Alpaugh Arrival

We arrived at Alpaugh, CA at approximately 1:52:40 PM on Friday, February 5th, but it feels like we showed up 3 weeks ago. The idea behind leaving on Friday was that we could have a weekend to orient ourselves and get to know the neighborhood. It didn’t take long. The town sign of Alpaugh read 608 residents (down from the previously mentioned total.) Coming from the New Lebanon metropolis, I thought that I would have a feeling for small towns. I was way off.

Alpaugh is, by first impressions, the scariest place I have ever been to (rivaled only by the end of the Blue Metro line in Budapest.) It’s an eerie town placed in the middle of endless farmlands. The first thing to see is the shanties that house the residents, broken down trailer homes with piles of junk strewn about the front yards. There is one, I repeat, one intersection in Alpaugh, a 4-way stop sign smack dab in the middle. On one corner is the Alpaugh grocery, a fairly sizable building with lovely potential. Its faded name on the side of the building, peeling paint, and unpaved parking area, however, lay claim to its truly dilapidated state. The K-12 school is kitty corner to the grocery store. The Alpaugh Unified School District’s only school lies on an expansive plot of land relative to the size of Alpaugh itself, but there’s something eerie about it, too. The fields are all rough and patchy. Weeds spurt out of the sides of the cement track that surrounds the overgrown football field. I don’t know how many kids attend the school, but I know that the classes are doubled and tripled up. For example, one classroom may serve as 4th, 5th and 6th grade. Again, the paint is faded. I think that’s what makes the place so eerie, everything looks like it was painted on 2 decades ago and not been touched since. Nothing is fresh.

Stray dogs are the greatest indicator that Alpaugh is an actual ghost town. On our first drive in we passed a platoon of stray dogs rambling around the center of town (the 4-way stop). Turning down our road we encountered a dead beagle lying right along the side of the road, and before we could finish displaying our horror at this atrocity, the side of the slowly moving van was attacked by some kind of collie. We sped by it of course, but that first impression left its mark. Alpaugh has a dog issues. We now take care of one pup we named Maggie, a little weiner dog that adopted our back porch. 2 more retriever type dogs come and go, but we give them food when they are here.

The house itself is magnificent relative to what I assumed all my dwellings would be. Walking in the backdoor (which is really the main entrance but still gets relegated to backdoor status), there is a spacious living room with wood flooring that is separated from the tile floor kitchen by a tile L-shaped countertop. Actually, screw this it’s not worth trying to explain how the house looks. But I’m in an average sized bedroom with 2 bunk beds sleeping alongside two other guys. Just the way I like it. The kitchen is meant for a king. There is a projector that we can connect to a computer, enabling DVD watching and video game playing. No cell service or internet though. Can’t have it all. So don’t try and text me, I won’t answer (sometimes if the wind blows right I’ll get a bar.)