Galvin crop

When I was a kid, my parents would pile us into the back of the rent-a-wreck du jour, cross one of the bridges over the Cape Cod Canal and head into the wilds of “big cities” like New Bedford or Fall River on shopping excursions.

It was even more depressing than it sounds.

Staring out the back windows, we’d see the shells and skeletons of what once were clothing and shoe factories, warehouses, and neighborhoods tied to businesses that had lost battles to technology, or had been overtaken by overseas competitors.

This was long before it became the fashion to convert such buildings into boutique malls and retro condominiums.

The groundscape had given birth to alien, tangled plant life, some of which wrapped itself around the rusted iron beams, discarded furniture and various scattered body parts from living, breathing industry.

The air was filled with red dust and a threatening silence, and we’d stare mouths open at this vision of death — worried about what demons might lurk behind the broken windows and battered walls — and tried to think good thoughts to help the car get through it all without breaking down.

What we didn’t consider in the moment, being kids anticipating fast-food burgers as a reward for playing nice on such trips, was that we were looking at the remains of a way of life. A history that had outlived its time, reduced to memories and minutiae.

What brought this to mind the other day might not be that hard to guess.

I found myself walking past the twin white stucco buildings along North Fir Street that once housed the Muddy Tributary and, for a shorter while, the TV newsroom of KTVL.

Buildings once reverberating with the beat of information being gathered, processed, distributed and stored sit with the same eery silence as the abandoned shoe factories of my childhood.

The press which churned out Muted Trumpets until the apropos Friday the 13th of January sits still inside — without a crew to operate it, or the giant spools of paper that thread through its gears, or the patchwork array of parts scrounged from various sources that kept the operation running as we stood there silently hoping the run would finish without breaking down.

Across the street, the Escherian Palace of Stairwells, Hallways and Rarely Opened Doors houses the remnants of history — microfiche and clipped newsprint archives and the final few weeks of papers themselves, stacked or bound and gathering dust.

History, we believe with dewy romantic vision, is a living, breathing organism. It speaks to us and teaches us and, if we dare forget it, will kick us in the butt.

History can also disappear, a trick borne from disinterest and neglect.

While the name still adorns the outside of both buildings, it’s not difficult to imagine that, later or sooner, the shells and skeletons of the Meandering Trolley could find themselves converted — or worse — in the name of progress. Another apartment complex perhaps. Another parking lot.

Lost in nostalgia, I went looking for something else: An online echo from when those of us now here worked there.

“01001111 01001110 01000101 is the loneliest number,” a headline from this  previous existence, went into the search field … to no response, apparently having taken the wrong exit off the information superhighway.

The next search was more successful, but clicking this link to the past rendered a heart-stopping vision.

“Error 30 … no web server IP is defined”

When the same message appeared when plugging in www.muddytributary.com, the sense of loss was complete.

“How can I fix it?” The Error 30 page offers by way of assistance.

“If you are a visitor on this website,” it suggests, “please try again in a few minutes.”

I knew better. I knew that even if I powered down, unplugged, or performed a hard reboot, the Muted Trumpet website was not going to spring back to life.

Visiting it periodically over the past five months had been reassuring — finding former stories and such was like seeing old friends and former co-workers and knowing that within that relationship was a shared history with merit.

Now, though, the door to those archives was as shut tight as the microfiche, the clip files and the bound editions. Ghosts in some machine, no doubt, but inaccessible to those for whom January 13 meant the expiration of a living, breathing organism.

That history was, and remains, the Rogue Valley’s history — the region’s triumphs and defeats, the stories of people, places and events that brought us to this time and place.

Here, in the present, with the future yet to be written and the past now transcribed in invisible ink.