JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: Nowhere Square

Nowhere Square

By Jim Pope

5 Nov 2009

Nowhere Square, once the center of its small universe at Main and First now sits at the intersection of Inconsequential Avenue and Purgatory Road. The county courthouse presides over it, seated uncertainly on its seedy unkempt lawn, lonely yet elegant in its gaudy restoration and its forgotten histories. It was long ago bypassed by roads of past and future relevance, their gaudy arteries clogged with neon fast-food franchises and anemic soft rock & roll tones.

The street's now quiet; it's Saturday morning and there's no courthouse business to be done. Now, Nowhere Square is surrounded by the great grandchildren of enterprises that once thrived on the profit of agriculture. The courthouse clock looks down on them, then sighs and peeks over their leaky roofs and looks with disdain toward Mr. Bigbox, the new hub of life, the universe and everything (sorry Douglas).

No bright jazz sounds here, only the odd wailing of "Barbeque Music" (whatever THAT is) whose festival is proudly announced on a forgotten yellowed banner in a dusty storefront. Faded plastic roses announce the "hair today gone tomorrow" special at the barbershop. A car parked at the closed jewelry shop looks like a wallflower at the prom in 1969. Another car scurries past, in a hurry and on its way to someplace, any place, but not this place. Look up at the sky, building cornice scarred by the shadows of chaos thrown by both angels and power lines feeding lord knows what.

Maybe the memories of small towns and their squares still thrive in isolated pockets of time and memory, but increasingly their reality seems destined only to exist in the orbit of a larger urban area. Their relevance deteriorates. No longer the focus of their own community, they begin to lose their unique character and are absorbed by cities in search of a soul.

This is a sad thing to see, especially in place with a history, a place remembered for its sense of community and the roots it provided for the people who lived there. Ah well, who knows, things have a way of flowing full circle. But for now, only the desolation angels hang around like bums on the neglected grounds quoting Kerouac, "We all stand on the sad earth throwing long shadows...".