Romancing Decline

I've decided I really like the tiny, tiny town, and it's for precisely the reasons that I originally thought I would hate it.

Take the trains, for example. Long, rattling, rusty traffic obstructions have turned out to be rolling art galleries with their own compelling musical accompaniment. I've seen all different kinds of tags and graffiti from all over the country rolling by-- not just the angular, near-illegible stack lettering, but also vivid stencils, cartoon monsters, Tim Burton-esque meadow scenes dotted with crooked headstones, and massive, cryptic logos. Lying in bed at night I try to isolate the individual notes that form the chord of the train's warning horn. It starts out as a minor chord with at least five notes, two of them wedged too close together and forming an edge of dissonance. But then as the train passes, the Doplar effect flattens the chord into something almost major, and nowhere near as pretty.

The town itself seems to be suffering from that same flattening effect. Apparently revenue from the railroad and the oil companies peaked sometime in the late sixties and then took a steady, graceful swan dive. Most home improvement and construction projects followed the same trajectory, so in many ways driving into town feels like sinking slowly backwards into quicksand. Few places take credit cards and fewer take checks, scrub grass sprouts up from the cracks in parking lots, and even the good restaurants never seem to fill up on weekend nights.

I can't explain why, but this isn't as depressing as it sounds. It's a graceful decay. There are still stained glass sunsets and thunderstorms. Cactus plants and bouganvillias and giant shuddering honeysuckle bushes fill in the empty lots and shake petals and sweet scents loose. There's a creaky little old man who lives alone across the street from me, and he comes out to get his paper every morning. He walks with two canes and has to rest at the beginning, middle, and end of his ten foot journey. The whole thing takes him about ten minutes. Sometimes he sits by his front window and dozes off, and when I try to come up with a way to describe this town, I think of him, napping with the paper folded in his lap as the world goes by outside.

I also thought the podunk-edness of this place would get to me, but I have to admit to getting a bit of thrill when I see something as bizarre as a the fuzzy-haired man riding his rickety scooter down a darkened street last night, using a flashlight as a headlight and balancing a half-naked baby on one knee. Or the town drunk, a woman whose name everyone seems to know even though she refers to everyone, male or female, as "Babe," and spends her weekend nights doing saucy karaoke renditions of sixties folk songs in the pub by the tracks.

From one side, this could all look pretty bad-- a town in advanced economic decline whose residents are declining with it. But from another side, it could be a place in a rich, natural state of flux with the edges of nature closing in, a minor chord with a touch of dissonance.