The robin’s-egg blue kitchen looks out on the brown grass of the
empty plains. The gas stove lurches away from the wall, and, in
the wild yard, the white bones of a deer bleach in the sun.
Plaster fragments litter the floors of the rooms, and down in
the cellar a galvanized wringer washer stands watch by the long-
dead coal furnace. In the upstairs bedroom, a window sash has
slipped and become a trapezoid framing the abandoned orchard to
the west. Two old cars rust nearby, caressed by the moan of the
wind. The stone footing of a vanished barn stares east at wheat
and grass. Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house
is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.
This is the place where American assumptions about the land
proved to be wrong. The homesteaders believed rain followed the
plow. In the grasslands of western Kansas, Nebraska, and the
Dakotas, they learned better. And so for almost a century we’ve
watched stranded towns and houses fall one by one like autumn
leaves in the chi