I’ve always enjoyed road trips, especially those that have taken me through small town America. Many of these places seem suspended in time and cause one to wish for the simpler times of decades past. There is something melancholy about them, with outdated signs and buildings that have become ugly eyesores on the landscape from lack of upkeep. The world has left many of these places behind. For me, the saddest of all is seeing the collapsing remains of old wooden homes and barns. They were once a dream that signified a new beginning and exciting time for someone. I’m not sure when it started but at some point every time I passed one of these dilapidated structures I would say to myself, “there’s another dream that died.”

I’ve been to a few ghost towns in the US over the years and this same feeling envelopes these places as you try to imagine what they were like during their bustling peak years. Two of my favourite towns were gold rush era mining towns in California called Bodie and Cerro Gordo. These places are how you would imagine them to be: isolated and forgotten. But there is a ghostly beauty to them as you wander through their streets and read tales of gun fights, gold, fires,  lawlessness, and every other now cliche wild west trope.

There’s a sense of wonder that comes along with the eerie sight of abandoned buildings that were once erected as someone’s dream; their home, their business, their hope of making their life better. These places were once their “American Dream.” This photo above was of the American Hotel in Cerro Gordo where the blood stains of a gun fight in the poker room were still visible on the floor more than 100 years after the incident. Men worked tirelessly, fought hard, and many died in pursuit of their fortunes. (Sadly, this hotel burned to the ground within a year of my visit). 

These buildings outlived their builders and serve only as a temporary marker of a once hopeful dream. You can’t walk past them without wondering about the stories of the people that came here to find fortune and build new lives in a time of great hardship. Many of us today, use to our comforts, would not last a week in these places if time were to transport us back.

These places have a way of reminding us of our own mortality; that we too are only here for a time. Our youthful exuberance gives way to sensible middle age and finally to those twilight years of reflection and memory. We all love the progress of time and the innovations that it brings, until it inevitably leaves us behind to be forgotten. What was once alive and vibrant in these towns, now sits in ruin and is but a reminder that time is forever moving forward.

We live now in a time where everything is overly manufactured and curated for our enjoyment, an enjoyment that is often short-lived in this consumer culture, until the next fleeting thing grabs us and briefly holds our attention. Much like listening to an old song or watching an old movie, and the way they conjure up feelings and emotions from another time, these towns and buildings seem to illicit those same nostalgic sentiments that yearn for something that has long faded away; something good, something beautiful, from a simpler, yet harder time.

You cannot walk these streets without feeling something; you cannot look on emotionless and not be moved in some way. It’s hard to not look back upon the past, stopping for a moment to wonder, without a gaze towards the future with dreams yet undreamed and hopes still unfulfilled; imagining what the world will be like once our bodies have been returned to dust. All of us will carry regrets; all of us will leave certain hopes and dreams behind unfulfilled, for that is the very nature of life in a fallen world.

As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
For the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
And its place remembers it no more.

-Psalm 103:15-16