The Greatest Thief

What are your thoughts of seeing abandoned, dilapidated buildings? Do you shy away in uneasiness and perhaps slight fear? Do you slap your thigh, irritated you forgot your camera? Do instantly creep in closer, your very skin itching at the fingertips to brush paint-stripped wood, to feel the deep ruts in its surface like wrinkles etched deep into an elders skin, each a worn path of a life fading quickly, old times that are now captured by shaking fingers, raspy gravel-bottomed voice, watery eyes whose very color seems to be slowly sucked out by the myriad red veins weaving across them. Or do you perhaps simply drive on by? Never noticing the humble, crumbling structure being reclaimed to the earth which it was so long ago wrought from. Albeit we all have our interests and hobbies, I would encourage you not to overlook these crumbling beauties, even if you only glance at them for a second. Try to grasp their story, the reason for their desecrated state. Look at the surrounding landscape, what can it tell you about the building's condition? How far is leaning downhill, how many fingertips does the porch still cling to the house's facade with? How many windowpanes are missing like a broken picket fence, or a hillbilly's blackened smile? How pronounced is the sag of the roof? The back of an old mare who has carried more than her weight in a long lifetime, now put out to pasture, purpose and meaning behind her, lazy days of lush grass and fattened bees buzzing overhead now unfold before her.

For some you may be thinking, "it's an old building. Why the heck would I pay it any notice? And in all truth, I can't force you, or anyone, to give even a moment's notice to such abandoned places. But like I said, perhaps you should. Not to observe the blatant, sometimes harsh and agonizingly tedious cycle of life for not only rural buildings like barns but any building in general, not even for the dark and - for me anyway - intensely appealing and inspiration beauty that a dilapidated building has to offer, but for this simple truth: time is the greatest thief.

In many of my poetry, when I decide to write poems that is, I revert back to the topic of abandoned buildings. Mainly abandoned barns, farmhouses, houses in general and ghost towns. For me, whenever I see such things and my eyes instantly lock in place, like a spinning wheel amidst the Vegas show lights and flashy jewelry and smiles landing on that perfect spot, winning you the big bucks. My mind imagines the story behind that building, how did it become abandoned? What weaves amongst the half-broken windows? What makes the floorboards creak? I yearn to run my fingers across wooden siding smoothed and rutted by time, to peer past the dusty, wavy windowpanes like the fogged and watery eyes of the elderly, capturing a portal to the past, but offering no glimpse of the present. Perhaps this stems from my ability to view an old house only once and be able to retain it in memory and build an entire novella around it. Old houses are the axle that send the caboose of my writing down the steep embankment. They are the strong heart pumping thick, fresh blood through my veins when they dry up and become flat like hair on a sticky summer afternoon.

I'm sure I've talked about it before but on the way to my great aunt's farm in Daggett, Michigan there are abandoned houses and entire farms scattered alongside the highway like true rubies and diamonds tossed inadvertently from a car, exposed to the elements, scratched by time's greedy finger, fogged by its potent breath until it is a ghost of its former self, a constantly thinning shell that houses nothing but the air which breathes in and out of its many openings. My aunt was explaining how each of these places came to be abandoned, and of course I was interested in every tale. I would give anything to learn the true stories behind the houses which I so fleetingly glimpse through the window of my car, but now that I think about it. Perhaps it's better not to know, for my imagination would become a mere vapor, lingering swirls of cigarette smoke hanging in a room stripped of everything, yet the past remaining, too deeply embedded to ever be torn away. For even as the blood drains the veins remain, as does the heart and the dry riverbed leading to the shrinking sea. There is always something that remains, even when there seems nothing is left for it to cling to.

A while back, in the early nineties I believe, there was a man who photographed a certain farmhouse somewhere in the countryside for a decade or so in each season. In the first photograph the farmhouse was occupied and the farm used regularly. In the second photo it had been abandoned, the photo had been taken some five years later I believe. Obvious changes had already occurred. The once uniform, sharp coat of white paint the house donned like the precisely ironed uniform a nurse would wear was now marred by strips of wood showing beneath. Time was peeling back the layers like an onion being peeled to the rotted core, or a child innocently licking a sucker, his tongue red with candy, oblivious to the sharp spike waiting to pierce it just below the bubbled surface. The out buildings had suffered the same fate, their metal roofs rusted and sagging. The third and final photo was taken in the fall, showing some trees cleared in an adjacent field, as well as the house's two-tiered porch slowly leaning away, like a mother turning away from her misbehaving child, shame etched into her face by a red cloak. Great bald patches of paintless siding snarled at the camera, out buildings bore roofs of red rust appearing to mimic the fall foliage in perhaps a last attempt at beauty, a cry for help.

It's sad really, to see a house fall to shambles like that, nevertheless an entire farm. For at one point, no matter if it a decade, a century or a mere three years ago that any place was abandoned, you know there was a hard-working family living there, earning a paycheck, cooking family meals, holding raucous bridge games on Sunday night. Now all of those things are distant memories, viewed through the telescope with the cracked lenses that's just short of bringing everything into focus. There was a house on the way to my aunt's farm that for the longest time was pretty much intact. If I remember correctly, it had been struck by lightning sometime ago. Well, prior to my most recent visit, I hadn't been out in quite some time and anxiously scanned the right side of the road, recalling the house sat at the bottom of a hill. I had remembered most of the roof being caved in and a pile of its own materials sitting in the middle of the four walls like shoveling dirt into your own grave, but upon seeing it on that particular trip I found out that not only did the four walls cave in, but also the roof. My heart had deflated instantly, perhaps mimicking the house's demise, trying to capture what it felt like for it to give that final sigh and feel its own weight fall against it, enclosing it like arms being folded over a hardened, cold body as its lowered into the ground. It had looked to be a beautiful bungalow-style home at one time, but is now a heaping pile of rubble, just like the neighbor's barn across from my aunt's farm.

The green-shingled roof sits atop broken-off and splintered siding and a remarkably newer looking concrete-block foundation. It's a shabby blanket perhaps, thrown over a starving street animal, a small gesture of comfort. Or it could be a moss-layered, floppy hat disguising a cancer-stricken scalp below, hiding its rawest truths from reality, from the prying eye. I remember when that barn was standing, the roof would repeatedly sag further and further inward while the outer opposite edges bulged outward until I thought it would explode at both ends, spewing grayed, wooden siding like a baseball greedily knocking teeth out of its way. But the roof simply proved too great a weight and it fell against the foundation like a flattened pancake smacking against the concrete, having slipped from the spatula. It was ruined, irrevocable. Thankfully my aunt's own barn, albeit not in use save for a friend of hers who carves wood in it, is still standing strong and humbly against the Midwestern sky. I find the barn fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because of the simple fact that it's a barn, and it's old.

Perhaps when I mentioned of time being the greatest thief you didn't automatically think of the effect it has on buildings but instead thought of how it affects your life. But that's for another blog post entirely, and ironically I find i can relate better to this one, than if I were to write the other. Maybe it's not ironic at all thought, for like I said, We all have different ways we view the world, and different things we gravitate to and let pull our attention.

I have seen many an abandoned barn in my lifetime, and fiercely wish I could photograph them all, but one thing I have yet to see are ghost towns. Now ghost towns hold their own fascination for me. For it isn't just one family and one lifestyle that has left the buildings they once lived in like a loon's cry dissipating into the morning's thick fog lacing the thin air, it's an entire community, perhaps hundreds of families full of bustling children, apron-donning wives and hard-working men that for a while enjoyed the luxury of that perpetually spinning Vegas wheel landing on the jackpot every time, the continuous whir of its arc was the clink of axes against stone, the chatter of children rising and falling, the crack of eggs, the giggles of gossip and desire, the soft whisper of gold and silver, the scrape of bills flying from finger to register...until that click became the fire of a shot gun, the ending of an era, the deflating of a dream raining down like shrapnel, piercing everything, running the veins dry, bleeding out the heart. Imagine a ghost town sitting in the middle of a valley, darkened, paint less buildings rising unsteadily and parched from the earth like scabs barely covering wounds which will never heal. Perhaps a few yellowed pages still flab in the post office, or a crooked screen door swings on its unoiled hinges, beckoning its old friend the wind to come and play, to push the rocking chair, to open the windows, to pluck a tune on the dusty piano keys. When was last call at the saloon? Is the wind pushing over cobweb-draped stool the ghost of a drunk still trying to reach home, formulating an excuse in his mind to feed the wife, apologizes laced with liquor and perhaps a hint of the inevitable ending of it all?

But for as much as time steels from such places, it is frozen within them as well. For perhaps as much as it continually takes, it cannot help but give back, to stay awhile. There was a poem I wrote earlier this year I believe that revolved around a fictional ghost town. I've chosen to end with that. If you've ever photographed an abandoned house, ghost town, or barn, or simply witnessed one huddled deep in the woods or the crook of a valley alongside a rural highway, I would love to hear your story. As you can tell, I could talk about such things all day! You, the readers of my blog, have that same right.

Another Ghost Town Lives On
by Corrina

Each building bears a
sagging facade. Darkened
by time, stripped by wind's
raspy breath stealing over
jagged teeth lining the hills.

Roof lines mimicking the
curve of the valley beyond.
Three letters vanished
from the sign once boasting
the word saloon. Drunks no more.

Yellowed squares of paper
scrape along the post office floor.
Screen doors bang open
pleading for one more delivery
of letters from men far from home.

Riches once flowed freely,
through dirt roads and calloused hands.
Gold was the word that birthed this town,
springing it from the very dirt that now
wears its skin thin, bringing death closer.

Titled stones fight for existence
amidst a labyrinth of weeds and
old beer cans. They are as worn as the town
which once sustained the people
buried below, forgotten by the world.

If they had known their beloved
town would one day be no more,
would they have so eagerly built
up homes and businesses?
Rushing an undiscovered frontier?

A faded wooden tractor sits upon
a sill, beside a headless teddy bear.
Pale sunlight weaving through cracks
in rotten clapboards the only thing
left reaching out to touch, to acknowledge.

Rutted roads cling to the feel
of wagon wheels digging in.
Leaning porches whisper of times
when the broken chairs would
patiently wait for a tired soul.

A one-room schoolhouse
dominates the only hill.
Tiny voices laughing gaily,
feet and books shuffling.
It is only the wind.

Is the wind the only living
thing amongst these sleeping
relics? The last to pick a tune
upon cracked piano keys, or
slip into a pew within the church?

Sunlight comes in early morning,
to dance beside the wind.
To fade another family picture and
steal moisture from house's bones.
They are like children playing amongst graves.

It is a town dying a slow death,
despite its lifeblood so swiftly torn
from its veins. The main road cuts
through like a splintered spine,
another ghost town lives on.