Amber Sparks
It was the Andersons who started the whole thing. They had just returned from a three-week trip to Europe, and Ted was in rapture over the ruins: the Pantheon in Rome, the Moorish castles in Spain, the crumbling fortresses in Wales. Andrea was less enthused—she had preferred the Spanish Riviera to the musty monasteries—but she always went along with Ted's new enthusiasms, whether model rockets, ballooning or bear-tracking. She and Ted worked long hours at boring jobs in marketing and sales so their family could afford to travel, and if Ted usually carried things too far in the aftermath, at least the obsessions were short-lived.
Now Ted was determined to build his own ruins. There aren't any good ruins at all in Maple Falls, he told Andrea. She pointed out that Maple Falls had only been built in 1992, so nothing would have had time to get ruined just yet.
Nonsense, he said. The problem with the Europeans, he said (and he had said it often during their travels) is that they lack initiative. No New World get up and go. Anybody can make a ruin; it just takes some doing.
Andrea helped with the theme: Playground, Abandoned. It needed to be uniquely American; Ted was insistent. No faux castles or colosseums. Ted bought a used swing set on the internet and they worked hard at making it rusty. Andrea would get out the spray bottle every morning, with its mixture of saltwater and vinegar, and give the metal frame a good going over. It was amazing how quickly rust could grow, like kudzu in the right conditions.
Why can't we play in the sandbox, the kids would ask, and Ted would shake his head. It's a delicate ecosystem, he would say. The kids didn't understand why they had to walk six blocks to a real playground, when they already had one in the backyard, but Andrea explained that it was aesthetic, not functional.
What does that even mean, said Shawn.
It means Dad has another obsession, said Rachel. They sighed, and watched as Ted hacked at one of the swings with a chainsaw.
The Petersons, of course, were not going to just sit back and let the Andersons corner the ruin market in Maple Falls. Luke found an abandoned playhouse on eBay, and he and his husband brought it home and installed it in the adjacent backyard. David, who had a definite green thumb, soon had moss growing up the sides and vines trailing round the tiny windows. Then they boarded up those windows with rotting wood. They collected their daughters' old dolls and left them out in the rain to grow moldy, bloated, monstrous.
Oh, really, said Andrea in disgust, when the Petersons put a speaker in the playhouse, blasting Phillip Glass's score for Dracula. They've gone too far.
But Ted wasn't sure; none of it was real, after all, and the larger and more complete the illusion, the better, right? Hadn't Anselm Kiefer once said that ruins are the symbols of a beginning? He bought a bigger, better speaker and placed it at the top of the slide, broadcasting Mendelssohn's most melancholy works.
The Dahls disapproved of the whole thing. Ruin value is a fascist concept, said Julie Dahl at the neighborhood block party.
Yes, and who wants to follow in the footsteps of Albert Speer, said Emily Dahl.
I disagree, said Keisha Lemmon. She took a bite of her burger—too well-done, Ted's doing—and said, if a ruin is designed appropriately, it can form a future refuge for animals after us humans are gone. A ruin can be an ecological tool. David? Your thoughts?
Yeah no, I'm grabbing another beer, said her son David. He was home from college for the summer and he did not want to get roped into any of his mother's ambitious ecological projects. She turned to her younger son instead, the budding architect. What do you think, she asked, about a crumbling bomb shelter that doubles as a habitat for bats?
Soon, everyone on Dixon Street was building some sort of folly to keep up. The Johnsons, both engineers, were building broken-down automata: a ballerina, a soldier, two children frozen in the middle of a chess match. The Reardon-Bakers had, of course, gone the European route and built a small ruined castle, roughly of the Gothic period and complete with smashed stained-glass windows and splintered flying buttresses. Mr. Reardon was a history professor who taught Medieval Studies; this was, as Mrs. Baker told her friends, a particular kind of catnip for Henry. Mrs. Appleby ruined a garden. The Serranos ruined a train depot. Mrs. Klindt ruined a cemetery, though as she told Mrs. Johnson over drinks one night, she'd actually purchased the headstones at Spirit Halloween and she hoped the Neighborhood Association wouldn't fine her.
Even old Evelyn Horst got in the spirit and let algae clog her little pond. The Dillons just laughed; they already had a ruined Chevy in the front yard and a rusted refrigerator out back. Ahead of the trend, they congratulated themselves. Theirs was the original American Ruin.
The Andersons were flattered by all the imitators, but Ted also saw the proliferation of ruins as a challenge. He went down to the hardware store and came home with a truck full of two by fours.
What are you gonna do with that, asked Dave Dillon.
I'm going to build a wooden bridge for the playground, Ted said.
Yay, said the Anderson kids.
And then, said Ted, I'm going rot the bridge, plank by plank.
I think their brains are rotting, said Rachel to her brother. They walked the six blocks to the park with the Dahl kids, whose parents had given in and were turning their backyard into an empty abandoned swimming pool.
Keisha Lemmon started work on a temple that could serve as a home for howler monkeys one day, with plenty of pillars for climbing. The Dillons put out a semi-trailer to rust. The Johnsons built a broken-down roller coaster. Several neighborhood families pooled their money to purchase an empty plot and turn it into an abandoned mine. Everyone was building out, building up, creating ruins at a breakneck pace.
Then, the Reardon-Bakers ran out of retirement savings. A neighborhood child fell down the abandoned mine shaft and broke an arm. Keisha Lemmon's temple flooded when she hit a water main while digging. To everyone's shock, housing values started to plummet, to say nothing of the rat problem.
I miss the kids, said Andrea one evening. She and Ted were sitting on the deck, trying to take in as much memento mori as possible. The Mendelssohn blared. Ted really wanted to grill some good steaks, but he'd artistically rusted the grill months ago, and now a family of sparrows was living inside it.
Me too, said Ted. The kids in the neighborhood had all moved in with friends who lived outside Dixon Street, friends who still had backyards and pools with water and functioning swings.
It would be nice, Keisha Lemmon said to her son David, not to hear sawing and hammering from morning till night.
Didn't Emerson say that man is a god in ruins? asked David.
Maybe we went too far, said Keisha. Like one of those gods who went too far. David nodded. A bat landed on his head.
When everyone left Dixon Street, the houses greened with moss, and the lawns—what was left of them—grew thick with creepers. The corrugated metal and wet cardboard bent and sagged. The cockroaches took over the kitchens and the rabbits plundered the gardens. The bats screeched from the bomb shelter, but otherwise it was silent, the semi-trailer and the swimming pool equally haunted, equally uncanny.
Occasionally a car would make a wrong turn, would drive down this peculiar street, slowing down at first in curiosity, then speeding up quickly as the rats poured out of the mine shaft and a rusted see-saw toppled over in someone's former backyard. But they were seen, these follies, if just for a moment, and it was only in being perceived that they truly lived, once more filling one with the dread and wonder of time passing, of entropy's work. In those moments, and only in those moments, the ruins could be the singular Ruin, and nothing less or more.