When you're sitting in the car for so long, driving through a thousand towns, you start noticing patterns. Or maybe it's more correct to say that you begin to generate narratives to fit a recurrence of similar sights, sights that may not be as necessarily related as they seem.

Vacant homes and stores would be one of those patterns.

From the old main street of Russellville, Arkansas to large tracts of Memphis, to North Platte, Nebraska, to Pittsburgh, the vacancies were abundant. In some places, like Russellville, entire blocks stood empty, the old brittle reflections in the cantilevered display windows masking the dark space behind them; brick facades tinted a pale, dusty tan; rust striping old metal signs advertising Buck's shoes, Rosemary Gifts...or just Barber.

In Memphis, the vacancies were as much homes as businesses. Here, large sheets of rough plywood--often painted dark blue, grey, or green--were nailed over doors and windows, tall weeds choking foundations and rising up over porches.

Along the highways, off back roads, in dusty hamlets, and on the fringes of county seats, the fading shells of clapboard houses lean earthwards, dotting the countryside in irregular intervals, the peeling paint turning chalky and then to dust under the recurrent pressure of sun, then rain, then snow, and then sun again.

Views like these were common. We got used to them very quickly. I found myself lingering over some of these old stores and houses; over the whole blocks of vacant storefronts especially, staring into the blank faces of dead shops and homes, wondering where the people went, wanting to know every story behind every aged facade.

Sometimes, it was hard not to invent them. Sometimes, those stories read almost like newspaper headlines superimposed over a scene of civic disturbance, like in an old movie where the EXTRA editions flutter over the black and white moving pictures of throngs in the street, or men and women lined up to collect bread or soup. This story is one of national failure; of a great recession, or the accretion of smaller recessions over many years.

Another story speaks not of great upheaval but merely of a small town gone bust. A mine dries up, a factory closes, the soil decays and grows sterile. Or natural calamity. A forest fire, a tornado, a flood; whole crops, or stands of timber, or neighborhoods destroyed, the fabric of the community torn in two, the livelihood of those remaining no longer tenable.

Or it is a story of hubris. Of men and women whose dreams were as unrealistic as their will to work was real.

Or maybe the dreams were realistic and it was the will that faltered.

Maybe the abandoned houses tell of families migrating to the city, the sagging wood frames remaining as symbols of old, discarded ideas and possibilities, ideas whose failures point towards the city, and the guarded optimism of the prosperity that multiplies there.

Or maybe these sagging edifices are the decaying echo of a more bitter story; of a family riven by internal collapse, or enmity, or tragedy; of neighbors and men and women consumed by their own darker angles.

It's all too tempting and easy to paint these scenes with such narratives: symbols of an inexorable march forward into brighter futures, or tombstones standing atop folly and failure...and all the subtle variations on these themes; all the possibilties between these two seeming narrative poles.

Sometimes, it's difficult to make any sense of the vacancies at all. Beaufort, South Carolina is an exquisitely pretty old town, thrust out deep into the coastal lowlands, situated near a Marine base, close to Charleston and Savannah, with a modest if dependable tourism industry, filled with old, fastidiously renovated houses and shops. Inexplicably, right there on Bay Street, there are vacancies; those same cantilevered display windows filled with nothing but still air. In the wake of so many other vacancies in so many less prosperous towns, it was tempting to imagine many of the familiar narratives. And yet, this is a town that has a good dozen fresh fish restaurants with wide outdoor seating overlooking the marshes, some very upscale boutique restaurants in the old quarter, magnificent Victorian inns and professional businesses.

Maybe the story here is a familiar one, if you're from the city: the rent is just too damn high.