Cow House

n.b. this is not Cow House, it is an abandonned barn nearby, at the top of Krumkill Road, photo by Eduardo Olivera

It was one of those Urban Legends that, when you think about it, you can't even remember where you heard it first. Maybe it was on the school bus, maybe it was your parents whispering to each other in the front seat of the car, maybe it was a real estate agent trying to explain away an eyesore on the neighbourhood.

As you drove down New Scotland Avenue towards Voorheesville, perhaps to pick up some groceries at Stonewells (the last of the independent supermarkets that hadn't been bought out by Grand Union or Price Chopper just yet) or taking the shortcut down the back way, past the abandonned country club, you'd pass Cow House.

It had clearly once been a beautiful house, one of those huge, sprawling farmhouses you only really get in New England and Upstate New York, dating back to the early 19th Century, when white clapboard Colonial started to give way to the gingerbread fancies of American Victorian. Two or three stories with bay windows and a porch wrapped all the way around the outside, of the sort you could see old grandmothers sitting on in rocking chairs in the summer heat, knitting and telling stories.

Except the paint had long since peeled to a weathered grey and the only occupants that dared shelter on the porch were black and white Friesian cows, chewing their cud complacently out of the heat. There was an orchard by the house, with ancient, grizzled apple trees that had long gone to seed, but no one dared pick the apples, and they fell and rotted among the unmowed grass.

It was such a sad story, the gossip went. 50 years earlier, a farmer had lived there, the last of his line. When his wife died, he shut himself up in the house and became a recluse. Here the story gets muddied - or maybe it's my memory. Some kids tried to break into the house, and he chased them with a shotgun, and shot one of them in the leg. Or perhaps it was someone from Social Services who came to check up on him, on account of the state of the house and land, and he chased them off with a shotgun. (I wonder, these days, why he wasn't sent to jail for doing such things - but then again, this was America with its right to bear arms, and, unlike the UK, if you find an intruder in your house, you're within your rights to blast them to Kingdom Come. Don't quote me on that, I'm a storyteller, not a lawyer.)

Whatever, the story, it was somehow both terrifying and sad. There were actually quite a few abandonned houses in the area (and even an abandonned schoolhouse where I used to hide out when I ran away from home) but only this one had rumours about it. When we first moved in, in the early 80s, it looked conceivably still inhabited. But as the porch crumbled and the roofs fell in, I wondered if the shotgun-toting, lonely old man had died, or if he ever existed.

When I was a teenager, I didn't understand the impetus that would lead someone to such a life. Lock yourself away from the world, bar the windows, let everything go to rack and ruin around you. But lately, it's begun to look more and more appealing. Why bother to interact with a world that has abandonned or disappointed you on every level? As you feel yourself slip away, social ties growing ever looser, you wonder what it is to stop you. That revulsion that people feel towards old cat ladies and old crazy guys who shout at traffic - it's that shuddering sense of "There but for the grace of god..." How easy it is to fall between the cracks. How many missed calls and unanswered emails before you slip away for good. And as you get older, those connections get harder to replace. Until one day there are none.

I used a slow afternoon at work to look for the house on Google StreetView, up and down New Scotland Road, trying to remember how the back roads all connected up. The house was gone, not a trace that it had ever stood there - obliterated so completely that at first I wasn't even sure I had the right corner. The house had been bulldozed, the orchard had either been chopped down or simply fallen down through old age. Cow House was utterly vanished.

I deleted my MySpace today. I'd been threatening to do it for weeks and not quite had the nerve, as there were still friends for whom that was my only way of contacting them. But then again, if a social networking site is the only way you have of contacting someone, how close a friend are they, really? A few years' worth of blogging gone in an instant. Is it a loss? I don't know. Perhaps those years are better off buried and forgotten.