The American Wasteland                                                                                                                  

Once upon a time, we went outside to enjoy ourselves. Softball leagues were full, volleyball events had caught on… Heck, I remember one time way out on the south end of Ella Sharp Park – spring of 1986 I think during my freshman year at Jackson College – there must have been a hundred students playing in the sunshine, laying out on towels, jamming the greatest music ever, throwing frisbees, revving muscle car engines… and then it was gone. We were all there together – and then we weren’t…

Along M-60 in Concord, at the point where Warner Rd. breaks off to the right, is a building called the Hilltop Chapel Event Center. Now, a few hundred yards west of that building is the Hilltop Chapel Church, a beautiful old place with a grand old-fashioned spire that looks magnificent in the moonlight. Both of those buildings sit on hills – the church sits higher up – and between them, between the hills, is a low-lying area filled with tall trees and thickets.

I’d driven that area a hundred times, finally realizing that there are light poles down there – tall, wooden light poles with the lights still attached, wires hanging down, trees reaching up to reclaim and hide them.

Years ago, long before the church had purchased the building that became its’ event center, it had been a bar – for the longest time The Pony Bar and eventually The Hangar Lounge. The bottom of the hill between each facility – a strange metaphorical chasm between the righteous of the Sunday morning crowd on the other side of the gorge from those that partied and danced their troubles away the night before.

I talked to some of the locals, people who have lived in the area for years, and heard from both sides. Church goers had leagues using the volleyball nets on Sunday afternoons, often dueling bar patrons, although no one seemed to know who actually owned the land. Most thought it was the church. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

When I finally walked down there, between the hills, I saw the remnants of what used to be. I saw the light towers, the hanging cords, the metal volleyball poles – the nets long gone – and the picnic tables where people sat and cheered. A pathway had been mowed between the church and the event center for people to pass back and forth, but it wound around the old volleyball court and not through it. I doubt anyone even noticed it anymore.

The cheers, the grunts, the laughter, and the good times that had once drifted up from that area alongside M-60, had faded away – as had the volleyball court, which was now just another lost piece of our collective fabric, a slice of who we were, the times we had, now faded and forgotten…

… into the American Wasteland.