Once and Future Community

Today I spent time in two vastly different communities.

This morning I drove 100 or so miles south of Salt Lake City to check out some archaeological sites from the recent past. We looked at a good half dozen homesteads that were used from 1900 to about 1925 or so. From land records we could attach some names to the places, sturdy English and Scandinavian stock, farmers and ranchers.

They were brave little spots, out in the sagebrush. You could see stone house foundations, roughly made from local rocks, but with little home touches—porch remnants, well-laid stoops. Trash was scattered about. Window glass, barrel staves, a teacup fragment with a rose print on it, a patent medicine bottle, a small, white, button. Each homestead was broadly similar—a house foundation, a well, wood shed remnants, glass bottle bits—but each was also unique. One highly motivated soul had laid a sturdy one-room house by jamming white stones into wet-concrete he had pressed against rough boards. The roof, floor, door, and windows were gone, but the walls stood tough in the wind. I paused inside, looking out an empty window frame at the sagebrush and mountains. Off in the distance I could see the other house foundations, the spare traces of a community wiped out by the collapse of agricultural prices and lack of water in the 1920s. I realized someone else had probably also stood there, looking at their neighbors.

I drove home to the annual back-to-school barbecue at my daughter's elementary school. The place was filled with people. I always enjoy the chaos. Kids running around, parents visiting, teachers trying to be both official and pleasant. It seemed so vibrant and alive, an invincible little community.

Make a few economic changes, they don't even have to be that major, and that little school community can disappear just as quickly. Give it enough time, and I pretty much guarantee it will disappear. Archaeology teaches you that much. Our places are ephemeral, ready for the dust to move back in. All we can do is keep sweeping it out, keep our ties to each other, make new ones, try again.