What Happened Here?

 

When you live in a house with lots of people and pets, and you walk into a room that’s a total mess, you might ask the question: “What happened here?” 

I was strolling through a cable channel video with no particular place to go. The subject was ghost or near-ghost towns, based on stories without happy endings.

The town I zeroed in on was literally being swallowed up by its own vegetation. Sometimes a porch or a roof would stick out in protest. (You could look at a clump and think: Is there a “there” there under all that ugly, non-specific greenery?)

Sometimes someone had seemed to sneak back into town to plant a few flowers or mow a lawn (showing that relatives of the original residents, or more than likely, other residents were still around), but you could see that this was a very sad place in a very sad situation, in the aftermath of some unhappy happenings.  Some place you don’t want to think about. Some place you don’t want to be.  A place you don’t even want to write about.

Still, it was a living breathing place.  (Maybe a gasping place would be more accurate, or coughing.)

Four houses actually looked maintained and inhabited. Some residents came out and waved for the video.

Among huge empty vacant lots, tall wooden signs still stood straight (or bent over) on the spots formerly occupied by businesses. Curbs were ringed by the remnants of fruit stands and, an up-to-date, check cashing service.  A motel promising it would be back soon was left with all its doors wide open.  There was no grocery store, drugstore, hospital, fast food restaurant in sight, or anywhere else. But there was a car dealership and a car wash.  So, if you bought a car, no worries if it needed to be cleaned.

There was a spacious avenue of hope with historic signs proclaiming historic sites. Fences surrounding these historic sites had attractive red brick, sidewalks and streets.  Rust had accumulated on the iron fences and mold was under the house eaves. Once, when in good condition, it was a charming scene in what surely was a charming town.

Not really.

The accompanying narrative to the video enlightened us. This was once a prosperous location with river traffic including at one time: steamboats, ferries, barges, and all the passengers and goods that went with them.  When bridges supplanted the watery ferry routes the town dried up.  No more businesses meant no more jobs.  Barge traffic which still continues until today is not enough.

The narrative went on to reveal the deeper discontented truth.

It wasn’t just the loss of river traffic or periodic flooding. This town was struck down by suicide. It suffered from a history of bigotry, ugly deeds and opinions, biased to the point that it imploded.

Maybe this was never a nice place to live; never a good place to go to church and raise your children. And the porch and the roof and the other body parts of the town still struggling to survive, to spit out all the overgrown vegetation, are now present-day witnesses haunting us and asking:  Was there no help for this? What happened here?

Available in : A Quick Read: Short-Short Stories