Few years back I was making a high speed run to Santa Fe and stopped for the night in Amarillo, Texas. With a couple hours of light left and only a block or two separating me from downtown and old Route 66 I had to go wander around and explore a bit.
Don't know what I was expecting to find but the taxidermied corpse of an old five and dime store wasn't it. Did seem kind of fitting though, much of the area seemed to be doing about as well as Woolworths.
Kind of reminded me of home, that feeling that the march of time had left it behind. Left to eke out an existence on the trickle down economics of nostalgia, it had that familiar air of despair.
Here it was the interstate drawing away the vehicular lifeblood of Route 66, where I grew up it was the decline of tobacco and coal. Something changed and then the Good Times went away, never to be seen again. Not sure if the Good Times ever made it to my neck of the woods but Worse Times sure came calling.
It's a sequence that plays out all too regularly, the economic winds shift, the ones that can get out, and the rest get left behind to make do the best they can.
That which gets left behind. What gets left behind fascinates me, to look at something neglected and forgotten and think about how it was once was new and valued and how it came to be in its present state. Pretty sure there's something to be learned about humans from that but I haven't figured out quite what.