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.

I wish I could get up on some giant stage and sing a sad love song to everyone I know. But since this isn’t feasible for many reasons, namely the fact that I have a terrible singing voice, I decided to pack up my Bolex, a couple cans of film and a few cans of beer, and head east in search of more ghost towns (see the archives for past ghost town hunting adventures).
After a weekend that one might call emotionally turbulent, it seemed fitting to get out of town in a “don’t look back/just keep going” sort of way. But less than an hour out of Portland, a really bad crash happened several car lengths ahead of me. A semi truck hauling Little Debbie Snack Cakes plowed into a camper trailer, which jack-knifed and smushed into a fuel tanker. Several other cars then piled on, at least six or seven in all. The authorities arrived quickly, but the freeway was completely blocked for almost two hours. It was another example of overt consumerism messing everything up: nobody really needed those snack cakes, but because of them, traffic was backed up for miles and the channel 2 news helicopter even flew over us and took our picture. People got out of their cars and began to mill about, nervously hovering as if expecting important news or exchanging useless bits of information. There is something always particularly irritating about sitting in a vehicle that is not moving. Whether it’s a car stuck in traffic, or an airplane sitting on the runway, gravity feels like it is pulling harder when you are in a stationary vehicle. Something about the forward motion is comforting, even hypnotic for that matter, but when the vehicle is standing still it suddenly becomes less comfortable then ever and more ridiculous than ever.

But eventually the wreck was cleared and traffic was let through. I drove to The Dalles and then cut in on Highway 206, hoping to eventually find the old town of Lone Rock, which was just west of Condon and pretty far out on a dirt road. I had read that Lone Rock was a ghost town, but when I got there it just seemed like a cute small town with a couple rehabbed buildings like the old jail and city hall. I realize now that I probably shouldn’t trust any town that actively calls itself a ghost town- I think they use it is as a ploy to form some sort of identity, to lure suckers from the city out there to spend money. Real ghost towns are ashamed of being ghost towns. They take their signs down and stop taking care of their roads. They don’t actively promote themselves as being a ghost town; they curl up and hope nobody notices them as they drive by. I can imagine some underground network of folk artists, crafts-people, and hotel owners concocting fake ghost stories in hopes of bringing in tourists and boosting sales of their handmade crafts and homemade apple pies. In the case of Lone Rock, there was one ‘artisan crafts’ shop run out of an old farmhouse that looked like it sold nothing but wind chimes, and it was obvious that they had something to do with this scam. From Lone Rock I decided to go for broke and take an old fire road to an old abandoned mining town called Kinzua, but after 12 miles on a un-kept dirt road I gave up, as my valiant mini van (who we’ll refer to as The Red Baron from here on out) didn’t have the clearance to make it over the rough road. I decided to track backwards and get back on some paved roads, and then aimlessly drove around until I stumbled upon an incredible old abandoned farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. It was a couple hours before sunset, so I decided to camp out and wait for the good light (golden hour as they refer to it in the business).


Once again I was sitting and waiting in my van, but this time it was much more peaceful. Insects and birds were busy making strange sounds, and the abandoned house would creek and moan with every gust of wind. I thought back to the accident and wondered about the people who were involved. I hoped they were okay, but when it takes two hours to clear a wreck it usually isn’t good news. Then I wondered about the house. Who lived there? Why did they leave? Was there a disaster that was equally as efficient as the car wreck, or was it a slow dissolve? With every moan of the house I felt more aware of its history. The wreck happened so fast, but the house is like an ancient tortoise slowly crawling into the landscape.
Clouds rolled in and my sunset shot wasn’t quite as spectacular as I was hoping it would be, but I climbed up on the roof of my van, I mean the Red Baron, and cranked a few feet of film through the camera anyhow. Shooting film is like riding a bike with no hands. You sort of hold your breath while it’s running through the camera and your heartbeats an extra beat just for good luck.
Once the sun went down, I rolled back into Condon, a town of 670 people on highway 19, and grabbed a room at the 90-year-old Condon Hotel. I think Condon was probably a pretty happening town back in the day, but the only thing happening tonight was a bingo game at the VFW Hall and some loud drinking in the bar directly below my hotel window. I’m very impressed that the hotel has Wi-Fi – nothing like live blogging from the frontlines of a ghost town. Tomorrow I steer the Red Baron towards the town of Whitney, another reported “ghost town,” though I suspect the real finds will be what I stumble into along the way.

I’m not really sure why I have such a fascination with abandoned buildings. I know that they’re ultimately a negative thing, that they are a strain on a local economy and often an environmental catastrophe. An abandoned building is a place that represents a failure or a retreat. Lock the doors and run away. Maybe it is that tragic mystery that intrigues me. I like old, historic architecture, but I have to admit that I have little interest in newly renovated buildings. I’ll take a photograph of a run-down building from the 1950’s over an immaculately restored building from the 1890’s any day. Renovation scrapes away more than just the leaky roof and layers of old paint. It scrapes away the mystery, and scares away the ghosts. In Portland, back when the Simon Benson mansion was boarded up and scary looking, I would go and look at it every couple of months. It was a stop on the sightseeing tour I’d take my out-of-town friends on when they’d come and visit. But now the Simon Benson House has been completely renovated and returned to it’s original grandeur, and now it just seems like another old mansion or boring tourist attraction.
Detroit is filled with so many abandoned buildings that it becomes overwhelming, and the only thing that outnumbers the abandoned buildings are the vacant lots. The vacant lots are scars left over from where a building once stood. Some were clearly grand mansions from the turn of the century, others were luxurious hotels or car factories from the 1920’s. Nature has reclaimed these spaces, and could confuse a visitor into thinking that Detroit has an expansive, if poorly manicured, system of city parks.
An abandoned space is a sad, mysterious enigma, but it also represents an opportunity or maybe a new frontier ready to be rediscovered and re-claimed. Maybe that is the allure: that you as a passer by can stake a small claim in the building, adopt a bit of the building’s sad story and stake out your own little piece. A renovated space reminds you that you are the public, and that you are a spectator who will have too eventually go away. Abandoned buildings are also clearly in danger, and subject to disappear without warning or comment. I think the first time I became aware of the visual landscape of a city was when I first moved to Portland and was walking by a recently demolished building. I strained my memory to think what building was there; I knew something was there, some building that was at least four stories tall, but I couldn’t remember what it was or what it looked like. A parking structure with an Office Depot and Kitchen Kaboodle on the ground floor has since been built in its place. I remember thinking that there should have been some plaque, or some memorial set to remind people of what used to be there, the history of that particular corner, and a gesture to all the memories associated with that space.



In Detroit, a lot of the abandoned buildings are pretty easy to sneak in to, and once inside you realize that you are in a different dimension. My friend Kristine and I walked right into a giant old Ford manufacturing plant that is now just a lumbering compound of decay. The floor was thick with remnants of the old ceiling, and a heady bouquet of toxic, mildewy scents filled the air. It felt more like walking into a cave than a building. We stumbled into some illegal metal salvagers who had driven a truck right into the plant and were tearing sheets of metal off the ceiling, and it was clear that we had just walked into the wild west, or maybe the age of the dinosaurs, where a hole new set of laws and realities applied. A lot of the buildings in Detroit have been damaged as much by vandals and salvagers as they have been by the natural elements. Elaborate marble carvings from old buildings are stolen and sold on the black market, and then mysteriously appear in new buildings as far off as Chicago and San Francisco. And apparently something like 400,000 feet of cooper wire has been stripped from the walls of the once-magnificent train station. Then there is just plain vandalism, like in the case of the majestic old UA Theatre, which was just torn and battered to pieces, leaving perhaps one of the greatest movie palaces of all time an utter mess of smashed statues and ripped fixtures. The theft and vandalism gets me pretty mad, but when I think about the history of Detroit and figure that the perpetrators are probably people who had their entire livelihoods yanked out from underneath them by the auto industry, it seems a little more justifiable. I mean, what has happened to all the buildings in Detroit has happened to the people as well. I’d want to steal all I could too, and then smash the old memories into the ground so no one else could reclaim them. Sometimes it’s better to let things die than to let them turn into a theme park.

Today I find myself in Detroit Michigan, getting ready to show my films at Wayne State University. It is pretty amazing that I made it here- for the past week I have been in a severe mental fog and have barely been able keep my shoe-laces tied, let alone get myself anywhere on time and be half-way presentable. It is my annual post PDX Fest brain melt; I think that I have become pretty good at dealing with stress and keeping things together when I have to, but the minute my brain can relax, it really shuts down. I’ll apologize now to anyone who has noticed me zoning out midway through a conversation in the past few days. It’s not that I am bored, it’s just that my brain is on vacation.
But while I was able to get myself to the airport in time to get on the airplane that got me to Detroit, I am sad to realize that I forgot the little cable that connects my camera to my computer. I think that Detroit might be the most photogenic city in America, and I had big plans of ‘blogging the shit’ out of my trip to Detroit, complete with photo analysis. This is my second time in Detroit, I was here a couple years ago for the Media City film festival. Pretty much the only traveling I do these days is on these ‘work’ trips when some school or festival or museum invites me to come and do my little song and dance. This is pretty much how I make a living; I go somewhere and show my films and talk about them, and if it’s a school I’ll usually do some sort of filmmaking workshop or student critiques or something. They always pay me much more than I deserve to get paid, and I suppose the big secret is that I would gladly do it for free if I could (but then again I guess that would mean I’d have to have a regular day job which would then prohibit me from taking off time for traveling so much- one of those ‘vicious cycle’ scenarios).
But anyways, back to Detroit. Detroit is a crazy, messed up place that I find fascinating and beautiful. Less than a century ago, Detroit was competing with New York to become America’s grandest, most important city, but now it is an urban wasteland. There are so many beautiful, significant old buildings here that are shuttered up it makes my head spin. It’s like passing through the living ruins of an ancient mecca, where the decay is in process. It’s hard to tell if the powers that be are waiting for the right time to renovate the buildings, or if they are waiting for nature to take it’s course and naturally do away with them. Detroit is a lot like one of those ghost towns I described in a post last week, but on a much grander scale.
It would be very difficult to sum up the issues and conflicts that face Detroit with real accuracy, but the one thing that seems clear is that Detroit is a good example of what happens when a community puts too much faith in a single entity- in this case, the auto industry. Detroit was already a thriving city before Ford and General Motors came along, but in the 1920’s, Detroit saw a boom unlike any American city has ever seen. Those corporations became so powerful that they could just completely have their way with this city, and when the time came to pull out, they let this city crumble. The thing that gets me angry is that this is not exactly a poor city. One look at GM’s “Renaissance Center” or a drive through some of the outlying suburbs is a clear indication that there is plenty of money floating around here. But instead of taking care of the community that made all this growth possible in the first place, those with wealth have retreated behind walls and have fortified themselves away from the actual city. The economic and racial issues in this town are as blatantly terrible as anywhere I have ever seen, and one has to wonder if this city has deteriorated beyond the point of possible resurrection. The problems here are deep, and far more complicated than I could ever grasp.
But I am excited to do some ‘urban spelunking’ tomorrow, and maybe i’ll even be able to wrangle the right kind of cable to download the pictures I take. Urban Spelunking is huge in this town, so much that I think the city should consider legalizing it and marketing it as a tourist attraction. Maybe they could hire me or Bill Brown or Jem Cohen to make the television commercials: “Come to Detroit to explore the millions of acres of abandoned factories, sky scrappers, warehouses, and famous train stations!” The commercial could have a bunch of attractive young people with flashlights strapped to their heads and wearing safety boots, repelling down one of the elevator shafts at some abandoned Ford manufacturing plant, or maybe looking out at the view of the downtown skyline from the top of the abandoned train station. We could shoot it all in Super 8 Kodachrome. It would be hot.

A couple of days ago, me and my pal Bill Brown drove out to Eastern Oregon to search for ghost towns. Bill was in town for the PDX Fest showing his new film “The Other Side,” and once the fest was over we jumped in my minivan and drove out to the sticks. Before heading out, we checked in on www.ghosttowns.com, but quickly decided that we should just get on the road and read about it later. It sorta seems wrong to drive all day to see something you saw a picture of on the internet, so we figured it would be better to just get lost and see what happened.
A century ago, the region just south and east of The Dalles, Oregon, was spotted with small farming towns that dated back to the early pioneer days and the Oregon Trail. These little towns started as trading posts and transportation hubs, but for various reasons many of them didn’t last long. Some of the towns were on a train line owned by a company that went out of business, while others didn’t have an adequate water source. And if that didn’t do them in, then the advent of trucks and the highway system left them in the dust (both figuratively and literally). Bill and I were pretty excited to find some of these old ghost towns, and hoped we might even find some ghost tenants, but what we found was that the visual reality of a ghost town is not nearly as romantic as we had thought. I suppose it is expecting too much to be able to drive your minivan on paved, public roads right into a perfectly abandoned ghost town, but we did find some interesting stuff and came to realize that these days it seems like there are three categories of ghost towns existing in Eastern/Central Oregon.
The first type of ghost town is one littered with old, abandoned buildings, but still has a few inhabitants. It would be easy to confuse these ghost towns with a run down trailer park that just happens to be out in the middle of nowhere. Kent, Oregon is a good example of that. There is an old abandoned grain silo that marks the center of town, and a strip of old store fronts that line what one can assume was Main Street. There are several abandoned, ghostly looking houses, but behind them are what appear to be even scarier mobile homes with mean dogs tied up in front of them. There is an old, half burnt down school and an abandoned gas station, and two or three little houses that actually look pretty nice. Kent looks like it stopped being a town several decades ago, but there is another layer of ghostly evidence of the town’s second life as a home for old, kooky folk artists. Maybe these were original inhabitants that never left, but my guess is that in the 80s and 90s Kent was a hot bed for back-woods eccentrics. One house in particular was lived in by a guy named Leo Decker, who decorated his yard and house with whirly-birds and other airplane-style paraphernalia. Apparently he was an old air-force pilot who flew in Korea and then spent his last few decades in Kent decorating his yard. On the roof of his house there is a single chair mounted to a platform that is pointed toward Mt Hood, and it was nice to imagine Leo sitting there and watching the sun set. But these days it looks like old Leo has either passed on or moved away, leaving his house and yard to whether away like the rest of the town.

The second category of ghost town is the type that was probably a really cool ghost town twenty years ago until somebody came along and renovated it in hopes of it becoming a tourist attraction. This is about as disappointing a ghost town as you could find. Sure, it’s cool to see some old buildings, but at a certain point you can’t even tell the difference between the old, original buildings and the new, fake ones. Shaniko, Oregon is a perfect case in point. The ghosts in Shaniko have clearly been run off, replaced with busloads of Elder Hostels, and the entire place just takes on the vibe of some big Las Vegas theme-park casino. Scary, for sure, but certainly not ghostly. What is even scarier is that the town’s renovation is being financed by super-rich-super-freak Robert Pamplin Jr. I am all for the renovation of old buildings, but there just seems to be something wrong with the idea of visiting a ghost town and finding soft-serve ice cream and machines that will smash a penny into a personally engraved souvenir, especially when you know it’s funded by the guy who brought the world “Bible Man.”
The third type of ghost town are those that simply are no longer there. If you stop and look really hard you might be able to identify were the old train tracks had been, or maybe find an old foundation or pile of rusty metal artifacts, but for the most part everything is gone. But the one thing that probably is still there if you look hard enough is the cemetery. The old town cemetery is the one thing that the wind couldn’t knock down, a fire couldn’t burn down, and a farmer wouldn’t plow over. It seems to me like these are the real ghost towns- the ones that only leave a scant trace and a lot of questions. Ghosts are notorious for hiding out and playing tricks on you, and what is more mysterious than an entire town that has vanished?
Bill and I got to wondering if a town that becomes a ghost town feels self-conscious about it. I mean, is a town that stops being a town considered a failure, or is it kind of like retirement? It seems like there might be a joy in being able to go back to nature, and not have to bear the weight of a city or feel jackhammers pounding into your back. But I could also imagine that there could be a sense of failure, as the ghost town sees other towns around it grow and prosper. I think my favorite ghost town in Oregon is a town called Friend. It’s mostly on some rancher’s private property, so you can’t really hang out there for too long, but it consists of one abandoned store, an abandoned school, and an old cemetery. You can make out the grade that the old train tracks once sat on, and you can tell by the placement of the buildings that the town was fairly big. But now it is primarily wheat fields, and it seems perfectly content to sway back and forth with the breeze and greet the occasional ghost town hunter or lost road tripper with a sense of calm melancholy.