s.w.g. continued/day two

Posted by: Matt McCormick | From: June 1, 2006

There are some actions that can often be interpreted as an open invitation for communication. For instance, you can stand on a street corner for hours and nobody will talk to you, but if you stand there reading a map someone will probably approach you within minutes to ask if you are lost. Walking a cute dog has similar effects- people barely even glance at me if I am just walking around by myself, but I used to have a roommate who had a dog that I would take for walks, and on those walks it seemed like people couldn't help but to talk to me.

Entering the world with a movie camera is also a similar action, but in a different sort of way. Having a camera and filming something makes the statement that you are interested, and many attention starved people see that as an opportunity to tell you why you should be interested in them. Sometimes they are just really lonely, sometimes they're just really drunk, and sometimes they are totally creepy. But often times they are truly interesting, or at least truly weird in the good sort of way. Like an 80-year-old guy named Easton DeHart I meet in Houma, Louisiana a couple years when I was down there shooting my doc 'American Nutria'. Easton was a retired marine who now served as the town's Alligator Nuisance wrangler. He was known as the "Alligator Man" and if you ever woke up one morning and found an alligator in your swimming pool, Easton was the man you would call. I met him while I was filming some trappers trap Nutria, and he invited me to spend a day with him looking for alligators. We checked the sewage treatment plant, the city dump, and all the places he regularly gets called to go to. We never actually found any alligators, but he talked all day about how you catch them and what you do with them after you catch them. He was an 80 year old who seemed more like a 13 year old, and I almost decided to just make a movie about him and forget about the Nutria.

But anyhow, here I am now out in Eastern Oregon, driving around in search of the perfect ghost town. This morning I stopped in a little town called Hardman, which was a bustling farming town in the late 1800s but today has more abandoned buildings than residents. There are four very old store-front type buildings on the main street, three of which have nearly caved in on themselves while the forth has had just enough renovation to keep it standing and serve as an occasional community center. There are probably twenty houses, half of which are abandoned and decayed beyond the point of return, and I'll guess that there are about 20 residents or so still living in the town.

I parked the Red Baron and got out to look around. It was a little creepy - the town felt completely vacant, but a few of the houses and trailers clearly looked lived in, even though they were in really bad shape. It was hard to tell what was a driveway and what was a public street, and it felt like I just stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The quiet morning was broken by a couple dogs that started barking at me, so I figured I might as well just reveal myself and set up the tripod and let anyone who cared know that I was just some city slicker with a fancy camera here to take some pictures. I'm sure they've seen the likes of me before, as these old weathered buildings attract guys like me the same way bees are attracted to BBQ sauce. I walked around and set up for a couple different shots and started to feel more comfortable when suddenly I heard someone calling out from just behind me. I turned around and saw a little old man in the yard behind me motioning to me to come closer. It was pretty windy and hard to hear what he was saying, but it was apparent he wanted me to come in. I walked through the gate and he started talking about how he'd bet me 100 nickels that he had something that 'I ain't ever seen before' and that I needed to come in his house to check out the wood burning stove in his bathroom. I followed him inside the old, poorly maintained house, and sure enough there was a wood-burning stove in his bathroom. It was true that I had never seen a wood-burning stove in a bathroom before, or if I had I certainly hadn't thought about it. The old man introduced himself as Mel, and while it was very difficult to understand what he was saying I made out that he was 74 years old and had lived in Hardman for the past thirty some years. He spoke in a loud, almost shouting voice, and then as if he had been reading my blog, he told me that Hardman was a ghost town, and since he lived there that made him a ghost. I told him that in that case I better take his picture.

I wasn't sure, but he seemed to be speaking in rhyme, or at least have little poetic outbursts that ended like songs. He motioned me to follow him into the living room where he wanted to show me a picture of himself when he was younger, so I followed him into the living room where a Fear Factor re-run was playing on an old television set that was placed in front of an old tattered couch. The TV reception was bad, and on the wall behind the couch were several framed letters and pictures including a painted portrait of Mel wearing an Army helmet and looking about 30 years old. He talked about how he served in Korea, but then started talking about the time he worked at the animal shelter in Boardman (a bigger town probably 40 miles away). He seemed to be still talking in rhyme, almost like he was a 74-year-old version of Eminem, and by now I realized he was pretty drunk. He took his spot on the couch and filled up his glass with the last drops from a jug of Boones he had stashed under the coffee table while he explained how he preferred whiskey. Mel continued to point to things in his house, like a giant pair of bull horns mounted on the wall, and tell me all about them, but I could tell I needed to get out of there quick. Crazy old men who live out in the middle of nowhere are always really interesting, but if you let them talk long enough they'll often start to reveal a whole lot of information you just don't want to hear. Once the really bad sexist or racial epitaphs start flying I take that as my cue to get a move on.

I stayed for a few more minutes and then announced that I should hit the road. Mel wished me luck and told me to come back and visit again sometime. I shot a little more film in Hardman, but the high-noon sun was approaching and the light started getting a little too flat, so I fired up the ol' Red Barron and headed off towards the John Day river to make some lunch and maybe go for a plunge.

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