Every once in awhile, I hear a song that really sets me to thinking about life, the universe, and everything. Mostly about my life, mind you, and my corner of the universe, which is a pretty limited definition of 'everything' but it'll have to do. P2 is the most likely to be on topic of the various lists I read, so you get to be the victims of my latest narcissistic self-examination. Sorry about that, eh.
The song in this case, is Farewell Ball from Mark Erelli's Hillbilly Pilgrim album, a song about a town that's going to disappear because of a dam project - I'm a little unclear on whether they're building or tearing it down, but the town is going to be flooded out in any case. You can hear a clip of it on Mark's website.
My family has a bit of a history of ghost towns and relocation in its past.
My father grew up in a part of Germany that wasn't Germany before, and isn't Germany again, so as Germans, they were moved out when it was ceded back to Poland after the WWII.
My mother grew up in a town called Ocean Falls, on the coast of BC, a town so acutely remote that it was accessible only by boat or float plane. There was a hydro electric dam there, and a pulp and paper mill, and with 10,000 people, a fairly thriving smallish town. But the mill shut down, as mills are inclined to do sometimes, and the town, what little of it is left, is mostly run down buildings and fishing lodges. You can still only get there by boat and float plane, but there's not much of a reason to bother anymore. Like the man in the song, she went back home a few years ago for a reunion and explored the old buildings and remembered what was.
Once they were married, they started out by living in a "town", and I use the term quite loosely, called Anzac. It was rather more a logging camp than a town, really, and when the mill moved, the people moved with it. All that's left of Anzac is a big pile of wood chips and two old telephone poles (chemically treated to last 30 years, you know!). Good fishing up that way, so we'd stop by and visit the old lot sometimes, and Mom would tell the story of the day the bear got into the house.
The town they moved to after Anzac, the one I grew up in, Bear Lake, faced it's own mortality last year. The government was threatening to close the grade school there, and a town without a school is no town at all. Parents would rather drive to work at the mills themselves than send their 5 year old children on a run-down bus for an hour to kindergarten, so the town would have slowly asphyxiated. To outsiders, that would hardly be much of a loss; it's only a pit stop on the highway to Alaska, after all; a place to buy gas and greasy hamburgers. But to a few hundred people it's also a place to call home. There was a 40 year reunion for the grade school the same week as the school board vote on its future. It had the feeling of the Farewell Ball in the song, with people wondering if they were saying hello again, or good-bye for the last time.
It was an oddly conflicted time for me. As long as I lived in Bear Lake, I professed only hatred for it. I rode out of town on my high horse after a public promise never to return again. The people were uneducated, uncultured and small minded with few dreams and fewer goals. I couldn't get far away fast enough. I moved first to Brazil and then to Toronto in an effort to distance myself physically, socially, culturally from Bear Lake and all it represented. But a funny thing happened to Bear Lake as I got older - it must have happened to Bear Lake, because surely it couldn't have been me that changed - those memories began to seem less like nightmares and more like nostalgia. The people are still close minded, but they've been quite accepting of the gay couple that moved in. They're still uneducated, except for the university graduates and the masters candidate. They are still uncultured, except that country music they listen to seems somehow more relevant and important than it had before.
I've long maintained the conceit that my interest in country music in all its forms had little to do with my rural upbringing. The music spoke to me because it was about life and universal themes, I'd argue, not because it had any special connection to my people and my past. But songs like this one remind me that that's not quite true. Towns that blow away on the wind are a uniquely rural, blue collar experience. Company towns go bankrupt with the company that owns them, farm towns dry up in the drought, but big cities are forever. The city girl I've long since become can listen to this music and appreciate it for its wisdom and its charm, but sometimes only the country child I was can feel it in her heart.