allelujah;
For one year, I lived in a town called Michaels, in western North Dakota. I was twenty-one.
In this state there are halves, beginning with the pieces that look like anywhere else in the general vicinity; in Grand Forks or Bismarck, cities that still skirt the hundred thousand mark in population, you could just as easily be in suburban Ohio, you could be a half-step out of Chicago in Illinois, because the midwest is blending together into this half-civilized place dotted with green farmland and paling pastures. It's only the Dakotas that are still mysterious, out there, because those other places, the half no one sees, are dying. They call it "an economic reality," and occasionally they almost sound sorry. I knew that when I got there, but I didn't know what that meant.
There are twenty-six people in Michaels, as of 2008. Eleven of those residents live in farms nearby.
In 1988, there were one hundred and twelve.
In 1968, there were one hundred and thirty-two.
When I stepped off the greyhound at a gas station and truck stop, I was a mile away from my destination. The buses, I was told, do not stop in places as minor as Michaels, and so I was expected to have my own ride or walk the remainder of the way to the township. I walked. On the way, I counted cars: one, two, no more than ten, rushing past on gray asphalt and toward more meaningful locations. The land there is flat - even the smallest hill is an aberration, and the trees only appear in hopeful clusters near certain crops to guard them from the sharp prairie winds. They are not natural, and have all been planted; only the sunflowers and grasses are home-grown, colored yellow-green, dry, waist-high in places, and I waded through them on the way to my destination. I saw deer bones bleaching in the sun, and didn't touch the ridges of the spine - it wasn't clean, I knew that - but I wondered what it felt like to have died there, and what killed it. Maybe it just gave up, too, like the town's residents.
There were no clouds in the sky. In those first days of early fall, I only saw blue.
I came around a building that used to be a barn, but the wood had gone old - black and rotted, with holes dotting the roof. Inside I could hear something move - rabbits, maybe, or wild dogs. They said coyotes came around here, once upon a time, but I never saw them and at that moment, honestly, I wasn't even looking. I dropped my bag on the dirt packed floor of the barn and stood inside for a while, squinting up at the sunlight. The wasps in the loft chased me away eventually, but there were too many places just like that one for me to be dissuaded permanently.
My house there was borrowed. Two stories, with a sloping attic roof and a Norwegian grandmother's delicate, dusty furniture. Her rosaries hung on the walls, and her rocking chair on the floorboards at night was often the only sign of another presence I'd encounter for weeks at a time.
In town, we had a bar, a church, a gas station, and a mechanic's shop for tractors and trucks. I sat on my landlady's steps, leaning against the bent and rusted railing, and watched men with farmer's tans and serious eyes bring their wives to the bar on Sundays after church. Those were the days when it became, if only for the afternoon, a buffet, with plastic tablecloths covered in tiny pink and green flowers, surrounded by thin folding chairs. The rest of the week, it went back to being the safe-haven. Most of them drank every day. I didn't really understand why until winter came.
Imagine: you spend your spring, summer, and fall carefully harvesting your livelihood. In January, the frost is particularly brutal, and you lose three fourths of that which you have expended thirteen hours a day working to maintain. They say that's what kills people there- suicides are quiet and common, typically blamed on alcoholism and moreover, chronic disappointment, an unwillingness to cope with the crushing sense of never being able to keep up with nature's whims, but I don't think that's it. Even when the crop is good, there is always a man or woman who goes to sleep in the old car in the old garage and never wakes up again. I think it's the sky, and the snow, and the days when the only voice you hear is the moan of the wind in your window.
Three months into my stay there, I found the train tracks north of town, and I followed them. At first, I didn't know where I was going, guided only by the rusted outlines in the ice. As I went away from town, the snow stretched on as far as I could see, flat like the sky above it, which was still cloudless but now completely grey. Like reflections of each other, they blended together toward the horizon. I could see my breath clearer and clearer as it got dark, and I don't know what I was looking for- the town was barely breathing, and everything was silent, but I thought somewhere there had to be something alive.
I'd been walking for at least an hour and a half when I heard it: the howl, almost like a wolf's call and twice as lonely.
There have been no wolves in Michaels for sixty years, and even the coyotes don't come out when it is that cold. This was something mankind had made.
The train came screaming into nighttime, rattling the earth beneath my feet, rushing into nothingness, its lights flashing wild warnings for no one. No one was there to know it had come. I watched the lights come pouring down the track and only stepped away when my hair blew back away from my face. When it was gone, I was three miles out, and all I could see was the snow reflecting dim moonlight from there until eternity, and the sky above it was just as empty.
No matter where I went, Prague or Milan, Tokyo or Sydney, this unlovely place would stay with me, saying: drink in every beautiful city you can find, because there is nothing here for you, and nothing here will ever leave you.
That was all of it. That was all I knew, and that was why I'd chosen this ghost town.
The last I heard, the remainder of Michaels set fire to their church when the numbers of the congregation got too low. More rubble. More refuse where there used to be something building- but still, I think it's a good idea. What's left? Those sad old magazines some young bride left abandoned, those one-eyed dolls with decaying dresses, the schools with their glory days' football trophies collecting dust on the walls, the places where the American Indians kept Writing Rock and those stones that could have predicted this reality long before they were parted and subsequently silenced, and all of the pretty two-story homes with sloping attic roofs wherein whole families simply disappeared, namelessly lost to the monotony of the years. I say burn all of it to the ground.
Sometimes you have to destroy what you love, or you won't be able to let it go.
(Then again . . . sometimes it just follows you.)
