Pt. 2 - Ghost Town

The clouds crept slowly, almost imperceptibly across the azure sky. Here and there a particularly ambitious cumulus humilis cast its sprawling shadow over the neighborhood. The successive canopies of oaks in lush summer array shifted aquatically and hissed in the high, soft breeze. Up above there was clarity and order. As he got farther away from his home, the streets which sat vacant and abandoned were often bisected by limbs or even full trees. He had cleared the most egregious offenders in his own neighborhood either out of necessity or ease of travel but here, just a few miles away, the deadfall remained untouched.

He hated being this far from home; this exposed; but necessity dictated risk. With the lack of rainfall he simply couldn’t risk exhausting his supply from the barrels. With the river being only a mile or so away, he had at least the luxury of obtaining more. In addition, he could wash out some of the worst of his dirty laundry. While he didn’t relish the prospect of lugging back the gallons of water, he savored less the potential of doing so when it was a dire need, perhaps when the weather was far less amenable than today.

Slung over his shoulders was a nylon strap of old seatbelts attached to a furniture dolly carrying a moderately clean garbage can which would serve as transportation for the water--- another of his backward innovations. At its best, what now amounted to progress was like trying to rewind an old tangled cassette tape with a pencil, or better yet, a pencil-shaped stick which fractured periodically.

Power lines sagged listlessly, devoid now of purpose. Some lay in tangles among the shards of shattered trees. Others held taut seemingly out of sheer defiance.

Ahead, just before High Ridge dead-ended into Huron River Drive, he could see a break in the tree line where the river had been dammed to form Ford Lake by Henry Ford himself during the magnate’s ambitiously optimistic plan to provide hydroelectric power for his nearby auto plants. It was hard to fathom the seemingly boundless ambition that Ford and others of his era had for progress and societal advancement. Though not without its flaws, there was much to be praised in these optimistic futurists who sought not only to amass personal wealth but also the civic good. Now, much of their drive was a crumbling edifice. Several years before the dam partially collapsed under the strain of a particularly intense period of flood, drastically altering the shoreline of Belleville Lake a few miles downstream and damaging the bridge at Rawsonville Road. The irony of Rawsonville being damaged was not lost on Declan Foster who knew well the history of the area.

Once there had been a village of Rawsonville located a mile southeasterly which had been settled in 1830’s. Rawsonville, while never attaining the proportions of its neighbors Ann  Arbor, Ypsilanti, or even Belleville, still had its own community, school, and post office. Never growing beyond a few hundred residents, Rawsonville muddled along for the better part of a century before its lack of railroad stop led to it ceding business and population to its larger neighbors. By 1925 when the Eastern Michigan Edison Company finished completion on its plan to put in its own hydroelectric dam there were few remaining citizens to object. Upon mutual agreement, the remaining citizens were bought out and the ghost town of Rawsonville sunk beneath the rising waters of the Huron, its hopes and dreams banished to the floor of the new lake.

An overgrown ballfield fell away before him as Ford Lake emerged sparking in the sunshine. As his head bobbed from the weight of the cart, Declan mused on Rawsonville’s forgotten remains. What remained of the community now? The milfoil encrusted frame of a house? An old tire? What became of the schoolhouse? Very likely no discernable remains of the village now existed, the testament to its impact extinguished by silt and aquatic creatures.

He looked out on the decaying buildings, the burned out cars, the vine-ridden chimneys crumbling unnaturally before their warranty. He could see curtains softly shifting behind an open window almost as if the homeowner had just stepped out for a moment. Such domesticity in the shade of blistering tragedy. In a nearby yard a pair of stalwart hostas flourished in spite of the assault, or rather, reclamation, of native invaders. Shrinking footprints of grass created a patchwork history of human cultivation while the world pressed in from the fringes.

Declan reached the end of a paved drive and began descending a broken concrete decline. The cart bounced behind him twice falling off the pavement and into a ditch nearly tipping. He pulled the straps with considerable effort and cursed as the cart bashed into his heels. The trail leveled out and the rippling aqua waters of Ford Lake lay before him shimmering in the midday sun. As he pulled a severed length of hose from the can to syphon the water he watched the horizon with consideration. Just discernable between a distant patch of cottonwoods a thin sliver of smoke rose. Declan frowned.