On a rainy Sunday afternoon while the children slept in their car seats, I drove the back roads. This leg of the trip was Rt. 64 toward Kelso from Salem, then left on Rt. 121 toward Elora. At Elora I crossed the Huntland to Huntsville highway and decided to take the old road from Elora back to Huntland. Three blocks later as I turned past a row of trucks, I saw on my right the original "downtown" Elora--a row of stores side by side now vine covered and empty. The setting was gray, wet, dull; the mood somber, poignant. I have an immediate sense of a time long past, of voices--people speaking who still think both Winchester and Huntsville are far away--of an old store redolent with kerosene and licorice and ginger.
It is a fragment of a fragment of a town by passed by the by-pass. Elora as a working hill town is still, in fact, quite a going enterprise. There is a large grain mill/silo storage facility, a cotton gin, and two large sawmills with active timber yards. Bean, wheat, corn, cotton fields surround the town. There is even a small volunteer fire department; its garage sits just beyond the end of the row of empty stores. Many of the houses are old, but several substantial new houses are dotted along the road. Out on the by-pass the new market is busy, the passing traffic on the long straight away is fast, throwing rain spray high into the air in long vortexes behind the cars.
The turn onto 121 near the Flintville Hatchery had been between abandoned stores. One was obviously a gas station-garage combination. The block walls and metal frame of the window remain; all trace of wood and roof are gone. On the opposite corner, another store and then a gas station-store with lodging above; it was a road house from the days when the "house" meant lodging long before the first motels appeared. Route 64 between Winchester and Fayetteville show two dozen, perhaps closer to three dozen, closed and abandoned stores. A few have curtains at the windows. Most are empty. Wasps and trumpet creeper claim the gas pumps. In all but a couple of cases the only indication of the gas pump is a rusted pipe broken off at the surface of the fragmenting concrete island that mounted the pump.
Winding the Elora-Huntsville road, the fields are clean, full. Good crops are made. Hundreds of round bales sit in the fields. The road bears back and forth. I have never driven this road before though I have lived here most of thirty years. It is a road of grave yards. Dameron Cemetery. I know the name. There had been a student...; I can't recall her first name. Another cemetery, and another now at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. These are large, kept cemeteries. The grass is cut, the stone walls still stacked and neat. I don't think of it as a world that is lost so much as a world where the past just isn't far away. The old stores and the graves of the old store keepers and old customers are at hand, present almost like the stage sets of a play that is not quite over. Their voices are just off-stage, murmuring, rising with the hum of the wind. Are they about to walk back on-stage, take the clippers to the vines, take down the grocer's pencil behind the ear, sweep off the curling planks of the store porch?
In Franklin County, along these back ways, I sense drama, historical pageant, act after act but the stage hands have not taken away the old sets. Stores and schools and houses and barns from Acts 1 and 2 are everywhere, almost like clutter, a theatrical properties warehouse without a roof or walls. The players are still in costume--there at the church. After lunch they will open the store, set the pies in the window, put the menu sign out at the road...
On the back corner of the new Nissan site near Decherd, the domeless silo of the old farm stands, sentinel now over mounting piles of concrete and building debris as the barns and houses of the Nissan site are cleared. Nissan has been a long time coming here. Their first step of construction was miles of chain link and barbed wire fencing. It reminded me of a southern Indiana arsenal grounds I once drove past each week--rural, empty, and fenced. The people and stock move out, the land sealed, no activity visible from the road. Nissan's land is a good example of a wild place, in this case a very large tract of fields, trees, streams enclosed and protected. Surely, I think, the deer are fat, careless...the hunting should be good. West along the connector road, the new plant is under construction. I have taken a picture of that as well, but these thousands of acres for me will always turn upon a point, a corner, anchored by an empty, roofless silo.
"The emotional appeal of happy memories does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging....nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all since the past it idealizes stands outside time frozen in unchanging perfection....
Nostalgia finds its purest literary expression in the convention of the pastoral, with its praise of simple country pleasures....The celebration of rustic felicity was never intended for rustics. It could be savored only by people of refinement who did not seriously propose, after all, to exchange the advantages of breeding and worldly experience for a life close to nature, no matter how lyrically they sang nature's praises. Nostalgia, in its pastoral form at least, was a luxury only the favored could afford to indulge, just as their spiritual descendants indulge a taste for handmade goods in a world dominated by machine production....
Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. It sees past, present and future as continuous. It is less concerned with loss than with our continuing indebtedness to a past the formative influence of which lives on in our patterns of speech, our gestures, our standards of honor, our expectations, our basic disposition toward the world around us."
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven
A sampler of abandoned equipment
A sampler of abandoned buildings
A sampler of abandoned stores
