I pursue an interest in history to attempt to understand mortality, I think. Not world history, far removed from anything empirical or useful, but local history- or the history of wherever I happen to be. If I can find some remnant of connection to any particular point in history, either in a date, or a photograph of the same building- something to bridge the now, to the then, through an object ‘vehicle’ of sorts, though that vehicle is often a building- if I can find those remnants, I will spend any spare minutes I have saved for hobbying on research and mental-mapping. It’s like if I observe others, throughout history, taking this finite ride in this finite vehicle, I can understand how the ride I am taking, in the same vehicle, is projected to occur- and what the ramifications are, for that reality- and how priorities arrange themselves on the heels.
I was on a distant road in one of the northern most capillaries of the United States- before the St Mary’s river, and then Canadian wilderness- and on this road I passed a small one story house with a little garage nearby. Looked like Hank Hill’s kind of a home, where the grass would be well kept and a little american flag would be up somewhere- but it was quite overgrown and abandoned. A remnant from a 90s era retiree, rotting bones still standing upright- still hoping, maybe, for a young revitalizing family to save it. Less it vanish forever to rot, mold, and storm damage.
There is this slight existential dread in the shrinking population, and the odd effects it has on the fluctuations here where I live, and the demographic shifts. There’s these corpses of passing generations everywhere, and though it seems like nobody is picking up the pieces and getting the fires going in these old fading places, I don’t actually have any kind of finger on the macro pulse of the world. Just the microscopic sampling in front of me, so what could be extrapolated? Not much.
Still, it warms me very much to see young families doing well, out and about. This afternoon I was fishing off an old ruined dock at this ghost town turned state park, with a giant magnet attached to 50 feet of thin cable attached to a little buoy. A pontoon boat with a big family pulled up, and all the kids came over with questions. The dad came along with them while the females and elder male stayed behind on the pontoon. At one point I managed to drag up a few chunks of rusty cable and a barnacled necklace with a tag on it stuck to one, and the kids came running over very excited for this treasure.
Interesting how time is both a healer AND a terrible thief, no?
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