Ghost Town

Today is All Souls Day, which is the Catholic Church’s nod to those of us who don’t aren’t in the subset of souls who get to be saints. (Saints are honored on November 1st, All Saints Day.)  Not mincing around with niceties like the use of the word “soul”, the Mexican’s celebrate today as the Day of the Dead.

So it’s apt to post today about ghost towns.

I wouldn’t have thought of this all on my lonesome, but I did happen upon an article by novelist/short story writer Antonya Nelson in The New York Times last week.

A few years ago, Nelson and her husband bought a few blocks in a Colorado ghost town. It’s not a complete, 100% ghost town – it’s inhabited by about a dozen bodies/souls. But it’s close enough to 100% abandoned to count as a bona fide ghost town in pretty much anyone’s book.

Nelson owns the old P.O., a derelict mine, and the town graveyard.

She didn’t name names, as she doesn’t want to turn the place into a tourist magnet. (Not much of a fear, I’m thinking, given that most of what’s there is falling down or rusted out. Plus there’s no cellphone reception. What would people do, hanging around a played out silver mine, if they couldn’t yack or text?) But Nelson drops enough hints -  elevation 9,400 feet; burnt down in 1937 – that someone hell-bent on finding her heaven on earth would be able to do so.

In any case, it got me thinking about ghost towns.

They happen for a lot of different reasons. Someone wants to put a water supply where your town happens to sit (which happened in the 1930’s, in Western Massachusetts, when they created Quabbin Reservoir).  Natural disaster. Unnatural disaster (Chernobyl).  The lure of the big city. (How you gonna keep ‘em down on the ghost town, after they’ve seen Par-ee?)

You can find ghost towns all over the world – including Antarctica – but to me the classic ghost town is American. It’s in the West, with tumbling tumbleweed tumbling past the long-dry saloon, its doors swinging in the breeze. Gone because the mother lode has played out, the last nugget panned from the creek that’s run dry.

Move along, folks. There’s no longer any way to earn your living here. You may not turn into a pillar of salt but, for god’s sake, don’t look back. How American is that!

In this context, Detroit, Buffalo, Toledo and the other incredibly shrinking cities aren’t necessarily such epic fails. They’re just big ghost towns. Ghost cities, as it were. The mine has, metaphorically, played itself out.  Sure, you can look at it as the outcome of soul-crushing capitalism. Or as evolution. (Half empty, half full.)

I’ll admit, it must be depressing to live in one of these ghost cities, and remember the good old days when everyone walked out of their house in the morning, swinging a lunch pail and whistling their way to work. When couples in snappy outfits took the bus downtown on Friday night for cocktails at the Dew Drop Inn. When you could do all the shopping you could imagine at the Bon Ton Department Store.

But maybe it’s best to just accept that what’s gone ain’t never coming back – not the way it was, at any rate.

Still, there’s the question of what to do with all the abandoned buildings.

When we’re talking a city that once had hundreds of thousand of residents, we’re talking a lot of built up real estate. And a lot of them were no doubt more sturdily built than the slapped up wooden structures of the “classic” ghost towns. You can’t just leave it standing there.

Thus, places like Detroit raze abandoned buildings, let tracts of the city return to nature, and contemplate turning Motown into farmland.

And sometimes they find poets, artists, writers, and musicians who are just delighted to live in a solidly built, pre-war house that they can get for a few bucks. Who like the funk and grit of those old time cities. Who want to be part of something that doesn’t involve driving from one end of suburban sprawl to the other, in search of 10% off on a flat-screen TV.

Detroit, etc. may not be as picturesque as Antonya Nelson’s ghost town, but for those who want to homestead them, oh, pioneers!

Too bad we can’t build a full economy that way.

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P.S.

While it’s All Souls Day/Day of the Dead, it’s also Plan Your Epitaph Day. Since I plan on being scattered, not buried, I’m not doing much planning around my epitaph.  Likely, if I were the buried type, I’d follow s.o.p. for my family: just the facts, ma’am. Name, DOB, DOD, and – if I were to share my dug digs with someone else, some indication of the relationship to my companion for the duration of the Big Sleep.  (Talk about soul mates.)

But it does get me thinking about what my epitaph might be:

Should’ve been a writer.

Not bad, all things considered.

Dead or alive: low maintenance. 

Nah. I think I’d have to go with what my good friend Peter posited as the appropriate epitaph for anyone who did time in the pre-Vatican II parochial school gulag:

Who do you think you are?

Today, by the way, is Peter’s birthday, which he shares with my late Aunt Margaret. Peg of Our Collective Family Heart would have been 100 today. Happy Birthday to Peter, and to the memory of my beloved aunt.

P.P.S.

Thanks to it being Plan Your Epitaph Day, I now have the sentence “Let no man write my epitaph” – the title of a book I never read, and a movie I never saw – floating around my brain. I am happy to pass it on. Tag, you’re it.