Local ghost tour (now with fried pies!)
Getting my writing vibes back by meandering through abandoned places....
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I’m stuck on the book I’m writing. It’s the bad kind of stuck — the kind where I have no plot, but am also convinced that I have no vibes either. [note to new subscribers: I wrote about my writing process in “No plot, just vibes” a few weeks ago]
I want to think my way out of this block. But I know, from bitter experience, that the only way to get the vibe back is to stop thinking, look up, and see what’s around me.
To that end, I lured my dad into driving me around the other day. It was child’s play (today’s free pun, since I’m his child!) to trap him. Knowing his weaknesses, I promised him fried pies at an Amish store ten miles away.
When we pulled up to the store, it looked closed. The dark windows are to be expected — the Amish don’t use electricity, other than a single lamp that they moved around for us as we browsed. They had dozens of freshly fried pies (turnovers, basically), which are good enough that I’ll usually eat one and accept the suffering of my gluten issues later.
The store is sort of in a town, but there isn’t much left of the town to see. The town unincorporated themselves in the 1970s when it became too hard to find city council members. There used to be a grocery store where my dad got deli sandwiches when he was farming; it’s now a brick building open to the sky and falling back into the earth. The old post office was torn down years ago, but not before someone used it as an aviary for thousands of birds. There’s a nice little community building where I went to a 50th anniversary party for some neighbors last fall (I was not invited; I showed up because it was announced in the newspaper), a few houses, and a railroad track with a dire-looking wooden overpass.
Anyway, pies in hand, we left “town” and drove around for awhile. My dad has an encyclopedic memory of who lived where in the 1970s. My grandparents used to sell propane to rural houses and my dad helped with deliveries. They also sold feed and seed to all the farmers. And my dad was already raising his own livestock and conducting farming business when he was in junior high, so he knew everyone out in the country then.
I’ve always loved driving around with my dad — no plot or agenda or map, just vibes. These days, though, it feels like a ghost tour. It’s not one you’d find on Viator or Lonely Planet, but it’s strange and melancholy and compelling anyway.
He’ll say, “This was Laurel’s farm, and there’s a hidden spring back there that has running water in all seasons.”
Or, “Here’s where old [name redacted]’s dogs killed my sheep, and the railroad engineers on a passing train saw it happening and stopped in at the depot to get someone to call me.”
Or, “That woman would have set me up in farming if I’d married her younger daughter.”
Nearly always, the land he points to looks like it never had a house on it.
If you know the signs, you might be able to guess — a stand of trees surrounding the perimeter of what could have been a building, like a fairy circle marking a border. A raised bit of earth through a ditch that might have been a driveway. A post that might have held a mailbox. But mostly, it’s corn, or soybeans, or pasture. Or it lies fallow, waiting.
I want to ask my dad: “How do you handle watching as the map of your world is slowly erased? What happens to your heart as the houses are buried and the people disappear, and nothing replaces them?”
But I don’t ask him, because I’m avoiding asking myself: “How do I handle watching as this world is slowly erased? Can my heart bear to live here as the people disappear? Can I find a solution and create something to replace them?”
We did drive by one interesting house, freshly painted and looking well-maintained. My dad pointed it out: “There’s Gail and Leota’s house.”
It’s not where Gail and Leota’s house used to be, though.
After they died, their house was moved a few miles east, turned 90 degrees, and put on top of another house. You’d never guess it now, other than to think that the second floor balcony looks like it could have been a front porch.
I’ve told you before that after old farmers die, their houses are often abandoned. Sometimes, though, there’s something to salvage. Salvaging them means moving them off the flat yards where they sit (which are farmable, and therefore valuable) and putting them on hillier acreages (which are picturesque, and therefore more appealing for people looking for a cheap house in the country).
There’s a spot across the border in Missouri that feels like a secret memorial to my parents’ neighborhood in Iowa. A guy we know has moved at least five houses there from our area. He has the route all mapped out to avoid as many power lines and bridges as possible. When he does need to go under a power line, he works with the utility company to turn it off for a couple of hours. Easy breezy, I guess.
A few years ago, he looked at the house I grew up in and offered to take it. Our house had already been moved once, back in the 1930s, which contributed to its crazy angles and softening floors. We didn’t give it to him; we buried it in an unmarked grave instead. But that’s a story for a different newsletter.
The man moved another house from the neighborhood a few weeks ago. I took a photo the night before he moved it, when it was already jacked up and placed on moving beams. Now it’s an empty field. And the security light, which illuminated the yard at night, has been turned off — a literal turning out of the lights as another house disappears.
There are very few lights left in the countryside at night, as the dark emptiness creeps closer to the handful who remain.
And now, filled with images of hidden springs in overgrown forests and darkened lights on empty roads, I think I have the vibe back for my book.
Cheers,
Sara
The fried pies make it all worthwhile.... Right???
Moving houses fascinates me. The one in SF a couple of years ago had the whole city holding it's breath, I don't know if you remember? https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Victorian-home-moved-SF-franklin-fulton-15967656.php