Ruminations on Ruins

Looking at the ruins of a Chinese city, Paul Thereux wrote: "Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city... It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies - only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world.  Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities." (239)

I have to agree with him, partly.  Stepping through the dusty remains of Dooley is not like looking at the ruins of a dead city, or fallen statues of a once-great civilization.  It doesn't inspire any mournful thoughts about the futility of human effort - quite the opposite.  It puts human effort into an entirely different perspective. 

The last human inhabitant of Dooley left twenty years ago, and for thirty years before that the town was essentially abandoned.  Fifty short years were all it took for the prairie to reclaim what once was a town.  And in that time a thousand towns continued on, hunkered down in this windswept land, waiting out each freezing winter and holding their houses up against the snow, thunderstorms and floods.  Dooley is what happens when everybody moves out.  Dooley is what would happen if the people who lived in this prairie gave up and stopped trying.  Dooley is proof that human willpower and constant work holds towns together - not masonry and certainly not inertia.  Human hands are the only reason every town in Montana doesn't look like Dooley.

The Crow Indians lived off this land for five thousand years.  Without stone foundations, their abandoned settlements must have vanished even more quickly and more surely than Dooley.  Their homes would have blown away in a year if not for human hands constantly fixing rips, rebuilding fires, gathering more wood, killing more buffalo, curing more skins, making more shelters  - the constant labor to hang on to the ground more fiercely than the wind could blow.  Build a home, keep it warm, keep it stocked with food, survive.  And then the Europeans came, bringing with them broken promises and slaughter.  The Crow were torn away from their land by guns stronger than the winds had been, and the U.S. government opened up these lands for homesteaders.  Once again, small settlements were waiting out storms and fighting to hold on to their lives.  Families built small houses and kept them together, kept them warm, kept them stocked with food.  A hundred years later people are still doing the same.

The earth can reclaim its territory quickly, at least in this part of the world, where the freezing winters crack wood and stone and the winds rip trees and houses straight off from the ground.  Everything we've built would crumble into dust if not for our constant effort.    Does that make human lives seem small and meaningless, or admirably powerful?

(Or pernicious, like a parasite?  Where are the woolly mammoths, the herds of wild buffalo, the endless prairie like an ocean? Our houses might vanish but some damage can't be wiped away by time.  There are many ways to put human effort into perspective - as easily indelibly catastrophic as doomed in its glory or noble in its determination.)