When I began college as a civil engineering student, one of the aspects of civil engineering history that I read about concerned the Owens River Valley War, a fierce conflict between the city of Los Angeles, which demanded more water to support its early 20th century growth beyond the levels it could support with its own aquifer, and the Owens River, an area not too far from Death Valley where a lovely river watered grass for cattle raisers and other small landowners. Given the disparity in power and population between Los Angeles and the Owens River valley, the end result of the ‘war’ was predictable. No matter how much small-scale destruction the cattlemen and townsmen tried, the damage was repaired, and in the end the Owens River was captured and its waters were sent to the thirsty cities of Los Angeles. When I traveled in that area, in what is euphemistically considered the Inyo National Forest, perhaps the only National Forest in our entire country without a single tree, there was a haunting feeling of being in an area where there was great violence, if not physical violence than at least the violence of theft and diversion and misappropriation of scarce resources. It is strange to see an area that was once a pleasant river valley be a land that looks like it is dying.

I was born in Western Pennsylvania, and shortly after my birth, a structural collapse of the steel and coal-based heavy industry of the riverine communities of my birthplace made blighted cities and neighborhoods out of the communities of my birth. The loss of jobs in heavy industry, the loss of tax revenue that ended up leading to the collapse of living standards even for public employees like my father, who was a bus driver in his rural school district, who managed to keep their jobs, and the loss of population as people left in search of better opportunities turned formerly thriving towns with smog belching over them into areas with clean air but with grass growing through the streets and there were boards in the windows, and all of the other telltale signs of pervasive urban decay. For a while, before a recent growth in health sciences at least stabilized the city of Pittsburgh and its nearby suburbs and allowed for high-quality jobs for those with a good education, the only apparent new construction going on was either related to stadiums or prisons while the cities and towns of the area suffered a slow death by neglect and abandonment. To be sure, Pittsburgh was not the only area to suffer so. Some areas, like Detroit, seem never to have gotten any kind of chance to replace the industrial basis of their community with something else, and so the ruins of a city in terminal decline discourage others from giving the city a chance, leaving those who cannot or will not leave in a state of grim defiance against despair.

In 2006, I went to the Feast of Tabernacles in Turkey. The Feast tour included all seven of the famed cities of Revelation 2 and 3, once we insisted on traveling to Thyatira, which was not on the original schedule, and also included a few other ancient cities of interest in what is now Western Turkey, formerly the province of Asia, like Aphrodesias, Colosse, and Hierapolis. The cities themselves presented a wide variety of fates. Some of the cities, like Smyrna (Izmir), Philadephia (Aleshehir) and Thyatira (Eksehir), were still thriving towns, with only a little bit of their ruins explored, and most of their area being used for present occupants. Other cities, like Sardis (Sart) and Ephesus, had small contemporary towns and villages nearby but had large and well-preserved ruins where the past could be dimly imagined. For me, though, the most poignant experiences were connected to a small area where three ancient cities once stood. Laodicea was once a massive city whose notorious lukewarm water was taken by aqueduct from the nearby hot springs of Hierapolis, and whose ruins were being cataloged but had not been restored when I visited. Nearby, the medicinal springs of Hierapolis (now called Pamukkale by its inhabitants) bordered upon a creepy necropolis full of tombs and monuments in an area largely devoid of permanent settlements. Perhaps most poignant of all were the ruins of Colosse, where clay tile could be seen in the fields of a farm and the cut out hillside showing the city stadium were visible, but covered over by grass, but where no other trace of a city that inspired two of Paul’s epistles remained visible. There, on the edge of Meander River, famous for its meandering, was once a massive city, and now it has vanished almost without a trace. A more tragic fate is difficult to imagine for someone who takes memory and history as seriously as I do.

What all of these areas share is the same tragic fate. To build a town is more than to build its physical structures, its roads and pipes and aqueducts and utility lines, more than merely planting trees and gardens and laying out parks and other public spaces. To build a town is to set people in a community, with the hope of a future, where people seek jobs and shops and homes to raise their families. Ruins are a mockery of those hopes, whether those ruins come about because a resource base dries up, or because trade routes have shifted, or because the rivers or aquifers have run out of water, or because armies or earthquakes have destroyed an area so thoroughly that its survivors are not able to rebuild their hopes, and so they abandon the site either to the sleep of death or to oblivion as exiles, leaving behind their old town and seeking opportunity elsewhere. Such was the fate, after all, of New Salem, a town near the Sangamon River in Illinois where Abraham Lincoln came as a young man seeking opportunity, and which he left to travel to the new state capital, Springfield, leaving New Salem behind to eventually become a ghost town that is only remembered at all for his sake, as a record of his young adulthood spent learning surveying, unsuccessfully looking for a wife, and rising in the world from the status of his impoverished rural childhood. How many of us have left behind such places, and will they be worth remembering for our sakes, if anyone will remember us after we are gone?