Somehow, I am from Thurber, Montana...
Sometimes I wish it did, so I could dramatically leave it behind, with all it’s terrible beauty and hard fought life lessons, taught by tough but fair, larger than life characters of the over ripe American West. I wish I could say I came from there, and fled in my late adolescence in a stolen Buick Riviera and never looked back, but I didn’t. I invented it, like a fictional city in a novel, except Thurber is 1/87th scale plastic. Thurber is a HO Scale model railroad town that has haunted me, in several incarnations, for over fifty years. It is the place I wish I had grown up in. It is the place I wish I could leave, but instead it seems it is the to where I have returned, in the sunset of my life, to make some kind of amends. Its difficult to leave the small minded, shitty little town you imagined that you outgrew, when it can stay dormant in an actual physical box in your attic for over 20 years and emerge directly into your frontal lobes like a hit of crystal Meth.
Thurber has a population of roughly two hundred. Most of the buildings in the small downtown are old, from the 1890s or early 1900’s, and while updated, their charm is intact. A block of brick two story buildings, squat next to the main street, (actually Montana Highway 51, Thurber's connection to the rest of the world) their store fronts are mostly silent. Dean’s Cafe and Lounge still manages to open for the lunch crowd and if there is interest, for happy hour. The city hall/police station is newer, probably 1930’s and sits squat in it’s utilitarian pride across the road from the 1960’s interloper, the Food Giant grocery store with it’s garish lights and signs. At the end of the block is the heretic- a 1980-’s KFC. The main economic powerhouse of the community sits down by the train tracks, - Superior Knob and Hinge- two old, hulking red brick warehouse and factory buildings, smokestacks and with – commerce happening, trucks loading. Behind Superior Knob and Hinge is a chaotic auto wrecking yard and homeless encampment. A too idyllic small church sits downtown off an alley. Somber old homes huddle conspiratorially up the hill. A water tower declares the towns name and zipcode. A train station constructed by a dead dad completes downtown. A vertical cliff leads up a plaster and paper mache Mount Wyola, covered in brush and trees, and violated by a train tunnel. Thurber really is a place to me. And that’s a quandary.
I brought most of it down from the Siberian gulag of my attic in my 64th year of my existence, during the second reign of the mad orange King. I felt very keenly, the need for the reassurance and peace of my old town. In as much as I have invented myself as an adult, I guess, I really feel like I am from Thurber, MT. How I got to this point is a depressing short story in itself. As a lonely, weird and creative kid, suffering the loss of a parent, model railroading saved me. As an adolescent not fitting in it was a crutch that made me feel like I was part of something. Then as a new father, terrified of the future and my responsibilities, it was the building of a safe community for me and my family, if only in miniature. Now, hopefully as an old man watching the real world start to burn at the edges, it may be an escape. The total invention of a community that is in some ways perfect and accepting, is also ultimately a 3-d miniature rorschach test of your needs and desires, and probably about your inherent and undiscussed bias. It’s a hobby with a minefield attached.
As I look out over this literally small town, that I have rearranged a hundred times like any good civil engineer and obsessive fiddler, I have both a quiet satisfaction in my home town and a strange contempt for it and myself for not engaging in the real world. Its a problem. Best to give you the whole history here. I grew up in the late sixties and early seventies, semi-rural. Our house was down a quarter mile driveway and fairly isolated. My siblings were all older, the next older than me by eight years, I was the youngest and a mistake, but much loved. I had no nearby friends to play with, so I developed weird obsessions. I studied the US Presidents. I made elaborate paper sculptures of them and other famous Americans (don’t call them “dolls”-my artistic bent made me susceptible to being called “faggot”, a terrifying moniker for the era, more on that later). I washed out of the Cub Scouts due to inherent awkwardness (possibly laziness as well). Little league was interesting but I was the kid picked last on any sport. Being sort of strange and emotional, I figure I was a challenge to my parents who probably hoped they were past this trying part of child rearing before I arrived. Maybe as therapy, my Dad got me interested in model railroading. I think he really wanted to build a full on HO Scale rail road but needed his 10 year old son as a beard, or possibly he just saw me flailing socially and decided to do something, but my hobby was born. We collected train cars and engines, experimented with track layouts on our pool table, and built models together. It was a great time for me. My dad was a fun adult to be around. We decided to build on a standard 4’x8’ sheet of plywood in the “REC room” of our basement. About a year into the build, my dad died. Eleven years old, lost and grieving, I carried on. The layout exploded to 11 feet x 5 feet. When we moved after dad died, we had to find a house big enough for the “damn train set.” We moved to a suburban neighborhood and my train became another weird millstone around the neck of an uncoordinated and mercurial nerd. Hobby shops were my happy place. My town was built and torn apart. I would go though periods of intense involvement working on it, followed by months of trying to pretend I never heard of it, ashamed that I had spent so much time on it. The new friends I made thought it briefly pretty cool and then really nerdy, and then it would quickly become a joke or insult. Looking back, my train and town was like a beloved dog that I would kick until it ran off, only for me to welcome it home again, with it willing to take me back without reservations. The train went into storage and the main layout was destroyed when I was in college. Boxes of ‘train stuff” followed me into marriage, stacked in storage units and eventually our basement. After the birth of our first son, terrified of the future, the awkward kid I once was demanded his town back. I rebuild Thurber in my basement, better than ever. I realized something by then, what this hobby was and wasn’t and what it meant to me.
My college degree is in Film and Television. Orson Welles memorably called movies “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.” Keith, a filmmaker friend, actually made a short film (partially inspired I think by my post fatherhood train layout) about two men who worked different shifts at a hobby shop, with an in house train set, with conflicting views of their ideal town they wanted to live in. One man had very staid conservative views (much like my town) and one had wild, fairly hilarious views and they were constantly changing the layout to suit them selves. Curiously it prophetically predicts the Red-Blue divide of America by at least a decade. Filmmaking is a very similar creative world making, though very much a collaborative and very expensive one. My wife Laurie and I made a feature film “Milk of Amnesia“ before the post natal train set. It was a semi failure that lead to much self examination and some regret. The need to re-create the world to control perfectly instead of repairing or improving some small piece of the tangible, flawed, uncontrollable real world is ultimately escapism as cure for isolation. I still love films, and thought that in my imminent retirement I would again direct a feature but the expense and relative epic grandeur of film making in comparison to the infinitesimal town of Thurber makes me hesitate. Never say never, Who would have guessed I would have drug my childhood down from the attic? A movie is immersive in ways trains can never be but its hard to live in a movie they way you can inhabit a train set. There was a classic Twilight Zone episode where a man and a woman wake up in a town occupied by lifeless manikins and staged perfect houses with a self driving train circling the town. Of course they are earthlings captured to be in an alien child’s train set. Same idyllic perfection and unchallenged patriarchal values on display.
The name “Thurber” comes from a friend of my dad, Roy Thurber, a large, chain smoking, out spoken man with a buzz cut, thick black rimmed eyeglasses and was the first person to give me an actual dollar bill for my birthday. Roy and his wife Louise were regular visitors to our house. My dad thought Roy was hilarious. Roy and my dad were both WWII veterans and much of their conversation was about that time of their young lives. I remember Roy and my dad cleaning handguns at the kitchen table. Later I found out that visiting my parents was pretty much the entirety of Roy and Louise social life. Roy seemed like a fine specimen of vanishing American to name an imaginary village after. I think he would have been pleased. As for Montana, I am a proud graduate of Montana State University the only film school in America where you can minor in horse shoeing. Montana of the 1980s seemed fairly magical, and filled with smart funny people. Now it seems to be full of angry people who blame a litany of others for their problems while their state has been parceled into vacation homes for costal elites. Where else could Thurber have been?
My interest in miniatures actually predates my interest in model railroading. My parents and grandparents would take me to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle once a year or so. It’s a great museum, filled with oddities and strange exhibits. One corner had the most amazing doll house with the most anal compulsive recreation of reality I have ever seen. It was like a fever dream. There were mercifully no dolls in evidence, jut a two story, open walled, turn of the century mansion with exquisite, perfect miniature furniture and furnishings. The absolute and precise scale and functionality of the furniture and the table ware and the linens was mind blowing. Even thinking about it now, fifty five or so years later it captures my imagination. It was amazing, and I would always spend much of my visit to the museum gawking at it instead of the exhibits on lumber mills or famous local sports stars of the past. However I knew it was wise not to linger, and leave before I was missed. Even as a small child I was careful not to show too much interest, as it was a “doll house” and the inevitable label of faggot or sissy lay like an open bear trap nearby. I remember that feeling with great sadness now, knowing that bullies have made so many lives unlivable, sometimes through nothing more than name calling. Other kids had it worse and I do not want equate my mild terror at being labeled with the shocking treatment I watched kids endure in those days. I sincerely hope the victims found their own imaginary towns.
I have long been drawn to absorbing hobbies that require commitment to building something, and once having it presentable and reasonably perfected, I let it sit as some kind of totem. With the achievement done I loved to just look back at it and not touch it again. Even though I am just a noise maker on a guitar, I made two electric guitars that sit around catching dust (they were a gas to build, and sound great.) In my driveway sits a pretty nice 1981 Chevy El Camino, with a very interesting art paint job. It runs great and I could tinker on it endlessly but it sits because it reached it’s hobby plateau and because gas is approaching $6 a gallon. My most rewarding artistic endeavor by far is my painting. Untrained and pretty much devoid of obvious natural talent, I have been painting for the better part of forty years. It too however is a victim of, once it’s painted, it goes on the pile and is never seen again. Trains seem almost like a better bet for satisfaction.
I do have a confession. While seeing the low tech, post industrial vision of a tiny locomotive hauling box cars in circle does inspire some kind of strange glee in me, echoing burn outs with my El Camino, its the civil engineering and creation of the town thats the thing for me. Its admittedly a sacrilege. The town is really supposed to be the supporting player, in service of the small electric marvels on the tracks. But the ghost of the Museum of History and Industry dollhouse feebly makes its self clear. It’s like only enjoying baseball for the uniforms. This time I am not spending much time on the intricate track layouts, basically it’s going to be all Thurber.
Creating a weird, time warp city, in a bubble is probably weird. The strange escapist vibe is undeniable but also very attractive. It’s a place you can fully understand and control. It can be any era or temperament. I think in my town it’s 1979 and its mid May. I have picked the house I would live in. I know that would go to Dean’s Cafe for happy hour. I would drive the 1955 green Ford pickup. My life would have a pleasing beginning, middle and end. Is that so wrong? My friend John had an intricate fantasy life in the years after his wife Lorraine died. John went through a world building fantasy involving the 1950’s actress Beverly Garland and the almost forgotten TV show “Decoy: Police Woman” from 1957-58. Decoy was shot on location in New York, where John is from. John would spend hours on Google maps searching out the locations of each shot. He developed a character for himself (an Asian American Police Photographer) and a relationship with Beverly Garland’s character. His fantasy, was intricate and frankly, sort of heartbreaking. It helped get him through a rough time. It’s not so weird to retreat into a world that you can control the wild variables of life. It’s possibly even helpful. I took control of Thurber and turned a 1920’s brick building into the ”Manchurian Dragon” Chinese Restaurant and Jazz Club- a cool hipster dive bar for John ( I told him Beverly Garland could be the bartender.) Dean’s Cafe is inadvertently named for my brother, who’s name I could spell from leftover signage letters. I named the wrecking yard “Wild Bill’s” after my other brother. My wife has a cool thrift shop downtown. I am adapting the town to hold my real people. Hey, if I gotta live there…
Still, I find myself, at times, embarrassed by my exuberance at the project; like I am dressing BRATZ dolls at the apocalypse. I will go up to the train set, four and five times a day and “putter” productively for an hour at a time and every time I will reach a maximum tolerance and flee quickly, like I was exposed to radioactivity. It is possible that I am still channeling the shame of my youth for my hobby, or that I am some how connected to my father’s unfinished business with it, I don’t know. Something about it, makes me feel very dislocated from reality, as I very perfunctorily add new features to Thurber.. It hurts a little. It feels vaguely like looking at porn or something, a highly forbidden thing that I need to apologize for, profusely. A frivolous idiocy. I sent a photo of “Wild Bill’s Auto Salvage” to my brother, and he immediately understood and appreciated his placement. He, being a Bernie bro, I added a “Fuck Trump-make America normal again“ banner to his sign, but I couldn’t help wondering how the other residents of Thurber might react. I am 64 years old, I am long past giving a goddamn shit what other people think, but in Thurber...It might be different. What might imaginary people think? Have I brought the real world crashing into Eden? Is that a bad thing, or is that exactly what is missing?
My concerns about my obsession so far are outweighed but the sheer joy the craft has brought me. That can’t be bad right? Well, maybe. You probably have thought, “oh, this old guy has a retro weird hobby, and that’s nice in a ‘Parade Magazine’ kind of way’” but I kind of feel that doesn’t tell the whole story. I feel both guilty and in a hurry to get this finished. It’s like I am not fully in charge. My son asked me today how things were going in the studio and I told him it was like laying in the fetal position and screaming. I feel in a rush. Nothing is as perfect as I would like but I can’t stop myself from pushing on. My history has inertia. The image of my dad patiently helping his awkward youngest son with a train set haunts me like no imaginary town could ever could. It’s a growing singular obsession, with the requisite perfectionism and frustrations but, more importantly, it is an opportunity to complete a task started when I was 10, and I don’t want to make it a crisis. I have moved the town, not yet a fully functional layout, up to my tiny painting studio, away from my wife and family, where it somehow feels less of a burden to normal family life and hopefully not like hiding bottles of liquor to an alcoholic. I am really enjoying my time with it. I am fully aware that I am creating an unattainable fantasy, like a caterpillar creates a cocoon. That might be unhealthy, it also might save me, the way it did in my childhood.
I am not from Thurber, MT.
Thurber, MT is from me.
