This time around the bars seem empty. They seem to linger on out of habit. Bars once packed with bullies, madmen and music are hollow and men gently jeer each other about golf. It's quite vile really, where has the public death gone? Was it recruited by meth and the alcoholics are now the toothless crazed squirmers we see at Starbucks? A fundamental aim of this trip was to go to dive bars. Maybe we are just in time. There is some sort of dive bar funeral pyre in this country; every time one of you corny motherfuckers Netflix and chills, a dive bar rots a little into the earth. A dive bar where an author should be sighing deeply, worrying they can't do this shit anymore. What the fuck am I talking about. The Bay Haven in Newport mocks all you Goddamned Instagram stars. Long after the milenials are old and boring (tomorrow), the Bay Haven will provide.
We walked a half mile down a closed road, past a closed boat launch with pad locked restrooms, down an over grown boat ramp to a wide prairie where Riffe lake once covered. It took about an hour of wandering the high grass and stopping to inspect jaw bones and intriguing pieces of metal and rock, but we found the remnants of the main street and bridge in town. Standing in the middle of the razed, abandoned and water worn rounded town, considering the mountains looming over head, it wasn't hard to relate to to folks who kicked stones and muttered 'good riddance' when they heard the town was to be inundated by the Mossy Rock dam in 1968. Kosmos, probably named by an optimistic homesteader whose few belongings included a bible seemed an apt name for the promise of the land in the 1880's. To a young woman or man in the 1950's, the mountains probably shrouded the overhead passing of Sputnik and seemed like walls denying a world rapidly changing and ent...