Dooley

Once upon a time, Dooley was a ghost town - empty storefronts, sagging buildings, prairie wind whipping down a Main Street no one traveled any more.  But today even the ghost is gone.  Dooley is just a place where a town used to be.

It still shows up on Montana state maps: neat type and a small white circle squeezed about as far northeast as you can go and still be in Montana.  Ten miles from Canada, fifteen miles from North Dakota, a hundred miles from anything you could call a city.  On the county map it shows up with an asterisk - "Currently no residents."  If you travel the bumpy gravel roads to the place marked on the maps, only a single church, slowly decaying, marks Dooley as different from the sea of farms.

When my great-grandfather was in high school, he went to Dooley. He played on the basketball team, and lived in "the shack" with other students from the countryside who lived in town during the week.  He graduated in 1934.  We still have his diploma, the green ribbon wrapped around it looking as shiny as if it were new.  When he was here, Dooley had a saloon, a blacksmith, a sheriff, a store, dances on the weekends, a heartbeat, a pulse.  The livery stable could fit a hundred horses.  Three hundred people lived in town, and farmers from across the countryside poured in for school, shopping, dances.  

A farmer's son, my great-grandfather married a farmer's daughter, and both of them watched the family farms go to brothers.  Farmers without farms can't do much, especially in the Great Depression.  So my great-grandparents left town.  A fire, a flood, a bigger railroad to the south - soon the whole town left town.

As we stand staring at the memorial, beside a pond that once was a basement, my father tells me that I've been here before.  When my mother was pregnant, my great-grandfather brought my parents out to see the old town.  "That so doesn't count," I tell him, and he laughs.  Back then the wooden beams, now floating beside the ducks in the little pond, were raised up and you could see the frame of the house.  Across the street stood a row of other buildings.  I turn around and see nothing but grass.

The grass is full of foundations I can't see until I step on them, feeling old pebbly cement instead of spongy dirt beneath my feet.  I pace them out, walking on the narrow strips of concrete that trace out squares and rectangles, unfathomably small rooms.  There must have been a half-dozen dirt roads around these buildings, but those haven't left a trace.  If my great-grandfather were still alive, he could point out what stood where.  Without him, I'd need an archaeologist's talents to figure it out.  But I doubt archaeologists will ever be interested in Dooley.

We climb back in the car to drive the invisible blocks to the church.  Springsteen's on the radio - "Glory Days" - but the signal is fading, and the song keeps cutting out to static. We park the car in the road and wade back into the knee-high prairie grass, decorated with fallen bits of wooden siding and shingles.  From the side, we can see straight through the church's empty window frames, the bright blues and greens of the landscape framed by the darkness of the wood.

It's absurdly beautiful outside.  Northeast Montana is never supposed to look like this.  The record-breaking rains that flooded Minot and are pushing dams toward their breaking points sank deep into this dry soil, and fields that normally range from yellow to brown are the vibrant green you'd expect to see in Ireland.  A warm summer sun shines, fluffy white clouds breeze across the sky, and a cool breeze slips from one horizon to the other.  Pheasants fly overhead when we startle them. 

The church lost its stairs long ago, so we clutch the doorway as we haul ourselves up to the threshold.  The main door is stuck mostly-open, dirt trapped where the wind flung it between the wall and the door.  Somebody used the doorknob for target practice.  Of the double doors into the main sanctuary, half of one door remains - but the hinges still work.

Inside, the floor is covered with bits of wooden ceiling and scraps of plaster, yellow paint still clinging to it.  An old stove is bolted to one wall, and otherwise the room is empty - dim, but not dark.  Sunlight punches through a hundred tiny holes in the ceiling, painting lacework onto the walls and floor.   On the back wall, enough plaster clings to the frame that you can see the simple floral pattern, white and yellow, that once decorated the walls. 

For a moment I can almost imagine what the church looked like whole - cozy, cheery, canary-yellow, full of simple pews and country prayers.  But the illusion vanishes as soon as I shift a foot through the rubble coating the floor.  My imagination's just not strong enough.

The church smells like nothing - like fresh air and grass and an endless blue sky, like empty prairie.  The silence is unbroken until the breeze brings a rustle through the grass, my camera's shutter whirrs, or I take a careful step.  I'm listening for ghosts, but I don't hear a sound.

As I jump down from the threshold of the church, my father points to the grass to the side of the church: beaten down almost flat.  "Deer," he says.  A half-dozen lightfooted deer, of the kind we've seen leaping away from the road as we noisily encroach on their territory, have been bedding down in the windbreak provided by this church, leaving the shape of their bodies imprinted in the grass.  I  take the long way around.  I don't want to leave traces of my presence to disturb the last inhabitants of Dooley when they return for the night.

On our way out of town we stop by the railroad tracks so I can take a picture of the Dooley sign, which looks bizarrely new in this abandoned place.  The railroad itself is stuck out of the normal passage of time - the wooden ties and gravel, the shiny RR XING sign, they all look new or just-repaired, but the gravel road has covered the tracks completely.  The railroad is kept in working condition, but clearly never used.

The dirt beside the tracks, soaked by recent rain, is less like land and more like quicksand, and we quickly get trapped in the mud, tires spinning uselessly.  We pick up old squares of steel from a discard pile beside the railroad tracks, using them to dig out tires and build little ramps for traction.  There is no cell phone service in Dooley, and for the twenty-five minutes it takes to wrench ourselves free of the mud, we laugh at our stupidity.  Stuck in the mud in a dead town in the middle of nowhere, forced to borrow trash from the past to dig ourselves out.  

And then, because we are late for dinner, we fly over the gravel roads away from Dooley.  We leave ruts in the mud and footprints in the grass, and put Dooley far behind us.