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.

Tony Regan's Locks

Part One  Part Two  Part Three

After Bill Regan died, Tony Regan kept on living in that old house, all by himself, and he never married.  They said all of the first batch of Regans, the children of William B. and Julia, were a little peculiar, on account of Bill and Julia being cousins.  Tony Regan was the most peculiar of the lot.  He hummed, tunelessly and loud, as he walked around the perimeter of his property, compulsively weeding his fences.  Tony hummed so loud that the black folks who lived across the street were straight scared of him, wondering what on earth was wrong with a man who would make so much noise.  Though he was a friendly man who would talk to anybody for an hour, he lived a little bit like a hermit - tucked away inside his father's old house, not so good about bathing or cleaning, rarely venturing off his own property.  Chief among his peculiarities was Uncle Tony's obsession with locks.  He put locks on everything - on all the doors to his house, on the door to his smokehouse, on the gates on all his fences - and he would never just lock them once.  After he locked a gate or a door, he would walk about twenty feet, then turn around and just look at that lock.  And then he'd go back, and unlock it and lock it again, and then he'd stand there and pat that lock - just like you'd pat a pet.  And if you asked, he'd say he was making sure he was safe, and nobody would come and steal him and Granddaddy Regan's money again.  That money was safe for sure now.

But if there was any of that money left, nobody ever saw it.  Tony sure never spent it on anything, wearing his clothes out until they were rags.  Most folks though Tony had gone out of his mind, and was guarding money that was lost forever years ago.  If there were a few whispers that Old Man Regan had a second stash of cash - one he never told a soul about for fear it would be stolen, too - and that Tony wasn't quite as crazy as he looked, and was guarding that last little scrap of the Regans' "dead money" - well, most people just dismissed that as the nonsense it was.  That money was as gone as Old Man Bill.

What about the rest of the family? In the last years of his life, Bill Regan finally let his children own the 180 acres they had each been farming for him.   Most of the fourteen Regans kept living on their land, borrowing money to plant it with crops and hoping to earn enough at harvest to pay back their debts, and maybe keep a few hundred dollars on a good year.  A couple of children moved into town and made a slightly better living buying and selling cattle... with weighted scales, to earn a little extra bit of profit.  They were prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-owners, often poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but not rich like their father was.  Those children's children, Bill's grandchildren, bought up enough farmland for 20th-century farming businesses, or went to school, or joined the military, or found themselves city jobs.  Today most of them have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

One of those children lives today in his great-grandfather's house, old William B.'s, the one Tony guarded for so many years.  Old Tony never had any children, and passed his property to a nephew, and it kept being passed down son to son.  The old house looks a little different now, surrounded by modern detritus, but if you squint real close you can see the ancient wood barely holding up the porch roof.  The Regan there today is a bit of a recluse, and heavy on the drink, so he doesn't get many visitors.  The angry german shepherds in his yard are as good as any lock at keeping strangers and would-be cattle buyers off the property.

The Regan fortune's gone, of course, that's for sure.  But if it wasn't gone... If any cash was still around, it'd be locked up inside that junked old house, inaccessible to the world, rotting away in a secret compartment somewhere.  It wouldn't be doing anybody any good.  And since everyone knows the money must be gone, no jealous neighbors would ever think of whispering to thieves in the night.

No, the money isn't there.  But if it were, it would be utterly useless, and forever safe.  Just how Bill Regan, my great-great-grandfather, would have liked.

The Night That Broke Bill Regan's Heart

Part One  Part Two

In the dead of winter, when the Georgia air was biting cold and the ground was dusted with snow, a car drove up to Bill Regan's place.  They arrived soon after nightfall, when the little house was surrounded by darkness and empty woods.  Uncle Bill sent his son Tony to answer the door, and Tony - about thirty years old by then - pulled it open to face three men he'd never seen before.  These men smiled at the two Regans. b "We're looking to buy some cattle," said one.  "At a real generous price," added another.  Old Man Regan saw dollar bills dancing as soon as he heard those words, and he invited them into his house to talk business.

They sat by the fireplace, built up real high for some warmth on that cold night, and the men sat for a while chatting about cattle. They started to barter, real friendly-like.  And the three strangers tried not to stare at the safe, sitting plain as could be in the corner of that big square room.  They talked and talked until Bill Regan looked right at ease, and then one of the men said, "Could I fetch a cup of water, do you think?"  Bill Regan pointed at the door, towards the pump outside, nothing but profit on his mind.  He didn't watch as the man walked past the pump and straight to the trunk of his car.  When that stranger came back in, he carried a gun in his hand.

The friendly smiles on the three men's faces had flown away, replaced by hard stares and cruel grins.  The men pinned down Tony, hog-tied him, and threw him on a bed, then turned to Bill, elderly and weak, and told him, "Old man, you're going to open that safe."

But William loved his money too much to hand it over, even with a gun in his face.  "I can't remember the combination," he lied.  Tony lay on the bed, tied up and helpless.  "I just can't remember it."

The men looked at each other, as calm as could be.  Then they looked at the iron beside the fire, waiting to help press some shirts, because Bill Regan was a neat and well-dressed man.  They placed that iron right on the coals of that big, hot fire.

"Well," the men told Bill.  "We'll just have to make you remember."  And they pulled off his shoes, and waited until that iron got hot.  Old Bill saw the iron glowing bright red, saw the looks on these men's faces, and by firelight he could just make out the terror in the eyes of his son Tony, but he didn't give in.  "I don't remember," he said, while Tony tried to shout around the rope in his mouth.  "I just don't."  So the men shrugged, and they sat on William's small frame to pin him down.  They waited another long second, to see if the old man would come to his senses, and then they pressed that iron firm against the soles of William's feet.  The crackling of the fire was drowned out by Bill Regan's screams, but outside the house, the empty woods and cold winter night swallowed up the sounds.  Soon the pain grew stronger than Bill's love of money.  "I remember," Bill Regan gasped.  "I remember, for the love of mercy, I'll open it!"  Was the agony in his voice from the pain in his feet, or from the thought of saying goodbye to those beautiful stacks of bills?

On his hands and knees, sobbing, pathetic, old Bill crawled to his safe and slowly dialed in the combination.  But despite his pain and his fear, Bill was still thinking of his money.  When he opened the door, h grabbed one bag of cash and tried to hide it underneath the safe.   But the men saw, and they grabbed a stick and beat old Bill for trying to cheat them like that.  Then they hog-tied Bill Regan and threw him on the bed next to Tony, and carried all the bags of money out into their car.  Laughing, they drove away to the north.

It took hours before Tony wriggled out of the ropes tying him down, and then he ran as fast as he could to the closest farm, banging on the door and hollering for help.  They went to town and roused the sheriff, and the very next day the sheriff started asking around about the strangers.  It was more than two years before they found them, scattered across the country from Chicago to New York, and they never did find a penny of the money.  They brought the men back to Early County to prosecute them, and they stood before an even older Bill, whose feet had healed but whose pride never had.  "I'm sure you had a real good time with all my money," Bill snarled.

"Nah," said the men, cruelly.  "It wasn't that much."

When they went to prosecute those men, the court didn't give them hardly any time in jail, because people said the money they stole hardly counted as money - "Dead money," they called it, like they always had.  "Dead money.  The old man wasn't using it anyway - it was barely a crime."

After the robbery, William Brown Regan wasted away until he died.  He never was the same again - he didn't care about a thing.  Folks said he died of grief over losing that money, which he'd loved so much more than he should have.  And while Bill Regan may have had fourteen children, it didn't do him much good when he was dying.  See, he'd had more children than he had love and kindness for them; he was as stingy with his heart as he was with his money. And when William lost his fortune and grew old, and weak, and needed to be cared for like a baby, his children remembered what a tight-fisted and unloving father he had been.  All that land, and he wouldn't pass it down properly to his grown children - he made them work it for halves, like sharecroppers.  No, they didn't look at him with kindness - not even Tony.  Only one of all his fourteen children would agree to take him in - and that was his son John Howard, the same son Bill had turned away when John Howard came begging for a little syrup for his starving children.

John Howard was a generous as Bill was stingy, and he shared his food with anybody, family or stranger, who was hungry, and he opened his home to the old and infirm when nobody else would take them in.  In the final years of his life, Bill Regan, the proud man who wouldn't give a penny to anybody, found himself flat broke, depending on another man's generosity to keep him alive.  And that's what we call irony.

soo behind

So as you can see I'm pretty far behind on actually putting up blog posts, and the order is getting all mixed up.  Sorry bout that. I've got a giant text document full of "blog posts to post" and it's all a mess.  And that's even without thinking about all the photos...

My travel-blogger-license should be revoked.

Why on earth do people move?

Traveling, even for just a little time and with just a little stuff, is a terrible nuisance.  There are floods that halt trains, computer errors that cancel planes, storms that bring the interstate to a bare crawl; even when those things go right, you'll deal with lost bags, inaccurate maps, rude strangers, uncomfortable sleeping spaces, odd smells, and really terrible food.  Language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, jet lag and exhaustion.  Oh, and everything costs more while you're traveling. Guaranteed.

And when you're moving - all the stuff to cope with, all the expenses involved, the worry, the breaking valuables, the crushed boxes, the pain of downsizing, and then replacing the things you downsized, and the cleaning of the old place and the new, of packing and unpacking, of learning the layout of a new town, finding new jobs, new childcare arrangements, new friends.

And just imagine what it would have been like before we had trains and planes and cars and credit cards and internet reservations and telephones and GPS - heck, cheap accurate maps, even.  The mules would get thirsty, or the cart would break an axle.  The cows would drink poisoned water and die (I'm an expert; I lost many a game of Oregon Trail this way).  The constant weeks on the road would wear on your family.  You'd abandon priceless heirlooms by the roadside.  You'd bury children along the way. You'd live for months packed into the stinking hull of a leaky ship.  You'd freeze at night, roast during the day.  Getting lost would be life-threatening, not just annoying.  With no travel guides or online ratings to check out, every decision about buying food, sleeping somewhere, following directions or stopping in a town would be a perilous judgment call.

So why do it? Why bother at all?

At some point in high school I remember learning that people immigrate for one of two reasons: to seek something good or to flee something awful - or both.  I wonder, though, if we might be able to look at all the reasons we popularly accept as reasons for travel - boredom, longing for adventure, curiousity, wanting to see a new culture, etc - and think of moving as just another kind of travel.  Especially back before travel was a widely available hobby of the middle class.  If you were making a modest living but longed for something exciting, new horizons, new faces, new tastes, you couldn't save up vacation leave and book a flight. Maybe the only way to find those experiences would be to pack up shop, sell some assets and relocate - and the relocation itself would be an exciting adventure.

It may be accurate to think about migration is as the push-pull of powerful economic, religious and sociopolitical factors, with personal whims and longings privileges immigrants couldn't afford.  Overall, people tend to move away from poverty and war and towards economic opportunities and political stability.  But to think this explains immigration and migration is an extreme oversimplification.

The other day I wrote on this blog that Prussia must have been absolutely awful if Montana seemed like a better deal - unless my ancestors just didn't know what they were getting into.  But when do we ever?

I've been rethinking that offhand statement.  Since I can't ever know their motivations for leaving a known land for an foreign place, obviously I should be careful about my assumptions.  And maybe they were fleeing an untenable situation, or seeking what they had heard was a land of prosperity.  But maybe, just maybe, they wanted something new and different.  The modern era does not have a monopoly on the desire for excitement - I think it would be a mistake to assume past generations were motivated by practicality and self-interest, when our own behavior so often displays impulses best summed up with a shrug and "I don't know, I thought maybe it would be fun."  

Or to put it another way: if the only way you could leave your hometown were to move away from it, would you do it?  Even if you weren't impoverished or repressed, and you had no guarantee of prosperity in a new town?

And if you don't think you would do it, can you think of anybody you know - any restless personality - that would?

I know I do.  The push-pull model of immigration is probably the most accurate way to talk about historical migration patterns, but on the individual level, we should remember to leave room for human impulses and irrational desires.

Without those, who would travel at all?








Seriously, travel is mostly awful.  Especially when half the country seems to be flooded, on fire, thunderstorming, tornado-stricken or all of the above.  If it weren't for restlessness and curiosity I'd be comfortably well-rested at home right now.  AND I'M NOT.

Stupid human impulses and irrational desires.

Back to rural Georgia for a moment of nutty reflection

I know that vineyards are the classic fantasy of blissful, aesthetically pleasing agricultural life - and who doesn't want to make boatloads of money, buy a vineyard in Tuscany and retire to a life of fine wine, blissful landscapes, and great food?  Such a pity that the fantasy conceals all that darned hard work.

But driving through Georgia, I slowed to a stop when I saw my first mature pecan orchard. Don't worry, there wasn't anyone else on the road.  And just like that, the idle fantasy of winery-ownership was replaced by a vision of pecan harvest.  Those old trees, straight and strong, spreading out their arms as they stood in wide-spaced roads - hundreds of them.  And beneath them, I am not making this up, were four or five absolutely beautiful horses grazing blissfully in the tree's shade, undisturbed by the drought and the sun's vicious rays.

I forgot about Tuscany, and started thinking a little closer to Tuskegee.

Just like vineyards, the peaceful vista disguised a real nuisance of nut harvesting and tree maintenance - or so my relatives told me.  But it didn't help - I still kept thinking about the calm beneath the trees. So I went back to take pictures, and alas, the horses were nowhere to be found.

You'll have to add them in yourself.  While you're at it, picture me in there, too, on a rocking chair with a glass of lemonade in one hand - and wine in the other, because I haven't totally given up on vineyards.

New York, New York

In New York City by myself with lots of free time, no map or guideback, and very little cash. What to do? What to do?


Get myself to Central Park, of course! and I only got a LITTLE lost on the subway...

Dear Diary, Today I learned the difference between "Express" and "Local"...

When Natasha collected my poor bewildered soul, the REAL tour of Manhattan started. Here's Park Ave!

The next day, I checked out the Highline, like Tasha said I should. IT WAS SO COOL.

Then I went to the meatpacking district. I bet these two businesses are great neighbors!

Did I go to Chelsea Market? Why yes I did.

Did I wander around Greenwich Village? Yup! Did I take any pictures? Nope!

Did I go back to the highline to play in Rainbow City? Yes I did!

And then did I watch the sun set behind the highline? well, not quite, but almost! It was a pretty good two days in New York... except for the many, many hours I spent talking to Amtrak reps.

But let's focus on the positive!