A couple of weeks ago I went on a road trip. I visited family and I went on a Nostalgia Tour.
I grew up in small towns in Indiana. Really small towns. When I was middle school aged I lived way out in the boonies outside a “town” named Lagro. Lagro had no stop lights that I recall. There was a small restaurant, a baitstore/liquor store and a few other small shops and a bank. I was insanely jealous of the kids who lived in “town.” They could walk to each others houses to play tgether in the summer. Walk to the store. Buy penny candy, get a whole BAG for a quarter! “Town” was exciting. I’m really not sure what the population was then but at 0.6 square miles it couldn’t have been many. In 2000 the population was 454, and in 2009 had declined to 416.
I decided to take a drive through Lagro on my Nostalgia Tour. So I set my GPS for Lagro, Indiana, and set out on my adventure.
On the road to Lagro.
When I pulled into town I stopped to get out of my car and looked around. As I looked around I felt a sinking in my stomach and a lump in my throat. The “town” that had seemed so exciting when I was a child now looked like a ghost town. The cafe is still there, it was open, but empty. The baitshop/liquor store was there and open. Every other business on the main street area was boarded up and empty. There was not a single human being moving on the street. No cars moving. No signs of life. It could have been a set in a Stephen King movie. I felt overwhelmingly sad, a heaviness in my chest. I felt that I had lost something special to me.
Looking through a camera lens distances me from the place I am in. It depersonalizes and puts a barrier between me and reality. So I took out my camera and snapped a few pictures, so I could look at them objectively and with out the same emotions I was feeling looking at it in person. Then I got in my car and left. I don’t think I will ever go back again.
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