my son.
This isn’t me complaining. Just stating where I was at the time. I didn’t lose anyone to Covid. When Covid reached me, I didn’t get particularly sick. I had health insurance and a job that was flexible enough so that I could take care of my child. I did better than most during the pandemic. I was never lonely, because I had my son. But I was bored. And worried about how he’d turn out.
CHYDARU, December 2023
—
Before Covid, I was already primed to be scared. My son was born one week before Trump’s inauguration, and my wife, every morning from election day until his birth, woke, looked at her stomach, and said “fuck.” It wasn’t just because we’re professional liberals living in a college town, the sort of cliche Hilary voters that right-wing media blames for the devolution of America. She’s Jewish and thus our son was as well and we feared that the type of antisemitism that Trump often hinted out—or said outright—would become commonplace. And we were right. In addition, his rise also led the worst Americans to re-emerge into the public sphere. The racists and antisemites and Christian nationalists. All of this was happening, while I was home with a baby boy and sleep deprived. And all of it reinforced my fear of having a son in the first place, because the problems scaring me were almost always caused by men.
There’s a book I love to teach, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. It’s a pretty simple story set in the Ozarks. Sixteen year old Ree Dolly has to search for her father’s body in order to prove he’s dead, because he put up their house as collateral for bail. She’s in a bad jam. Her mother is sick and she has two little brothers to take care of. So she has to traverse through a violent, patriarchal society—one decimated by meth—in order to do so. Along the way she’s told ‘no’ by one man after another. Many of my students—most of whom are women—are a little reluctant about the book at first because it was written by a middle-aged man taking on a teenage girl’s perspective, but they almost invariably come around to loving it because it’s probably the most deeply feminist novel I teach. You see the novel shows that although men are “in charge,” they’re almost all completely useless. Even her uncle Teardrop—the guy who gets the best lines as the book’s badass—doesn’t end up helping her find her father, no matter how hard he tries. It’s the women in this society that help her. It’s the women who keep it running. It’s the women who clean up after their husbands, fathers, and sons. But what is relevant about this book for this essay is Ree’s brothers. Her deep hope is that the boys “would not be dead to under by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean.” Are they predestined to become cruel, stupid men, or will they retain an ounce of generosity in adulthood? Can a parent—or in Ree’s case a parental surrogate—keep a boy from becoming an asshole?
That’s why I didn’t want a son.
Because when men are assholes, everyone suffers. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to prevent that.
—
It might seem like some sort of irrational fear, something that someone who spends his life reading too many books comes up with. But it’s actually less complicated than that. There isn’t some deep psychological reason that needed to be scraped out with a therapist’s knife. It’s simple. I grew up in a world of fucked-up men. My father. Decent man. Loved me. Drank too much. Never seemed happy. Angry, all the time. The fathers of my friends. Also drank too much. Also angry. Never seemed happy, sober. My childhood male friends, the few I had. Taking after their fathers. Angry, a cross word away from throwing a punch or swinging a bat.
And purposely stupid.
Beavis and Butthead without the irony. School was stupid. Books were “gay.” Same with emotions. Guns were cool. Same with war. Video games. Sports where you could hurt another kid. All the typical masculine bullshit.
I lived in it, hated it, ran from it.
And the consequences of men growing up in this world were pretty dark. A lot of jail time. Alcoholism. Murders. Suicides. A childhood friend of mine, one whose father was murdered, recently hung himself. He was 44. I’ve known others who met the same fate or found themselves living in worlds full of rage and disappointment. This was long before the current “crisis” about masculinity in young men. Long before Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and others deal in telling teen boys to fuck their feelings.
And this is not to say that having a daughter is easy, that the fears that come along with raising a woman in this world aren’t just as scary. But for me, raising a man not only dug up a bunch of childhood fears and pains and shames, but it also scared me about what he could become. Men shoot up schools; men commit rape; men go to prison at the highest rate. They also start wars, become internet trolls and incels and live in anti-intellectual echo chambers that breed hostility and stupidity.
And that’s what I’m scared I can’t prevent.
—
Over Covid, I kept coming back to CHYDARU, not so much the facility, but the mystery of it. What was the actual experiment?
When the archives at Wilson Library at UNC re-opened, I got an appointment to look at the university’s files on CHYDARU. I went into the research thinking that CHYDARU had some sort of nefarious purpose, that it was tied to the state’s history of racial segregation and violence, that it may even have links to eugenics. I was wrong.
What actually happened was much more interesting.
In the 1940s and 50s, the North Carolina prison system was brutal in the chain-gang, Cool Hand Luke sort of way. Segregated, of course. But even white prisoners were subject to inhumane conditions. Riots were frequent. As were stabbings. Prisoners were often shackled, put in solitary confinement in dark cells, only bread and water to survive upon. Punishment was meted out by a leather strap.
In 1956, Ivy Buff prison was opened for the most hard-bitten criminals in the state. The conditions were so bad that some went on a hunger strike. Others fell into self-mutilation. Several tried to escape. Some even succeeded.
Imagine the worst of the South and then keep digging into your darkest nightmares.
CHYDARU, it turned out, was different. It was an attempted antidote to that sort of imprisonment, an experiment in a more reform-based incarceration. Youth felons were transferred there from state prison to be reformed in the woods, while their guards and administrators were all parolees, men who’d gone astray and now wanted to teach others that there was another path.
According to Paul Keve in his book Imaginative Programming in Probation and Parole, CHYDARU tried to create a “therapeutic community” for first time offenders. It’s not clear how successful it was. But at least they tried. And maybe they could have really created something magical. But they ended it after a year for lack of funding.
I know very little about prison reforms or prison theory or what prisons are actually like. What struck me, however, was that even then they were trying to give men another way of being a man. It didn’t have to be all repression and anger. There was another way forward.