The route back into town is straightforward. It passes through the wilderness, following the steady course of the river along which the town was built. It’s a simple drive really, and no one else is behind him, but his hands are clammy. The closer he gets to the town centre, the more interference he can sense in his driving: in the feeling of steering, the smoothness of the bends in the road, the certainty of knowing the way around a place. There is a turn coming up that leads to his childhood home. He will not take it. He has to pass it, first, before he visits there. He begins to ask himself if it would be the right turn anyway when his attention is pulled away by something obstructing the road ahead. But he does not trust the landscape he sees here. He slows down to be sure, and blinks tightly. When he opens his eyes, it is not there, not really.
* * *
Owen mulls beside the stone wall, tapping it with the toe of his boot. It’s night, but it’s that kind of summer night where you think maybe the sun never fully sets before it rises again. He looks out over the sloping lawn, to the mill dam and the canal with its black water darker than the night itself, the railroad beside it, all neatly laid out behind a row of brick factory buildings that buffer the town centre. Behind him is seven thousand acres of state forest out of which the town seems to erupt. If it were to have a physical beginning, he thinks, this would be the place. All of it is perhaps contained within the bounds of the same stone wall he now paces. It’s impossible to know for certain: the stone wall seems to extend in physical space as far as it does in time. It may very well be three hundred years old, as old as the town itself, but hardly a single stone has been displaced, and they have all settled deeply into one another, fixed in the earth.
Recently, he has taken an interest in the town’s history. The town is an old mill town, like many in New England at one point. Textiles, mostly, and some munitions manufacturing. Before that, it was a mineral springs town. And even before that it was just an agricultural village, and then just a landscape, and all the stones were buried in the earth before they were dug out of the fields and stacked in long, stout walls to mark property lines.
This park with the sloping lawn is a place where he contemplates the small town he grew up in, through its many iterations in history. He sees everything at once from up here, and he thinks about such things as who else may have stood on top of this hill, and what they may have been doing. They would have looked out across the same river, the same landscape. Were they also moved by it? Did it command their attention the same way it commands his, here?
It is the development of these mill towns that really interests him. Even as planned industrial centres, he can see how we got here: the fieldstone foundations, the riverside mills, the iron railroads on trestles traversing the countryside. The landscape is legible. Progress is functional, traceable. We didn’t run away with progress in the mill towns, he thinks. Some of them have done better than others, though, to adapt to modern conditions since all the mills went bankrupt. It was a question of economy. How would these towns move forward? In the worst cases, abandoned industry left a hole to be filled, and what came in to replace it, at first slowly and then not slowly at all, was the opioid crisis. In other cases, new development projects were built where the old mills stood, demolished, erased. Some towns protected them, instead, as heritage sites, and created space for a commercial revival: European-style cafes, cideries and breweries, arts collectives, independent, forward-looking. It seems to be a matter of culture, then, by which the mill town forges ahead.
So this is the kind of redeveloping mill town Owen finds himself in. Searching for an identity. Although he has doubts: doubts that the opioid crisis has not touched this place, doubts that progress is occurring much at all, and that it’s not actually loss that is occurring. He can see the developing economy, the new businesses rubbing shoulders in the historic district, but he can’t see what happens in the isolated reaches of the town. He only has the perspective of coming back, a few times a year, to witness or not witness whatever progress has been made or not made since his last visit.
He hasn’t even seen his childhood home yet, as you know. This is simply ritual, a starting point for each visit where he can reacquaint himself with the town’s landscape and history. He stands on the sloping lawn, reading the town, and steps inside and outside of the stone wall, balancing with one foot on the stone tops before leaning down to the other side. Which side is considered inside or outside of the stone wall is known only by him. It is all part of his sense of place here.
* * *
There are two places that make up Owen’s life: the mill town, where he was born, and Boston, where he lives now. At seventeen, he wanted to get away from the small town he grew up in and knew too much about, and, with a bit more of an edge, leave something behind for the first time in his life. How he feels now is quite different, as if he couldn’t know enough about the town, as if he was away for too long and couldn’t get back again. Now he only visits, like he would if this was still a mineral springs town, coming here to try to heal in the cold spring water.
It’s late when he arrives at Pete’s house, and his friend’s parents set him up in the guest bedroom. Pete isn’t here, but they are lucky to have Owen, they say. Whether it’s to reassure him or themselves is hard to tell. But he is no stranger to this place. After all, he can still get to his childhood home by walking a little ways through the woods and crossing the stone wall that marks the property line, although the two families never treated it as anything more than an archaeological remnant. He no longer crosses that stone wall—but not from the side he would have thought. When he looks out over his old house from a clearing in the woods now, it seems foreign to him, as far away as if he were looking at it from the city.
There is an informal meal prepared for Owen. Although it’s past nine o’clock, a round of conversation is engaged over nothing in particular. Pete’s mother talks about real estate in the larger towns, the ones that are ten or fifteen minutes closer to the big commercial centres. The town here is a harder sell, mostly because of the commute time. Pete’s father talks about construction, his guys leaving for work in replacing foundations. There’s a lot of jobs now because the one quarry in town had been mixing faulty concrete since 1983 and they only found out a few years ago. Owen talks about Boston, but he has too much to say, so he doesn’t say much at all in favor of listening. Pete’s parents don’t mind. Settling into small talk is familiar, as if they were a family themselves.
Owen hadn’t spoken to his own parents since Pete died. It’s not entirely true, this statement, but the two events drift together in his mind, like silt stirring at the bottom of a lake. The last time they spoke was in fact much earlier, and it had been weeks since he had any idea where they were. They missed the funeral, and the house stood sealed up into November, when the electric company shut the power off and he had to come back and empty the pipes before winter. It did not take long for them to default on the mortgage, and the bank foreclosed the house. And that was it. A marching progression of events separated his sense of place from its most vulnerable centre, its natal origin: if the town was borne out of the sprawling eastern wilderness, so then was he borne out of this place within that town. By all means, it had returned to being only a landscape.
A landscape is indeed what surrounds him now in the guest bedroom. The double windows peer out into the woods that enshroud his childhood home. He lays awake, listening to the conversations of katydids, but he imagines the conversations that Pete’s parents will have in this house, on summer nights like these when the heavy things they find hard to say are lightened by the rising wind as the summer heat dissipates. Even alone, they will be mindful of how Owen comes up in their son’s death. In his own reflections, he is less mindful.
The whole thing bothered him. It was almost banal, like it was just the plain development of some trope: Two small town boys reach a turning point, and their futures begin to diverge in significant ways. One resents the town and leaves, one resents it all the same and stays, and then resents the other for leaving. Pete had been drawing away from him for some time, and for his part, Owen had drawn away, too, moving to the city. A bitterness built up between them like hard water deposits on a faucet. As the advancing trope demanded of them both, Pete started using harder drugs, and Owen could only misread it from far away. This was a landscape he thought he knew, watching his own parents slip in and out of drug use for years. Even if he didn’t like it, it was legible—at least it was, once. Had he just read it all wrong? Or had the terrain shifted, and transposed all his points of reference, and swept away all the landmarks he had? This was a landscape Pete thought he understood, too, before he died suddenly from an overdose, and when they were burying his empty body in the ground, no one else but Owen saw the earth trembling.
At the funeral, he had the impression that they were burying three people at once. The presentiment of death was not new to him. As a child, when his parents would disappear for a couple of days, he would walk the short ways through the woods to stay at Pete’s house. That’s just how it was. They always returned. But this time, he felt uneasy. It had been too long, there was too much death going around and he doubted his parents could evade it forever, when their only alternative was recovery. After the house foreclosed, he saw the future as clearly as he thought he could at the time: the town ground itself to dust like some ancient civilization.
In the months to come, he found it difficult to make the trip back to the town. Not just emotionally, although that certainly was true in its own right, but in a literal sense, in his subconscious memory of the place. On the route back from Boston, closer to his childhood home, turns that once came as naturally as breathing were as stymieing as driving in a foreign country. The physical landscape had become completely unreadable, as if something had rumbled through his personal topography and broke apart the stone walls that stitched the whole thing together, and his sense of place was scattered back into the wilderness that it came from.
Now, before he drives all the way to Pete’s house, he drives to the park with the sloping lawn first. He studies the town, rebuilds his attachments to it, piecing back the parcels and trying to understand what the stone walls here contain, and what they don’t. Extending on and on, do they contain everything, or nothing at all? He thinks about what the stone wall in the woods between their two childhood homes contains now. Pete is here, in his memory, but at the same time he emanates out from this place. Owen sees him across the landscape, searching for a place to heal, and get better, get clean, but the mineral springs are gone now, they drained back into the earth and became groundwater.
* * *
Owen wakes up in the guest bedroom. He makes his way downstairs, and the sunlight breaking over the treetops that is visible on the second storey vanishes by the first. Staying at Pete’s house, rather than his own, is still becoming familiar. Maybe he needs the reassurance from Pete’s parents after all. They don’t say it, but they see him as a son now, and perhaps they always did, when he was younger, it was there under the surface, but now they have more reasons to see it. Like the mill town itself, they are all learning to adapt to some loss, some new condition that demands you either rebuild, or stagnate.
Breakfast in the town centre is where the three of them are headed. There is a new cafe, and coffee roaster, as all independent shops like these must be, where the five dollar latte has arrived even here, a cultural victory for all. The cafe is situated within that row of brick factory buildings, right beside the old mill dam, that you can see from the park lawn. Former mills like this one have a chance at a future, as heritage sites, adopting a new economic and cultural mandate. After two centuries of converting one material into another, they may yet have one final act of transformation left. Does the town, too?
They order and sit in the cafe for a couple of minutes, making chit chat and watching out the windows. The town square swells with an activity that challenges the reputation of a town that burned out long ago. Volunteers with the horticultural society are planting in the flowerbeds. Others are eating and drinking out on the restaurant terrasses. Inside the cafe, a young woman leaves a stack of posters for a blues festival by the counter. Next Sunday, at the new amphitheatre in the park, thirty dollar entry. Half a mile to the west, a freight train blows its horn, the crossing bell starts ringing, and the train passes heavily behind the cafe, scraping alongside its route by the river, rattling the windows in the back by the kitchen. This used to be a town you only passed through on the way to someplace else. But today, people are staying. Although it may be in the best interests of the town, staying troubles Owen.
After the last train car trails away in the distance, they leave the cafe. Walking around, Pete’s father points out the places he knows, where he used to work, where he grew up. It fulfills Owen’s need to learn about the town, and it fulfills all of their need to restore a sense of place. They cross the railroad. A granite bridge passes over the river canal and opens into the park on one side, and the historical museum on the other. Owen gazes up at the sloping lawn. Pete’s mother touches his elbow, a gesture that acknowledges something between them that needs no other expression. He doesn’t turn away from her small pull. She doesn’t know that he comes here often, and that he will even come here again tonight, but he is content to leave these things unsaid.
The historical museum is open, which is surprising, it has odd hours. Arranged inside, over two floors and one half basement, is the history of the town, at least as well as the lady who runs it can tell you. The creaky former estate must be dark and damp on its own, because the sunlight beaming in strikes the display cases with the shimmering soft edges of a humid day. Pete’s parents hunch over a textile manufacturing schematic. Owen examines a collection of postcards: the mineral springs house, the mill with its towering smokestacks, the park with the sloping lawn when it was first cleared. The town’s earliest destinations. And yet, even in these miniature prints there are stone walls winding away in the corners of the scenes, kept in by the artist, and for what reason? They have seen more history than this place can contain, Owen thinks, if you could only ask them.
He could ask Pete’s parents, too, though he is reluctant. The New England stiff manner and reverence for the unspoken can be like a stone wall of its own. But there is history with Owen’s and Pete’s parents. They grew up together. They would have been young, in high school, when their short runway into adulthood was coming to an end and they were left trying to make sense of their hometown, a mill town that was sputtering out in the 1980s. Under similar pressures, Owen’s parents would start using harder drugs, Pete’s parents would not. And the four of them would go on to have children whose lives were shaped by the same pressures. Was this just another trope, trite and insignificant? Owen wishes he could recover who his parents used to be, or at least who they could have been, wishes he could recover Pete, too. But even recovering them in this way will not give them the sort of recovery they once needed.
Leaving the historical museum, a muggy summer heat has blanketed the town, and he retracts his earlier thought about the musty old building. In favor of air conditioning at the house, and desperately in the car for the five minutes it will take to get there, the three of them drive home. You wouldn’t know, of course, but it was only recently that Owen started thinking of Pete’s house as home, and it could very well be that Pete’s parents have allowed this feeling to return as well. In his memory, he has rebuilt the shattered stone wall between his two homes, lugging and heaving the stones back into place so that they can cordon off the traces of the past and continue, enduring, into the future.
* * *
Although Owen has done nothing out of the ordinary on this visit, he isn’t satisfied with the state of something, not fully. As time goes on, his landscape keeps shifting, settling in the wet clay of the earth. He thought maybe it would be set by now. It would certainly give him solid footing to see anything clearly about himself. Like the mill town, and the mineral springs town before it, with no industry and no mineral springs anymore, grasping for some sense of who he is.
It’s dusk, and the landscape is polarized by the fading daylight. He watches his long shadow on the ground ahead of him as he makes his way up the sloping lawn. In the other times he tells you about the park with the sloping lawn, he omits something. He doesn’t like to mention the abandoned high school here, at the very top, where his parents went, and indeed Pete’s too. It closed down not long after they would have left, but it still stands today. Hardly a few hundred meters from the historic district is this crumbling arrangement of brick walls, the lower windows boarded up, the upper ones busted in, the whole thing condemned. This is the last place before the whole town merges into the wilderness. It feels like the end of the earth. And in a way, it could be.
It was Pete’s parents who were notified of the incident up at the high school first. It would have been the kind of visit for the sheriff where the weight of the very air around him exerted an enormous pressure on his throat. Now of course the sheriff knew of their familial role in Owen’s childhood, because things are known in small towns like these. They were neighbors, friends, old friends of Owen’s parents; old friends for the sheriff even, all of them, at that collapsing high school. He would have stood at the threshold of Pete’s house and taken his hat off when they opened the door. And only for an instant would Pete’s parents fear that it was Owen.
But of course it wasn’t. So for the second time in less than a year they delivered news of death to him, and he drove blankly back to the small town where he was born. Except this time, the turns that so often troubled him came as naturally as instinct, ruined landscape or not, and from the town centre he walked over the granite bridge and into the park. It was early January. The black night stood empty against the white snow of the sloping lawn, and as he approached the abandoned high school at the top, he felt as if he was getting closer to and farther away from something at the same time.
Whether his parents stayed in town or not during the months they were gone is irrelevant to Owen. The burden of his loss would have been no different if they had left and died in some other town. But here, at the end of the earth, or the birth of the town, depending on how you looked at it, complicated his sense of place. Here, the very place he had come to understand his life and its conditions, amidst everything that he had lost. Like the rest of the town erupting out of this place, the force projects the loss onto everything he sees from here. What sense can he make of it all now? This town that used to be a landscape, an agricultural village, a mineral springs town, and then a mill town, and now a town that doesn’t have an opioid crisis, because it has a new European-style cafe and a horticultural society? He begins to believe that the will of nature is to forget, to ignore, to run away with progress and go too far and lose all the traces of the past. But he won’t let it happen, for a reason he is only beginning to understand.
Deaths of despair, Owen was told, is what opioid deaths are considered. And how much progression of despair it takes, he thinks. It was always right there, close to him. In his childhood home, where his parents never recovered, and then in someplace only they knew, where they traded their lives for the final grasps of death, and then in the park with the sloping lawn, where they left behind their broken bodies. How many deaths of despair can you bear, before becoming one yourself?
And yet, the river washes over the mill dam below and lags out of town, pulling the railroad with it, and perhaps the mineral springs, too. It is doing what it has always done, for thousands of years, before this mill town became anything more than a landscape. Perhaps everything has been restored to the way it was originally, the landscape unaltered, even after all of the ruptures that Owen witnessed. The will of nature, he has come to believe, is progress. But progress is not always so visible, or legible, there can be a lot of progress, unseen, that brings you back to a place you were before.
The town is going through a metamorphosis. It hasn’t ground itself to dust like he once feared. It has begun the slow labor of milling itself into something new: a composite material of what it used to be, and what it is yet to become. A final act of transformation. This is what he sees now when he looks out over the sloping lawn, stepping inside and outside of the stone wall, because that is the only way he knows to reconcile the progress ahead with the loss that is behind him.
Perhaps stone walls are all that will remain one day. They will lay out a sense of place for someone else in time, and the landscape will move them, and they won’t know why, but Owen will.