Listening to bricks, mortar and deer

I didn’t know anything about Fort Dix until I went there a few weeks ago.
I assumed it would be a run-down Army post, since it was “closed” by the Base Realignment and Closure process in the early 1990s.
I was surprised to find a lively, well-kept training base when I arrived.
There was, however, one BRAC casualty. (I assume it was BRAC, anyway. ) Walson Army Hospital can be seen from almost anywhere in the cantonment area. It’s a nine-story -- now empty -- building.
What struck me about it was how closely it resembled Ireland Army Community Hospital at Fort Knox, where Izzy was born. Ireland opened in 1957.
According to a marker (which looked suspiciously like a gravestone) outside the hospital’s old front entrance, Walson opened in 1960 and closed in 1992. It was built at about the same time, anyway.
When I first saw the old Walson Army Hospital building, I kept thinking about how my dad occasionally says, “If walls could talk … ” I walked around the hospital building several times and drove around it even more wondering what those walls might say.
Babies were born there, doctors put casts on the broken arms and legs of Soldiers and their family members alike. The emergency room patched up people horribly injured in car crashes.
Although it has been closed for 17 years (oddly enough, the same amount of time I have been in the Army) the curving sidewalks and benches are still in the back of the hospital. You can still see where people may have sat while awaiting surgery, or holding a baby for the first time or learning how to walk with a prosthetic leg.
The building is surrounded by a loop road which separates the hospital from its now-empty parking lots. There are still crosswalk signs that caution drivers not to hit pedestrians, even though there are few drivers and almost no pedestrians.
The emergency room doors still looks like ER doors.
The brick on one side has a rust-looking stain below some windows. The letters “WALSON” are still on the side of the building you see first when you come in the main entrance. However, only a stain remains displaying the words “hospital” below.
There were a couple of open windows on the higher floors. I wondered if they were broken or if someone opened them. I wondered if there were ghosts of people who died there watching me walk past.
Looking around the hospital grounds, you can almost picture basic trainees who shuffled past during early morning runs with the warm, yellow sunlight behind them.
Every night, at dusk, a herd of deer ate grass in a field across from the hospital. One night, I counted 14 of them. Several nights, I sat and watched them from my car for quite a while. When I walked around the hospital, four of the deer were eating grass very close to the sidewalk on which I was standing. I felt the wind shift. The deer could smell me. They all turned and gracefully ran away.
Maybe the hospital’s ghosts aren’t on the inside.
What would those old walls tell me?