2005-03-29 - 6:58 a.m.
He had found the place by chance, but it was chance borne of fruitless searches and failed quests. He would drive around almost aimlessly at times, looking for old homesteads, busted foundations, the purple funneling of lilacs persevering untended along barren stretches of narrow dirt roads. These half-hidden places, with their random humps and odd depressions of earth, their boundaries often interspersed with lonely clumps of daffodils and displaced stone, were like cemeteries: entirely quiet and serene. What ghosts existed always seemed contented, and mute.
In contrast, the still standing wrecks of what once had been homes astounded and sometimes frightened him. He would approach tentatively up mossy walks, climbing the now rotting front steps to inflict whatever momentary violence—the kicking open, usually, of an improbably still-tight front door—might be needed to gain entry. Once inside he would stand shuddering at the thought of the lives and hopes lost. What had become of them? What caused them to go?
The thought sometimes occurred to him that he too was among the lost. Someday, no matter what, the very home he had grown up in would also be drawn irrevocably into the vortex of time; inevitably it would succumb to neglect and decay, erode with the weather, and eventually become dirt. He could see in every one of these abandoned places the future as well as the past. He could look both ways at once. It was a vision scary to contemplate.
But despite an always accompanying feeling of dread, he could not keep from looking for and stopping by to investigate these forsaken homes. They intrigued more than they disturbed him. He hoped somehow to detect what had gone wrong, to discern the small vibrations, and to understand—something. In the middle of nowhere he climbed a switchback of stairs once and stood on a landing open to the world on two sides and spread his arms to detect, as if he were a spiritual water-witch, the amplitude of unseen presences. He waited perched on that loft with arms stiffly outstretched until the tips of his fingers tingled, listening—hearing eventually, despite the summer dry spell, a small constant dripping in the dying structure above.
For years he sought a place to fix up. He thought he would never have money to otherwise buy or to build, but securing some rundown, out-of-the-way place no one else wanted… that seemed vaguely possible.
Yet even this modest dream eluded him. No one wished to sell, despite there being scant chance of other offers. It was a weird, but to him entirely understandable, reluctance he first encountered after making enquiry on an abandoned, falling-down house sitting just off the road at the top of Rose Hill. It was still owned by the aging only son of its last occupants, who had left when the son had still been a child. (There were still sad stories told about this couple. The Ariel and Gaylord Michel saga started happily enough; they had been innocent once. She gave piano lessons during the early years, on long-ago Saturday afternoons, instructing in succession a few of the neighbor children while he did the chores. In the evening they would go to town to drink and to dance, before, eventually, the drinking won out.) Even now the old house had a gingerbread quality discernable despite its advanced state of disrepair. A written enquiry to the son prompted his coming down from the city one day to take a fresh look around. But in the end the old man’s own son living in California said he wanted to keep the property for a get-away, this despite the fact he had not been back in a dozen years.
