The Collapse CLXXXIV: Town

 22 October 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

This afternoon I took a walk through Birch.

You could name it a “reconnaissance mission” of sorts if there was need to quantify it and to some extent, that might be true, given recent events. But even now, I still occasionally like to take a walk.

My memories of this town go back a very long time indeed as we came here for Summer vacations with my grandparents; I can remember a time at the Cabin when the outhouse was the only available restroom and how terrifying it was as a child to walk the 50 feet from the Cabin there to use it.

Birch in those early days – from the little bit I can remember and the remainder that is here – was much more of a small “town” than has existed in recent memory, true of so many other towns in this country. There was certainly a mechanic, a grocery store, the post office/gas station, at least two restaurants, some other generic stores (judging from the now-faded storefronts), the Kamping Ground outside the town to which we walked to do our laundry. It was perhaps not self sufficient in the way such towns had been 60 or 80 years earlier, but it was a place where some if not much of one’s daily business could be transacted.

Over time that changed of course, as it did for many such towns throughout the country. Towns either grew in size as they became hubs of some kind of business or became folded into larger entities around them or slowly dwindled into smaller and smaller entities until they became hamlets or even not-towns, just a sign indicating a population and a handful of buildings on either side of a road one scarcely had to slow down on.

It struck me, as I walked down the former state highway and past what once upon a time was main street, of how such things were handled in other places.

In some places – and by places I mean “other countries” – the story was similar; it was clear that the town had been something different once upon a time but was slowly collapsing back into the unsettled lands from which it had sprung. In others, there seemed to be a genuine effort and concern to keep the individual towns as living, functional units – even if they were with short distances of each other.

It makes me wonder now, as I stalked the empty roads with the fading sunlight of Autumn on me, how much of a conscious choice it ever was.

Birch, even in the last few years, was at best in the final stages of decay, a small town of almost no resources (although they clung to their local school built in the early 1900’s and their post office) with a population likely consisting of people grown old from a previous generation, retirees (like myself), or the occasional odd duck that wanted to live a very different sort of life (Pompeia Paulina, Statiera, and Young Xerxes all fall into this category). The lifeblood of the town – such as it was – was in the tourist season where business came through in the form of tourists coming from Highwayville or Little City on their way to fishing or hiking or just being in “The Great Outdoors”. It was likely just enough to keep the few businesses going through the Winter months (except the bar at the now burned RV Park of course; alcohol never seems to suffer).

The Collapse, in that sense, was more of a coda than an actual event that happened.

I walked out to what is the clear “edge” of the town, where the last grouping of houses ends and the wider open spaces of custom built homes and ranches starts – it is about a mile from the edge of town where we currently sit. Turning around, I looked back on view I have likely seen hundreds of times now.

More than ever, such places seem to only have three places to go. One is the route apparently chosen by Little City, is simply to close themselves off and try and make their own way. Another, evidenced by Kentucky City and the hand of the Colonel, is to pull in people as much as possible to try to improve their current situation.

The third, it appears, is us: neither closing ourselves off nor building ourselves up, but slowly bleeding people and separating out until we are nothing but a memory of ramshackle buildings and a faded name on signs.

I do not have a good answer to this Lucilius, nor do I know that I need to have one today as I walk back with the breezes of Autumn in my face reminding me that Winter is not all that far away. But it does point to the rather salient point that in choosing not to plan, one has essentially planned the path of least resistance.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca