Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about my wild and weird #smalltownlife, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friends,
I think my entire life has been impacted by a deep, unconscious understanding: I come from a place that is nearly dead.
I’ve always been drawn to stories of the end of civilization, probably because I grew up knowing what an “end” might look. During the pandemic, I picked up FOUR LOST CITIES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE URBAN AGE by Annalee Newitz. Newitz chronicles the rise and decline of Çatalhöyük (one of the earliest cities, in Turkey), Pompeii (needs no intro), Angkor Wat (built with sophisticated water management and the attendant power struggles in Cambodia), and Cahokia (a large city in what is now southern Illinois, rivaling the size of London and Paris in the 1200s). If you’re looking for interesting non-fiction, I recommend it!
I’m thinking of those lost cities again as I settle back into my own lost city. And I wonder — when did those people know that their city would fail? Who were the doomsayers, and who ignored them? Who became prophets, convincing others that the end was near? Who profited off those disasters, and who lived to see their dreams perish?
I have those questions about San Francisco, and New Orleans, and half a dozen other places I love, and America as a whole (especially when I’m doomscrolling). And I especially have them about this place where I grew up, which I still love despite everything.
Last month, my city sold two buildings, in the main block of former storefronts, for $200.
That is not a typo.
It was heralded as a positive development. It probably is — buildings need owners. And buildings on that block really need to be kept up, because they share old brick walls that will take down their neighbors when they collapse. Several of the buildings are unused, but the post office is smack dab in the middle of them, so we need them to keep standing.
My dad owned one of those buildings when I was five or six, during his brief days as a real estate agent, when he went through ten careers in quick succession after the Farm Crisis wrecked his life plan and kicked the town’s demise into overdrive. I thought the building was scary then. The step up from the street was too steep for me, since the stoop had disappeared. And I have no idea what was going on in the back room, but my child memory is of a vast inky pit full of demons, and a sense that I could get swallowed up if I left the puddle of light around my dad’s desk. In reality it probably smelled like tar from my dad’s attempts to patch the roof, which isn’t too far from “demons.”
Obviously my memories of that building are tinged in horror.
I can’t imagine it’s improved much in thirty-five years, so $200 might be the right price for it. Hopefully the person who bought the buildings is able to do something with them, in this liminal space where the town is still technically functioning, but hovering over the abyss.
One of the most pressing problems in this area right now is how to remove abandoned buildings. It’s not a cheap task. Used to be1, you could shove an old house into a hole, and burn or bury it. Or you could donate it to the volunteer fire department for them to train in (also by burning it). But (for good reason!) the Department of Natural Resources doesn’t want people to burn shingles or asbestos or any of the thousand carcinogens in old houses. And the volunteer fire department has more offers of houses to burn than they’re able to use.
So you have to pay thousands of dollars to haul the house to a landfill, truck by truck — if you can find anyone willing to do it. And you’re left with an empty, scarred lot that may be worth a few hundred dollars.
It’s a brutal fact that the people who live in those dilapidated houses, right on the edge between ‘viable’ and ‘abandoned’, usually don’t have the money to keep the house from falling into a permanent state of disrepair. And they certainly don’t have the money to tear the house down if it’s unlivable. It’s cheaper, and easier, to walk away, and find a different dilapidated house to live in…until it, too, is unlivable.
It’s also a brutal fact that there are plenty of houses in town that look abandoned, and unlivable, but are still lived in — which is a whole different problem.
In a hundred years, there will be more abandoned houses dotting the nowhere parts of America than there are people. And there won’t be anyone left to tear them down — or any reason to, unless one of the Big Ag corporations decides the houses are worth clearing so they can be farmed over. I don’t think they’ll degrade into picturesque tourist-worthy ruins, either. Unlike stone buildings and mounded burial sites, these houses are relatively flimsy; left to the elements, they inevitably collapse. The rural Midwest is gonna be an endless junk field of barbed wire and plastic Little Tikes cars and discarded shotgun shells, and some novelist someday will somehow manage to romanticize what’s been left behind.
Who knows, though — maybe the town will recover. As people get priced out of most markets, these overlooked spaces could become new frontiers in America’s ever-churning internal migration. And, weirdly, we have faster fiber internet here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, so maybe people will come. On my optimistic days, I think that something better, someday soon, will be built on top of these ruins.
I have no clean segue after that. But living here, I can’t help but suffuse my upcoming book with this dark-yet-optimistic vibe: that everything is falling apart, but maybe we’ll be better off when the destruction is complete and new magic can take root.
Or, as Jeff Goldblum would say:
Cheers,
Sara
If you want to check out my previous books (Regency historicals - like Bridgerton, without the Netflix deal), you can find them at sararamsey.com/books. Or you can get my first book, Heiress Without a Cause, as a free download for any ereader. Enjoy!
“Used to be” is a popular way to start sentences here. Used to be I wouldn’t have used it in my newsletter, but my old slang is seeping back in.