The next day I didn’t feel like investigating Antler. Why? Ironically, because it was an original intention of this trip. It had started to feel like a job assignment. I headed in the exact opposite direction, specifically to not go to Antler. This turned out well!
I went into an area that looked pretty dull on the map. To my surprise, it rocked! Roads that looked tame on the map were wily and challenging. Trails that looked impassible were clear enough and within my abilities. I rode and rode and rode and rode.
All this time I saw nobody. What I did see was the passage of time.
We are all children of the 21st century. I don’t mean that in terms of a calendar but in terms of a societal experience that held sway until… lets say sometime after Christmas in 2019. All of us, especially those who’ve had more years on this earth, have seen so many new and marvelous things that it makes the future sound impossibly bright. If you’re old enough, you’ve seen miracles.
So many things have “improved”. Color TV with 50 channels of pointless shit. Instantaneous communication. Performance in a generic Honda Civic that would make a 1960’s Porsche blush. Air conditioning in every car! Cheap stuff by the truckload for every house in America. Average lifespans well into the 70’s. Fresh strawberries in January. I have broadband on a dirt road.
For most of our lives… everything has grown and most of it is for the better. So far…
“So far” is the key phrase. If you have a generic American public school (lack!) of education, perhaps enhanced by a half dozen years marinating in University, you might think it’s is always so. Always more and always better.
Wrong!
Sometimes progress fails. Sometimes humanity loses. That which is gained can be lost. There’s no magic force that invariably pushes humanity upward. Societies ebb and flow and not infrequently commit suicide. Old stories and legends of Europe often speak of magic pasts and lost cities of wonder. These tales were formed on the moldering ruins of Rome. The Republic was forever, until it wasn’t. The Empire was powerful, until the Barbarians dismembered it. Europe spent the next millennia holding on but scarcely growing. Fighting over turnips and desperately trying to preserve literacy; a sad epilogue to the greatest Empire of its time.
Why do I mention this? Because I rode through an area that had been settled and is now uninhabited. Uninhabited. Let that word roll through your head. Say it aloud. Taste it in your mind.
Most people have never truly been where it’s uninhabited. They think it’s limited to SciFi stories and professors whining about global warming. It’s not. Uninhabited exists right here on earth. I’ve seen it. I go there all the time. If you have not been where it is uninhabited, you should go. So much theory that makes sense if you’ve forever lived in Manhattan or Miami will slide from your mind; shown to be the falsehood it always was.
Such was the place I explored on my ride. My thanks go out to someone (or many of them) who’d done a good job as historian(s). They’d marked abandoned homesteads with names. Not just entries in a book; they’d gone out into the forest and marked the actual places. ATV routes and decrepit roads and logging skid trails brought me through, past, and around places that had been peopled.
Here, the sign says, was the Smith homestead. There, another sign mentioned, was the Johnson farm. Most were just basements and rotten logs. The traces are small. I rode carefully, lest I fall in a well!
Sometimes several homesteads were marked in close proximity. The skeleton of a small village; buried underneath the brambles.
I passed several tiny cemeteries. Most were in good repair; maintained by living relatives (or perhaps some sort of grant). Lives had been lived there. People had carved out a place to be. It didn’t hold. Regression is a possibility we all need to understand.
I passed a stone pile that had been a granary. A hole in the ground that had been a school.
I passed a sign that said there had been a post office… about a mile away. I turned toward it but the path was too overgrown and I was pushed back. Mail had once been delivered where a dirtbike couldn’t pass!
It’s a good lesson. We all should trod where there had once been so much hope and know it is gone. The forest has returned to rule all. They’d tried; those names on the signposts. Clearing forests, planting crops, and digging wells. They built civilization, but their works didn’t hold. They’re gone.
It is a mirror. Reflect and look upon our times. It is the 21st month of 2020 in what is still called the United States of America.
Lunar landings and supersonic flight were already fading when I was a child. Our Universities teach nothing; choosing to indoctrinate courtiers for the modern aristocracy rather than foster intelligence. The electronic cloud that replaced our libraries was hopelessly censored almost from its inception. Each election is sketchier than the last. Our president talks of F-15s and nukes. Not against cold war enemies but against his own people. A few weeks ago we fled a losing war against sheepherders… preferring, I guess, to wage war against ourselves.
I stopped to breathe in the smell of pine. It had no falsehood, merely the scent of a tree. How unlike our convulsing society where nothing is as it presented. Judges detect penumbras. Politicians say we will die if we do not obey. Then they say we will die if we do not obey the opposite. Truth is shocking and called misinformation. Misinformation is prosecuted or promoted according to whom benefits.
Like the Soviets of a generation ago, nobody really knows who’s running things. Words written on paper are now just words. Some laws don’t apply to the elite. Other laws don’t apply to the underclass. The remnant that obeys all laws is hunted. Great swaths of the citizenry are “those for whom we’re losing patience”. Cities are vote farms. Rural citizens have become subjects; expenses to be managed instead of people to be left alone.
Sycophants slice and dice those who are worthy from those who are contemptible. “Basket of deplorables”, “clinging to guns and religion”, “vaccine hesitant”… the phrases that lead to cattle cars. Those who’ve read history know where this leads. Those who haven’t live in childish wonder, until they too are swept away.
I am here in the forest because I retreat from cities. They burn frequently enough that I don’t even care why. If there’s a riot in Portland or Detroit does it mean something new? Don’t they burn every summer? Are the residents truly oppressed or merely bored? The students of Mao began with books and statues. Eventually they killed people who wore prescription glasses… and then starved. A green haired revolutionary can stop the wheels, but not maintain them. When will the grid go down? During a cold snap in Texas? During a heat wave in California?
I’ve read history. I see empty shelves and angry chants. I know where it leads.
There is no guarantee to anything. There never was.
Lest you think my ride was sad, it was not. It was beautiful. Death has it’s own beauty. We are torn apart from the inside by people that cannot build… and here I can see a lost world in repose. That incorrigible hippie Neil Young captured the feeling: “Every junkie is a setting sun”. Societies only last if they can. If they cannot… they won’t. But the trees do come back. Always.
At one fine spot I parked and hiked about; looking for squirrel hunting grounds. I found three small graves. I paid my respects. They’d built. It was gone but they’d built anyway. Good for them! I read the dates. One had died at 15, one I couldn’t read, one died at 40. Did the 40 year old know it was fading?
I rolled out. A path. A trail. A logging operation. An old ditch.
I pulled over and munched on a snack. I drank water. I rested.
Then, unexpectedly, a UTV zoomed by. The first one I’d seen all day. Humans travel in packs so I waited. Sure enough two more followed. They didn’t see me, parked as I was 80 feet away from the trail.
I decided to follow. UTV tracks are easy to follow. They turned left and right and so forth; the path became less overgrown. I started seeing more UTV tracks. I heard them in the distance. A few miles later I pulled up… to a church.
Nestled beneath tall pines, was a crude little church. It was in an area that had clearly been flattened in an old forest fire. These pines must have grown after the fire, and most of that happened after the homesteads and villages were gone? The little church was older than the trees around it. It was shady there and sweet smelling. I counted seven UTVs and one ATV. There was a smattering of picnic tables. Some were unused, some had UTVs and people picnicking there. A bit further off, a group had started a fire in a steel ring. They were cooking over the fire and lounging in chairs. (I was a bit jealous, I can’t carry a chair on my tiny bike.)
Everyone was happy, though more reserved than at Mud Ditch. This was holy ground. No stereos here. It was a place of the spirit. You could feel it.
The church’s steeple was off kilter. I walked inside. There was a historic display. The steeple belonged to the church which predated this one. It had burned. I assume it burned with the forest around it. But the steeple remained. When a new church was built on the ashes of the old, the surviving steeple was perched on top. The “new church” is now old too. It had pews and a wood stove. Everything was wood and strong and smelled nice but nothing gleamed with freshness. This is a harsh place and the building cannot thrive without its people. Time is an enemy here.
The forest circles hungrily.
So remote. Bittersweet and lovely. Just barely clinging to existence. Far from the power grid. It has never known the whirlwind of social media. It is rooted in soil, not electrons.
Yet the UTV people had known it was here. They came here to eat turkey sandwiches in the shadow of God’s house… amid the cool pines. Good for them.
There was an outhouse. There was a water supply that flowed continually, under pressure of the earth itself; an artesian well. There were a few graves. I suppose you could camp here… though I might not feel worthy to do so.
This was unexpected. A still living remnant of the society that is gone. I ate lunch there. When I left, I did so quietly. This was not a place to roar about in a motorcycle, it was a place of peace. I am glad I found it.