The Faulkner House

Andy and I drove through "downtown" Harrisburg today--the really old part by the river, down on second street--and we discovered that it's actually just straight up Creepy. One of the creepiest places I've EVER BEEN, actually, without exaggeration of any measure--and that list includes eerie, hair-bristling ghost towns in Montana and Colorado, places where people haven't lived in ages. Good ol' Harrisburg'll give them a run for their money...
There's an ancient, dilapidated, Victorian-style mansion down there by the river that absolutely cannot be without ghosts (or at least an extremely demented resident with a chip on his/her shoulder and an arsenal of leftover Civil War weaponry). It honestly looks like the set from Nothing But Trouble, a well-intended 1991 Dan Aykroyd comedy that will actually give you nightmares for at least a week after viewing. This movie is in no way recommended, except in reference to this post so that you can get some idea of the caliber of creepiness we're dealing with here.

Until today I had only seen the more normal sectors of town--the comfortable suburbias where kids play on teeter-totters and everybody's got a fence, a black lab, a bed of gladiolas, and an American flag motif in the front yard. So I was a little taken aback by the downright weirdness of the downtown. It didn't help that as we drove through, two rather steely-eyed, Cowboy Dan types stared down our car in a vaguely predatory manner.

Ooga booga, kids. I'm not joking either.

Anyway, we've pretty much written off actually living in H-burg, not only for that reason, but because occasionally (yes) we like to get wildly drunk in the comfort of our own home and rock out in the back yard to Slanted and Enchanted. I'm fairly certain that kind of behavior (or that kind of music) would not fly in an establishment such as Harrisburg. It's probably far better that we live either in isolation or around similarly youthful neighbors whose kids I won't teach on a daily basis.

We found a place that we're looking at again tomorrow, out in the middle of nowhere. It has the potential to be pretty cool with some work, but it's got kind of an unkempt yard and a bunch of debris that we'd have to contend with (like chopped wood that was never stacked, dead flowers in overturned flowerpots, carcasses of decaying walnuts in all of the flowerbeds, and shotgun shells on the back porch where someone had been shooting at god-knows-what). But frankly, it is a little bit creepy right now--it has an apocalyptic feeling of abandonment about it, like some family just dropped everything and fled town. The house is big and white and old-school, and there's a lone hog living in a shed to the west of the back yard... we've been puzzling over who's been caring for it and why it is alone.
Anyway, the whole place has kind of a Faulknerish feeling about it, and I'm not so sure that I want to live there. We might rattle around like loose cogs in a house with too much space, alone and young in the middle of nowhere.
Just maybe.

Shit, I don't know.

I complain about Eugene sometimes, but the truth is that I will miss walking down to Prince Pucklers and watching some 55-year-old dude in a Utilikilt order a scoop of Raspberry Truffle on a waffle cone. I kind of love the variety of it all. It keeps you young and openminded.