Into the Back of Beyond

We found it where the logging roads give up,
where maps grow vague and compasses uncertain,
in that fold of Northern Wisconsin
where even the trees forget their names.

An abandoned farm.

Not picturesque in its decay—
no careful ruin for photographers—
but genuinely forgotten,
released from memory’s claim.

The barn leans like a question
the forest has stopped asking.

The house, its windows gone,
breathes the same air inside as out,
no longer holding anything at bay.

We stand at the edge of the clearing—
if clearing it still is,
for the forest has been patient,
has waited with the certainty of moss,
and now reclaims what was briefly borrowed.

This is the back of beyond.

Not dramatic distance—
no desert’s vast indifference,
no mountain’s stark refusal—
but quiet, vegetative forgetting.

The kind of remoteness
that happens slowly,
one failed harvest at a time,
one child who doesn’t return,
one winter too hard to survive.

Until the last light in the window
goes dark for good,
and no one notices.

Because this is also the back of beyond:
the place past noticing.

We walk the property lines—
if property it still is—
where rusted fence posts lean
like old men remembering
what they were meant to guard.

Here, a root cellar,
its door collapsed inward,
darkness pooling in its throat.

There, an orchard of seven apple trees,
gnarled and unattended,
still blooming each spring
for no one.

Their fruit falls to the forest floor,
feeds the deer, the bears,
enters a different economy
than the one that planted them.

This is what happens
at the back of beyond:
purpose dissolves.

Things continue,
but without their stories.

We wonder about the people.

Not their names—those are lost—
but their dailiness.

The path from house to barn,
walked ten thousand times
in all weathers,
now indistinct as a rumor.

The porch where someone sat
watching evening settle,
now collapsed into its own contemplation.

Did they know,
that last day,
that it was the last?

Or did they leave expecting to return,
the way we all leave expecting to return,
until we don’t?

The back of beyond
is not where we choose to go.

It’s where we end up
when returning becomes impossible.

But there is something here
beyond forgetting.

A stillness that is not emptiness.

A silence that listens.

We feel it in the clearing—
not menace,
not welcome,
but a kind of neutral watching.

As if the place itself
has become conscious
in its abandonment,
aware in ways it wasn’t
when it was occupied.

The forest knows this farm now
more intimately than those who cleared it.

Roots have found the cellar stones,
wrapped around them like memory,
like possession.

The barn’s fallen roof
feeds new growth—
birch saplings rising from decay,
their white bark glowing
in the understory’s dim light.

This is the work of the back of beyond:
transformation without witness.

The slow conversion
of human meaning
into something older,
something that does not require us.

And yet we cannot name it empty.

For what is emptiness
in a place so full of time?

Every beam and board
holds decades of weather,
of sun and snow and patient rot.

Every stone in the foundation
remembers the hand that set it,
even if we don’t.

The well still holds water.

The apple trees still bloom.

Something persists
at the back of beyond—
not human, not entirely,
but not nothing.

A presence made of absence.

A fullness made of loss.

We think of all the backs of beyond,
scattered across the landscape:

The towns that disappeared
when the highway bypassed them.

The one-room schools
where no children come.

The churches with congregations of ghosts.

The farms like this one,
surrendered to the patient green.

Each one a small apocalypse,
quiet and local,
the end of a world
that was never large
but was complete.

And we wonder:
Is this where we’re all going?

Not dramatically,
not all at once,
but slowly,
one departure at a time,
until there’s no one left
who remembers the path from house to barn,
the taste of those apples,
the name of the dog
who barked at strangers?

Until we, too, become
the back of beyond—
not gone,
but integrated into something
that no longer needs our story?

We leave as evening comes.

The forest accepts the darkness easily,
has always known it.

Behind us, the farm settles deeper
into its forgetting,
or its remembering—
we can no longer tell the difference.

The logging road back
is harder to find than it was.

As if the forest, having shown us,
now suggests we not return.

And we understand:
the back of beyond
is not a place we visit.

It’s a place that visits us,
slowly,
inevitably,
the way moss visits stone,
the way silence visits sound,
the way forgetting visits all our careful meanings.

We carry it with us now,
that abandoned farm,
that patient forest.

Carry the knowledge
that somewhere,
always,
the back of beyond is waiting—

not hostile,
not welcoming,
just waiting,
with the certainty of roots,
with the patience of decay,
for everything we build
and everything we are
to finally come home.