From the balcony of our motel room in Logan, through the trees and across a strip of lawn and a chain link fence, I notice the remnants of an ancient stone building. The walls are at least 18 to 24 inches thick, and massively built - almost like a castle.
I hear water booming through one end of the building and wonder if it might have once been a mill of some sort. My guess is confirmed by the maintenance man at the motel. It is a mill, the old Thatcher Flour Mill that burned down in the 1940s.On a strip of grass by the motel, three kids get out of a car with Michigan plates and bat a golf ball back and forth with golf clubs, oblivious of the old building. The ball hits the asphalt pavement of the parking lot and bounces high three times before settling on the grass.
Intrigued, Veloy and I walk over by the stone carcass of the mill, careful to avoid the patches of stinging nettle and the irritating beards of cheat grass that abound on the other side of the chain-link fence.
The water dropping through the opening of the long-abandoned millrace is camouflaged by a thick growth of trees that in the past 40 years have sprung up through the foundation. A 30-foot box elder crowds its way through the main basement. Ash trees smother the millrace, muffling the water that spills through a four-foot hole in the stone, frothing against a mossy slick beam that dances in the current on the end of a long iron brace.
In the eerie light of sunset, a doorway opens to an inner, roofless basement room. A steel shaft protrudes from the wall where a water wheel once turned on the other side. On this side, a huge three-foot pulley wheel lies frozen in silt.
I try to imagine the power that once surged from its spinning belts to upper rooms where pulleys turned grinders and shakers, wooden shuffles, augers and screens that sent flour dust through the air to rest on every flat surface.
I imagine the sound that must have permeated the place day and night, the high hum of flour being made, of cracked meal mush and different grades of ground grains for animal feeds - and white flour, filling cotton sacks that have printed patterns on the side, sewn later by mother into homemade shirts.
Somewhere there must have been a chute where grain was shoveled from the beds of farm trucks and wagons into the bowels of the building. A bridge across the stream in front of the mill invites the imagination to picture wagons waiting to unload, while on the front steps of the mill, farmers sit and discuss the weather, politics and local gossip.
Since the mill was built around 1860, there must have been serious discussions here about the progress of the Civil War as it was being waged, and arguments about polygamy.
Might there later have been snide comments over the idea of giving the vote to women, words of consolation to fathers whose sons were killed in the faraway trenches of World War I, and words of discouragement during the depression?
Now, though, all that is left are these slowly deteriorating limestone walls and inner nooks where fallen beams echo the vanished glory of past local empires.
The litter of 1991 is strewn over the floors - thin aluminum beer cans, a plastic straw, candy bar wrappers, a couple of paper cups. Ants scurry hither and thither, as oblivious of the old mill's history as the three kids back at the motel batting the golf ball on the grass.
Even local people are oblivious of it. Often, we don't think about the things closest to us.
As I draw the mill in my journal, two teenage kids show up to do something with the irrigation water. I ask them about the mill. They explain that this water is a diversion from the Logan River, that the flour mill was further upstream. This was a "textile" mill, and there was a lumber mill further down.
A few more inquiries and I get a few more perspectives, each with some connection, but with a lot of inconsistency. How soon the facts become blurred.
As we walk back to the motel, the sound of water continues unabated over the spillway of the abandoned mill, rushing out from the center of Logan toward the fields where peas, hay and new grain absorb its sustenance and grow toward a season of continuance, toward a time when what seems so matter-of-fact in our present lives will be blurred and partially inaccurate in the minds of those who come after us.