The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

and how unknowing you were! In adulthood we have no way of measuring the illogic of our young selves except to hope that we have outgrown it.
    Close by our property, on the far side of a dirt lane, was a boarded-up old cider mill on a sloping bank of the creek. (“Millersport” is named for this mill, whose owner went bankrupt in the Depression.) Within my mother’s memory the mill was operated but I never knew it to be otherwise than abandoned and haphazardly boarded up as if in haste or in disdain—planks crossed like giant X ’s over empty windows, through which any child or teenager could crawl very easily. Of all places the cider mill was forbidden and was festooned with signs warning DANGER — NO TRESPASSING . Yet how many times alone or in the company of others I would push through a cellar window at the rear of the mill that was hidden by tall grass and debris, crawling into the wreck of a building with no heed thatI might cut myself on broken glass or exposed nails. What a wonderland this was! The very odor—chill, dank, sour-rotten on even the freshest days—was exhilarating. No children’s play-world could be more fascinating than the cider mill where fantastical machines (presses? conveyor belts?) in various stages of rust and decrepitude dwarfed me as if I were no larger and of no more significance than a prowling cat. Here was a stillness in which no adult had set his foot in years.
    Though steps were missing from the rotted staircase it seemed necessary to climb to the second floor. And to walk—slowly, cautiously—across this swaying floor, to stare out a high window at the creek. Behind the mill was an immense compost pile of rotted apples like an avalanche. In this rich dark pungent-smelling soil fishermen sought worms to use for bait on their hooks. From the high window I might watch them, unseen and waiting until they had safely departed.
    Or maybe I had been hiding there. The memory is blurred like newsprint in water.
    BUT IT WAS ABANDONED houses that drew me most. A hike of miles in hot, muggy air through fields of spiky grass and brambles, across outcroppings of shale steeply angled as stairs, was a lark if the reward was: an empty house.
    Some of these empty houses had been recently inhabited as “homes”—they had not yet reverted to the wild. Others, abandoned during the 1930s, had long begun to collapse inward engulfed by morning glory and trumpet vines.
    To push open a door to such silence: the emptiness of a house whose occupants had departed.
    Fire-scorched walls, ceiling. A stink of wet smoke. Part of thehouse has been gutted by fire but strangely, several downstairs rooms are relatively untouched.
    Broken glass underfoot. Drone of flies, hornets. Rapid glisten of a garter snake gliding silently across the floorboards. It is hurtful to see the left-behind remnants of a lost family. Broken child’s toy on the floor, mucus-colored baby bottle. Rain-soaked sofa with eviscerated cushions as if gutted by a hunter’s knife. Strips of wallpaper like shredded skin. Broken crockery, a heap of smelly tin cans in a corner, beer cans, whiskey bottles. Scattering of cigarette butts. A badly scraped enamel-topped kitchen table. Icebox with door yawning open. At the sink, a hand-pump. (No “running water” here!) On a counter a dirt-stiffened rag that, unfolded like precious cloth, is revealed to be a girl’s cheaply glamorous “see-through” blouse.
    When I was too young to think The house is the mother’s body. You can be expelled from it and forbidden to re-enter.
    It seemed that I would steel myself against being observed. A residue of early childhood when we believe that adults can see us at all times and can hear our thoughts. In an empty house, a face can appear at a high window, if but fleetingly. A woman’s uplifted hand in greeting, or in warning. Hello! Come in! Stay away! Run! Who are you? Often in an empty