By Jim Hagarty
In my travels tonight I saw this abandoned farmhouse and it took me back to a younger and braver me who would park my car and take a tour through an old place like this. I don’t know what fascinates me about forlorn old homes that are no longer lived in, but I have always had an interest in them. When I was a boy, my childhood chum and I worked up enough nerve one time to take a trip through an old house during the day time. We climbed the stairs and found a lot of papers in an upstairs room. The owner had been a teacher so he left behind a lot of his schoolwork when he moved on.
Maybe that’s where my interest started. We were sort like the Hardy Boys.
In my younger days, I drove across Canada a couple of times and visited various ghost towns in the western provinces. It was an eerie experience. The largest of the communities was in Alberta. It had streets, a downtown, a community centre, a church. Even a war memorial honouring men from the town who had fought and died in the world wars. The gas pump in an old station read 40 cents a gallon. But there was only one house inhabited on the edge of the village. The grass was green and cut. The house was kept up. I was told later it was probably a squatter from the city who had simply moved into the empty house one day. Live there long enough and it’s yours.
I remember seeing an abandoned farmhouse down a gravel back road in Saskatchewan. I parked, went inside and gave myself a tour.
I have lost all my nerve for that sort of thing now.
During the Great Depression, a farm family loaded their car with whatever it would hold and moved from their farmhouse in Saskatchewan to British Columbia where they started over. Forty years later, in the 1970s, on a trip east, they decided to drop in to their old place to see if it was still standing. It was there, so they went inside. It was obvious to them that no one had been inside their home in the four decades since they left it. It was like walking into a museum of their past. Photos on the walls, furniture as they had left it, curtains on the windows. They were enthralled.
It seems as though it would be impossible that no one had ever gone into their house but the territories are large in western Canada and the farmhouses can be far apart.
I can see it happening that no Jim Hagartys happened along to have a peek.
