When I was a boy, my father told me a story about a ghost town. I come from northern Maine, Aroostook County, a place of endless trees and potato fields with more deer than people. It's lonely country, a place of long, quiet, windswept vistas, of dark temples in the forest, of a world not yet destroyed by the endless march of human industry. Not yet. To be clear, I had heard my share of ghost stories - my sister had even seen the spirit of my grandmother standing at the foot of her bed, watching over her. I know because I awoke to her screaming. We lived with the idea of the Holy Ghost, the idea that life did not end with death, that life is but a walking shadow of the world and times to come. Once, when I was 17, I came face to face with a full body apparition. I'm still not sure what that was. But when my father told me of the ghost town, it was a horse of a different color. It wasn’t the remnant or memory of a person - no, it was an entire place, lost and forgotten, like a ghost but not a ghost. You can’t hang out and linger with a ghost, but a ghost town? Maybe it was the next, best thing.  “The clay there is red,” he told me. “That’s how you’ll know you’re there. It lies next to the river. It was a whole settlement, with a general store, homes, you know…A while back some folks dug there for clay to make ceramics with. Reddest clay you ever saw. Like blood. Not much left now, just a couple of old foundations and an old, broken down church from what I remember when I went there as a kid.  It’s not far away,” he told me, “just over the hill and down by the river, a hidden place. No one goes there anymore. It used to be called Dow Siding. There’s a road, but it’s hard to find. Mostly grown over. More like a path” he told me, “but be careful. Don’t go there alone.”  That was my old man, for you. Tell your boy about a ghost town, give him the rough coordinates, and then tell him not to go. So when there came a day when I didn’t have any real adult supervision, I hopped on my little Yamaha Mini-Enduro 60 and headed up through the field roads, over Buck Hill and down to the Aroostook River to search for a road that I hoped…man, I hoped for dear life that it existed.  It did. It took me half the day to find it, past people’s homes, down along fields even the farmers didn’t plow anymore, a patch of earth no one thought worthy of visiting. But there I was, going back and forth in a search pattern until…what was that? A pair of ruts in a tiny clearing? A pathway mostly overgrown with raspberry vines and thistle? Slowly, I drove the little bike through the thicket, dodging low hanging branches that cut at my face. Through squinting eyes, an opening appeared and then, a cleared area in the forest, something you only ever saw if it was a farmer’s field. This was not a field, but a half acre of land cleared years ago by forgotten hands and still, the woody root and red alder hadn’t been able to reclaim all of it. There were the remains of a building, very likely the church my father saw when he was a boy, all a pile of ruins. There were bits and pieces of metal, a wagon wheel, an ancient rusted hand pump resting at an angle in the ground. There were fieldstone foundations just peeking up through the undergrowth and, as I recall, a rosebush more full of blossoms than I had ever seen before. Someone had planted that rose, I thought. Someone had lived here, children had grown up here, men had risen early in the morning to keep the fires burning in the coldest winters imaginable. I got off my dirt bike and walked into the middle of the clearing. I could see where someone had dug into the side of a hill and, sure enough, the clay there was fine and as red as the dust of Mars. Someone had come back for it, as my father had told me, but even they eventually left this place alone. I stood there and listened for a long while. A silence fell, a kind of weight covering everything I co