You know the Night Vale podcast? Here's the wikipedia page about it for those of you who aren't fasmiliar with it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Night_Vale What if there was a real place out there like that?
My grandmother and school counselor both grew up in the same little town in the desert in Hell's Canyon (on the border between Oregon and Idaho). I was talking to a casual aquaintance of mine, one who I've known for a couple years and talked to periodically, but never been very close to. She told me about the time she visited in her mid-teens and told me it reminded her of the podcast, which is what prompted me to look it up.
Everybody there knew her and her mom by name even though they didn't know anybody in town and never introduced themselves. I told her that I picked up a newspaper while I was there and the entire back two pages were just information about people passing through town (where they came from, a physical description, information about their interests and personal histories, etc.) but she didn't accept that as a reasonable explanation for why they knew about her. In fact, I don't know why it didn't strike me as strange at the time that they have a large portion of their newspaper dedicated to sharing information about people visiting town.
During my stay there, I spend most of my time in the basement reading because it was often upwards of 115 degrees and there was no air conditioning, but the basement stayed relatively cool. I thought it was strange but charming that the town seemed to be suspended in the 1950s. The style of dress, the furniture, the way people acted, everything was like an old 1950s TV show. Also, all the magazines I saw were printed in the 1950s. I really got a kick out of looking at old issues of Life and Popular Science from that era, though looking back, it was somewhat strange. Everybody immediately knew that I was from out of town, but I mostly attributed that to the fact that it's a very small town.
My school counselor claims that when she lived there, there was a ghost at the store. She didn't elaborate on it much, just said that it would upen and close doors, stuff like that. The town only has the one general store so I knew it was probably the one I visited during my trip there, but the only thing that struck me as odd about the place was that the butcher was extremely friendly. It was like he was a character from The Andy Griffith Show or something, but then again the smae could be said of pretty much everybody I ment there. Also, whenever I was walking back through the dessert to the place we were staying (which was a few miles out of town), somebody in a Jeep would drive by and try to pick me up. This also happened when I tried to walk into town. There isn't much traffic out there though. At the time, I just thought it was some friendly person who didn't want me to go through the discomfort of walking a fairly significant distance in extreme heat, but looking back it occurs to me that I look like the last person somebody would want to pick up off the side of the road.
Remembering back to when grandma was alive, she used to say really vague and terrible things about the church in town. I'm not saying that there's anything to this. In fact, I'm quite certain that there's nothing to it. However, I do sort of like to entertain the idea that there is a real life Night Vale out there... Maybe you'll get a kick out of it too.
20 Feb 2015, 10:07 am
