Bye, Town

I got to witness a happening today.

In fact, in keeping with God's ever-crueler sense of humor, I was forced to watch a happening today, seeing as how the back entrance of our office was all iced over, so four times I had to walk around the block, right by it all, to go around to the front entrance of work.

Today's the day they tore down our Town Hall.

I'm one of those rarities: a small-town girl who still lives in her small town. For as long as I've known B'field, I've known that right there on the corner of College and Virginia Ave, the anchor of it all, stood the B'field Municipal Building, known to all as the Town Hall.

I first knew it for the Town Library, which was upstairs. My sister and I and our best friends used to love going to the library, getting to spend summer afternoons there when our moms were grocery shopping in town, or riding our bikes there when we were given a little freedom to roam. It was small; the walls were cinder block. And on those wonderful summer afternoons when we went to pick out our books, the inside temperature hovered at around 115 degrees. We didn't care. We just wanted to find the perfect book, then head up the street to ensconce ourselves in a booth at the drug store, get a fountain Coke, and read, read, read.

I actually checked out my first book with a curse word in it at that library. (The word in question was "goddamn," if I recall correctly.) I was sure I'd crossed that mystical threshold into adulthood that day.

If you took the first right through the door, not the second right which lead to upstairs, you'd go to a very nice and large auditorium. I've never understood why that auditorium wasn't used more than it was. There used to be musical programs on the weekends, local musicians putting shows together. The odd town beauty pageant. But I remember it at Christmas. Back when I was in high school, after every Christmas parade the band would march right off the street at parade's end and into the auditorium, where we'd continue playing, sharing the stage with Santa himself while he met with little kids carrying wish lists, and the town citizens came inside to listen to music and escape the cold.

For years, the Town Hall Auditorium was where voting took place. It was in that huge expanse of room, now with some broken seats and dry-rotted curtains, that I voted for the very first time. And every year after that I stood in one of the two lines that formed down the aisles (two lines: East Graham and West Graham districts), and socialized with all the other townspeople as we waited to cast our ballots. It was not only doing one's civic duty; it was fun!

Across the hall from the auditorium were the town and treasury offices. Where it was oh-so convenient, when you'd waited the last day to pay your taxes or get a new town sticker for your car, to just pop down there, plop down a check, and pop back out.

If you went straight down the hall from the front entrance of the Town Hall, all the way past the offices, you ended up at the Police Department and Town Jail. Now, while I personally can't tell you much about that, thank God, my sister or anyone in her graduating class could fill you in. Their graduation party was raided by the police and resulted in 100 or so drunkenly happy graduates crowded into the few jail cells, singing a rousing chorus of "I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)."

Beside the jail was the Fire Department. The Fire Department I visited as a Girl Scout, and was given the opportunity to slide down the fireman's pole. (I declined, even then being afraid of heights, and especially then being afraid someone would look at my panties while I slid.)

And that was it. It didn't look like that big a building, but it housed a lot of stuff. For a long time. The library left first, moving to a nice new building on the outskirts of town. Then the Fire Department moved down the street a few blocks to a big fancy building. But the voting was still there, and the police, and the town offices.

But see, we've been having this problem in our town. Our town, which had till recently suffered one minor flood in 30-some years, is now flooding every time it rains for more than two days. The Town Hall, along with a few other buildings nearby, get as much as four feet of water in them on a semi-regular basis. FEMA is a regular fixture here these days. And while FEMA's handing out sums of money to flood victims, they're dangling a large sum of money in front of the town. Around $800,000. Of course, to take that money, the town has to agree to tear down the Town Hall and rebuild it somewhere else, out of the flood zone.

And that's what town's doing.

The New Town Hall is going to be rebuilt out where the library is now. Out of the downtown area. Not within walking distance of people who work in town. Not convenient to the older people here who walk into town for all their needs. Not convenient to anyone, except maybe people who work at the library or go to the local middle school, which will be nearby.

Our town officials, who love to wave at us on public occasions and make their governing decisions in secret, decided this is where the new Hall will be. There was no vote. There was a lot of discussion, and they listened to us all, smiled, shook our hands, and went and voted to move everything out of town. We should have known it was coming when they moved the town's annual Fall Festival to a recreational park in the middle of nowhere - outside the town limits.

And so with this move starts the death of my town. The talk is town's only locally-owned grocery store, also in the flood zone, is going next. There are also six businesses in the direct line of fire. Unless they can find places up the street to relocate (and by the way, there are no places), they're gone too.

Now, here's the thing. One thing we've always been so proud of is that when WalMart muscled its way into town, the downtown area banded together to keep the megastore from letting them cause our merchants to go out of business. That happened with our B'field counterpart on the WV side when the local mall came in. B'field WV is now a crime-ridden ghost town. But we were sure our town had won.

Now, I'm no scientist, or geologist, or topographer, or anything else. But something is making our town flood every few months. Something like a huge expanse of land being cleared, timbered, and built on. And like I said, I don't know. But a lot of people who know more than I do are pointing to that huge shopping center on the outskirts of town (oddly enough, right near the area the Town Hall will be moving to, isn't that interesting?) as the cause of the flooding problems our town is having.

So who knows. Maybe WalMart won after all. Someone won, anyway. All I know is that today, our town lost.