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May 31, 2005

Volume 1, Issue 19

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Photo by Ray Soemarsono and taken from this stunning collection. I suggest that if you do your story first before looking at the rest of the pictures. But do go look at them.

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The girl returns from the barn, having risen before dawn to milk the cows and gather eggs and make sure the rest of the animals are fed. She looks sadly around her at the grey houses, grey fields, grey life.

She crouches down to pick up the small dog, who had been trotting beside her. She puts him on her lap, and asks him, "Why, oh why did we ever come back here?"

The dog, remembering good food, talking lions, and pretty girls tying light blue ribbons in his fur, bites her hand and runs back to the house alone.

Posted by: Tanya at May 31, 2005 5:37 AM · Permalink

Every year they became more like an old photograph. Age claims the dead and dying towns that appeared every twelve miles along the highway taking their very color, washing them out under the soaring sky. Houses became shambles next to trailers; only the old, identical three story brick schoolhouses that prided each town stand solid but abandoned. Arriving in town, the boardwalk outside the drugstore where once were served real cherry and vanilla Cokes is more warped and unwalkable. More familiar homes gone forever. He loves where he grew up, but memory makes it harder and harder to go home.

Posted by: marc at May 31, 2005 6:49 AM · Permalink

I always hated May, but 1943 was beyond belief. Margie had been accepted to Wheaton and moved out to get a head start on the rest of the class. Jake barely had his diploma before he was on a bus headed to boot camp. At the end of the month Papa had a fatal heart attack. Momma went to St. Louis to stay with her sister. Like a flock of birds we scattered to the winds. Unlike that scattered flock we did not return, too much time had past before any of us looked back at where we came from.

Posted by: Blaine at May 31, 2005 6:51 AM · Permalink

Looking back, people don’t really remember how long ago the first atomic bomb was detonated. Most folks act like it was in the 1970s during the Cold War. But it was the Hot War.

Maybe it was the best thing, saved a lot of folks’ lives, I don’t know. What I do know is that it sure wasn’t the best thing for some kin of mine living in New Mexico.

Some numbers were off, it seems, and what the physicists and engineers figured would be a safe distance from human life wasn’t. The damn thing worked too well, I suppose.

Posted by: Mr.Parx at May 31, 2005 6:59 AM · Permalink

"Why are we here, Daddy?"

Brendon scanned the abandoned farm. "Great-grandpa gave this to us before he left." Nothing here but a dead dream, he thought. Grandpa had always thought he could live out his days here, like his parents had. The stroke had stopped that idea cold. Now everything was in disrepair, not that anything here was brand-new before. It was just a dead house from a dead man.

"Daddy, look at that car! This is the best place ever!"

Brendon suddenly saw the farm through his son's eyes and smiled. Maybe he wouldn't sell the place after all.

Posted by: Johnny Catbird at May 31, 2005 7:51 AM · Permalink

Wow, I can't write anything that would deserve to be matched up with the photos in that gallery.

Posted by: Hubris at May 31, 2005 8:33 AM · Permalink

Threeforks (pop. 53) was a one car town. Every week, Bert Johnson drove to Omaha for the mail. In July '29, with the Johnson three weeks late, the Post Office sent a boy see what was what.

He came back a babbling lunatic. Sheriff Godwin and his deputies went to Threeforks. They found everyone there dead where they stood, going about their daily business, and stripped of flesh to the bone.

Godwin sent back for Parson Nabors, to do proper burials. Nabors died of a heart attack as he crossed the town limits. Nobody but looters visited for forty years.

Posted by: Jeff R. at May 31, 2005 8:43 AM · Permalink

I’d like to think Sharon is only a fan. But that would be grossly under-exaggerating her obsession.

Take this picture. Looks like any of a hundred dead towns scattered along the old California-Pacific railroad line, right? Towns that died out with the steam locomotive.

Sure, it’s a nice photograph. You can even see me and little Brooke up in the right corner.

But the real reason for the snapshot was the house behind the car.

So I ask you, who in their right mind travels an extra hundred miles to take a picture of the house where Madonna’s great-aunt lived?

Posted by: Jim Parkinson at May 31, 2005 11:09 AM · Permalink

Her eyes were not filled with wonder but a growing horror. She looked across a foresaken landscape, emptied of people. Decaying buildings, slouching in shame of their paint-stripped nakedness. It no longer spoke of a community where people once walked, laughed, lived and ...

Loved ...

The car. A rusted hulk that mocked her. She could still feel the soft leather against her bare back, his hand sliding up her thigh, his lips against the soft of her neck.

She whirled on him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt.

"Take me back," she hissed, "Back. NOW. I don't want to know the future."

Posted by: Darleen at May 31, 2005 12:16 PM · Permalink

Nineteen sixty-one: Paul Johnson dies. He had not left the farm in fifteen years.
Nineteen forty-three: Three months after the telegrams arrived, Rachel Johnson passes away.
Nineteen forty-one: Both sons join the Army.
Nineteen thirty-eight: The Johnsons survive the Depression through hardscrabble farming.
Nineteen twenty-four: Paul buys the Cooper farm.
Nineteen twenty-one: Jacob Johnson born.
Nineteen nineteen: Benjamin Johnson born.
Nineteen seventeen: “To have and to hold…” Fifteen people attend the wedding.
Nineteen hundred: Rachel Wilson born, the sixth of eight children.
Eighteen ninety-three: Paul Johnson born to Ennis and Rebecca Johnson. “There’s a world of opportunity for this boy.”

Posted by: Chrees at May 31, 2005 1:17 PM · Permalink

To watch little Ray stand in front of the hole he'd dug, you'd have thought you were observing an alchemist about to turn lead to gold. Dropping in a lug nut he'd kept proudly in his pocket since finding in on the road into town, rhe raised his arms and looked upwards with an angel's serenity.

He filled his hole, and we never thought much of it again.

Times were dry, and the crops died. Most folks moved away.

When the rain finally came, it was heavy, and fell for days.

And, right there where Ray stood, that car bloomed.

Posted by: Adam at May 31, 2005 4:52 PM · Permalink

I remember that scene. Sort of.

I grew up near the ghost silver-mining town of Tuscarora, Nevada, on a
barely modern cattle ranch (The Spanish Ranch) in the valley below.

Tuscarora was abandoned in the 1890s, clearly before the town in the
picture, but the feel is the same -- besides, there's abandoned
buildings and rusting cars from the early twentieth just like those
throughout the valley. I loved trying to take apart the old cars and
farm machinery.

Kind of a rude shock to be pulled back to my childhood,
but thanks. Guess there's a story due here as well.....

Posted by: Randy Shane at May 31, 2005 9:40 PM · Permalink

They're called 'ghost towns' because they're where the ghosts live.

It wasn't just ghosts. There were miners! Trappers!
Lawmen and outlaws! Dirt farmers!
Families, loners, ministers and sinners!
Cattlemen, sheepmen, and the battles for water and railroad rights-of-way!

They came from everywhere, looking for their chance.

The silent ghosts of the past accompanied them, and waited for their turn.

Eventualy, the gold and silver petered out.
The jobs vanished, the railroad never came.

Everybody left for the next promise, the next dream.

The ghosts claimed their inheritance.

I lost my job. Hey, do you know the way to San Jose?

Posted by: Randy Shane at May 31, 2005 9:41 PM · Permalink

It was my birthday, she came knocking. That’s when I knew we were in love. She cried despite my gentle words. We played records and danced. She let me lead. I read her my stories and showed her pictures. She cried again when I showed her the dress I made her. She always looked beautiful in yellow. We spoke our vows in the meadow under the moon. Now she smiles always, having sweet tea with Momma. I come in from the wood shed and peak in the parlor. Missing her voice I breathe in memories left in her sweet fragrance.

Posted by: carpediem at June 1, 2005 6:50 AM · Permalink

There was laughter and barbecue here once, and sex and secrets and horror and joy. This was the corpse of his childhood. Every board and rock and weed had some psychic acupunctural connection to some crevice of his, fifty year old word s and events made sanguine in every corner, some unwanted, some funny, most just forgotten til then. What happened here, who lived here, most survived only in his memories and even there they were on a feeding tube. I’d forgotten that flower bed. Chester the peacock is buried under that rock. Release me, he begged. And please don’t.

Posted by: Jon at June 1, 2005 7:42 PM · Permalink