It’s hard to believe
that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., not far from present-day
Dillon, was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic
communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the
territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of
abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings, and open only as a
quiet tourist attraction. It takes a powerful imagination to
conjure up the place once considered the metropolitan hub of
Montana Territory.
Or take Cisco, Utah, once a bustling
little town serviced by highway and railroad, but then bypassed by
Interstate 70. It now features a landscape of scattered and
decaying buildings.
Throughout the West, from the Yukon
River in Alaska to the farming service centers of west Texas,
mining camps and once-vibrant towns have decayed into relics, their
fates sealed by the whimsy of economics, changes in transportation,
or the boom and bust of resource extraction. We drive past,
wondering what they once were like, or wondering who lives there
now, or, perhaps not noticing them at all.
Which of
today’s thriving towns will become the next century’s
ghost towns? What places will have become forlorn, decrepit and
abandoned? This might be wild speculation, but could the answer be
the West’s sprawling subdivisions that depend on the
automobile and cheap fuel, those far-flung developments miles from
Main Street, work, schools and soccer fields, that Americans love
for their views, relative quiet and sense of privacy?
What if, over the next generation or two, we wean ourselves from
the automobile? What if gas goes to $10 a gallon, or more? What if
we decide that fighting traffic and spending 15 percent of our
adult lives sitting in the driver’s seat isn’t such a
spiffy trade-off for a bigger lot and better view? What if we
decide that being married to our car isn’t such a terrific
deal? Then what?
A century from now, the idea of living
six or 10 or 20 miles from town and from most everything we need to
do in a day, might become an alien and unpopular concept. Instead,
Americans might start tightening their embrace of communities,
packing in closer, living where everything from the public library
to the office is in easy reach.
Sound far-fetched? Maybe.
But remember, just a century ago there were only a few miles of
pavement in all of America, and though cars were coming on, horses
were still our main mode of transportation. The infrastructure that
bloomed to accommodate the automobile and gasoline industries —
the pipelines, service stations, bridges, highways and interstate
system — all came into existence in a few frenzied decades during
the last century. Before that, the idea of living far from your
occupation, your school, your community, was foreign indeed.
It could be so again.
In fact, I think
it’s already starting. Imperceptibly, perhaps. And yes, I
know, subdivisions still sprout across former farm fields and wild
landscapes, willy-nilly. People still succumb to nuptial agreements
with cars.
But at the gas stations where folks shake
their heads at dropping $50 or $75 dollars on a tank of gas — the
same tank they filled only a few days earlier — and at the busy
city intersections where motorists fume and sputter with
frustration, and will do so again tomorrow and the day after that;
or at home, after a busy week, when suburbanites reckon with the
reality that they spend maybe a fourth of their time in the car
just doing errands and maintaining their lifestyle, many are
considering how that same time might have been spent playing with
the kids or reading a book. In all those places, the wheels are
beginning to turn, the mental light bulbs are flickering on.
This is an insane way to live! That’s what people
are thinking. They may not be in a position to do anything about it
yet. They may not be desperate enough to actually make the leap.
But I’m telling you, they’re not fools. It’s
dawning. Give it another decade or two and you’ll see. The
subdivisions will empty, house by house. Windows will crack and
fall out. Roofs will sag. Driveways will heave and blister in the
heat. Weeds will sprout through the concrete. Like Bannock, Mont.,
it will be very quiet.
Alan Kesselheim is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a writer in Bozeman,
Montana.
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