Fare Thee Wells & Hand Me Downs

Krueger Road was a six lane window into a community’s metamorphosis: doctor’s offices and oversized convenience stores seemed to be multiplying faster than the white tailed deer that were a constant nuisance in the area The past however, still had a visible, if slipping grip. Mega church here, half dry stock tank there. Expensive new apartments that borrowed the rustic look of their facade from the barn and cattle chutes just across the property line. Optometrist office and spa next to the “Indian fortune teller” in a dilapidated wood frame house. Elm and live oak studded flood plains along creek beds that would never be suitable building locations; offering the last bit of refuge to the wildlife that was quickly being squeezed out of the rest of the realm. Down where the 6 lanes dropped to four near the high school, in the mountain cedars and swaying tall brown grass you could hear the bitter spirit of resentment and loss, stirring and squalling every time a relic of the rural past was lost to the city. An outpatient surgery clinic with an abandoned stone farmhouse for a neighbor...“I’ve heard of that place, what was it?” They knocked it down years ago but it was just like this old set of ruins on the other side of the park here back in the woods, the Kruger House, you know that old dump the town keeps saying they’re going to restore, but on a different road out of the city. Both of those were wagon trails then highways on the way up to all those little German towns up in the hills. They were stagecoach stops a hundred and whatever years ago, then stores, then taverns, then ice houses, then spooky places for kids to tear up and get drunk in, and cause trouble.”The Kruger House sat back off the main commercial thoroughfare that ran through Panther Creek. The town had high hopes of one day turning it into the showcase of their quaint little village but for now it was still a boarded up, fenced off “we’ll get to it one of these days when we have more money in the budget” dreams. Around it the rest of Panther Creek was a mostly unassuming suburb that had gone to great lengths to create and maintain a small town vibe to distinguish it from the metropolis that surrounded it on all four sides. Their old fashioned 4th of July parade and bash, which Angie and Mrs. Juleg were busy cleaning up after, and the mom and pop shops and restaurants, the park and little league fields all made for an admirable facade tacked onto the reality that it was mostly just a neighborhood within the big city that had long since swallowed it up. Most of the people who lived here now had no connection to its history beyond driving on the streets named for the original rural settlers of the area. They were regular folks with regular jobs: they worked in the medical center or the Air Force base or the giant banking corporate campus a few miles away and came home to their quiet neighborhood every night to water their lawns and walk their dogs. The residents ranged from blue collar to upper middle class with seemingly no real poor folks (or at least they were hidden well) nor any real upper crust to speak of. Throughout the town, woven between neighborhoods was a series of “hike and bike trails” that were really just drainage ditches and dry creek beds that were kept mowed short that wound around and somehow all eventually ran together and down into the creek from which the town took its name. Panther Creek was in turn named for the mountain lions that, before the city moved in, once supposedly frequented this area; where the hills to the north and west faded into the plains to the south and the east. The lions started moving out when the wagon loads of white settlers started moving in in the 1850’s…

Panther Creek (Excerpt)