They walked together nineteenth century streets of an old harbor town; brick sidewalks and lane rising from water in narrow alleys up sloping seaside hills, clapboard sided townhomes painted in muti-color arrays as the sound of traffic carried over lanes made for horse and cart and now rattled with loose and shifted bricks under rolling weight of cars, vans, and delivery trucks.
Mid-ascent in their walk up a main lane, Ryan turned around to see and absorb the view. Where the red and brown brick lane ended, harbor shone—its center glittered with dancing light of wind-blown riffles, standing out in contrast to the still harbor sides, sheltered in surrounding cradle of the town. Beyond the harbor, water opened to the greater bay, its far coast showing as shadow of hinted woods, tall pines and understory hardwoods, that hid the truth of encroaching growth of ex-suburban developments; their target market, having already changed and defaced the original attraction to lands settled as suburban spaces in gathering of excessive collectives, sought new open and open places—ever more remote, and still beautiful—to settle in the promise and marketability of space and liberties that, in developing would be denied after the mass transactions, dissection, and settlement of the very land that served as the ideal. With the communities would come the always accompanying culture—a dispiriting banality where every strip mall and new, but substantially undifferentiable, site of commerce could be predicted by what is seen in pattern nation-over.
The far shore was in transition. The new would possess neither history nor character of the old harbor: its brick streets and era-styled townhomes of days past.
No, the new would be little different than any other community nation over; bland street names with no history—and therefore no offense—and constructed in the style and spirit of a new that is never meant to be lasting, and as such is desirable to a new and young generation that, on inheritance of by the second—when cement cracks, paint peels, when the banality of commonness becomes unbearable to those lost and seeking identity and differentiation from a generation and society that inculcated none, when no one wishes the trouble of maintaining and improving what was made intentionally perishable and never meant to last; then the new becomes like the old, residential refuse of a disposable culture that moves, like locusts, to a more distant, less touched and ruined place, to consume in sale of an ideal that is of spirit and not place.
Ryan saw the future beyond daylight’s dance on harbor crests and golden cast of bay between. He saw the future in the shadows of a land that, not to long ago, possessed and expressed its own history: land, families, traditions, erased in less than a generation in idolatry for an inflating and ever less-relevant dollar.
Even in the harbor town, the street was changed. Its shops were not for the local, but the monied—as all prosperous and well-spoken of places were—with only a few symbols and tributes to its past of interdependent and self-sufficient communal nature. Interdependent and self-sufficient: did such places, towns, still exist? If so, where?
“What are you thinking?” Emma asked, drawing Ryan from his thoughts.
“I don’t know,” Ryan answered, attempting again to see the details, but they were gone. “I was looking at the far shoreline.”
“Over there?” Emma asked. “What can you see? All I see is shadow?”
Ryan laughed meek, believing Emma to have spoken more truth than she knew, and in surrender of the vision, shrugged the thought away. “That’s all I could see too,” he responded, “But the light on the bay is beautiful and too on the back of the harbor; and the bricks of the street are the same. Not everything will change,” Ryan finished.
Ryan returned is attentions to the immediacy of their surroundings—happy in their immanent—enjoying character and history of the hillside harbor town and sought no more vision into shadows of the far shore.