In our travels around the country we’ve noticed a disturbing trend regarding old buildings. They tend to fall down. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s one of those wooden, Northern Territorial designs found in remote Montana and Wyoming, or one of the adobe styles found in the desert areas of the Southwest, if you see an old building it is likely falling down. Due to the universality of this phenomenon we were sure Somethin’ bad must a happened.

We were puzzled by this and began comparing it to old buildings in Europe and other oddly foreign places where they’ve had old buildings for years and they don’t fall down. OK Some in upper England fall down and just lay around in a pile of rocks, but we chalked that up to the fact that they have VAT on everything over there.

Why then do ours fall down. We’re a lot smarter than they are. We’re better looking. We don’t have to suck up to royalty and aristocrats and other door knobs that hang out over there. What’s happening then. We build other good stuff that doesn’t fall down. Why are we archaeologically challenged?

We posed that question to a couple of archeologists we found scratching in the dirt along side the road. “Oh My Gosh!” they answered, “Really? Like falling down flat and stuff?” when we asked our question about deteriorating buildings. “Yes,” We said, “completely coming apart, totaled, like that motel room in Daytona you guys had over Spring break. Just a pile now.” They were speechless. We thought it was because they were overwhelmed by the social implications of our infrastructures disintegrating but it turned out they were struck dumb because they couldn’t figure out how we knew about the motel room in Daytona. Upon further questioning it turned out that they weren’t even archaeologists like we thought at all, but two college students collecting beer cans and trash along the road as part of a work release program. We thought those sticks with the nail in the end were an archaeologist’s tool but it was just standard State-issue roadside cleanup implements.

We then went straight to the horse’s mouth, or the archaeologists mouth in this case, and found real archaeologists at the University of Montana. We were not going to be fooled again by people that just looked like archaeologists but didn’t know archeology from a hole in the ground. These guys wore glasses, talked good, and had name tags that said Archeologist on them so we knew we had the real thing.

They were surprised and somewhat startled by our questions and it wasn’t until we began supplying them with photographic proof that they would venture an opinion. The older one, who we thought looked smarter and a lot like an archeologist that would be in the movies remarked that he could make some definite comments regarding the image above, and why there appeared to be some deterioration going on.

“Number one” he said in a deep resonant voice and a far away look in his eye, “was that whoever built this structure made one major mistake. They built it out of dirt, and to my trained eye, they used cheap dirt. Probably procured at rock-bottom prices at some low-end dirt retailer. Not to mention names, but perhaps someone like Dirt Depot. You can tell that by the fact”, he went on learnedly, removing his glasses for emphasis, “that the dirt didn’t cling together as it should have, there’s no clingy-ness or ‘adhesion’ to use an archeology word, and as a result it fell down. We don’t use dirt much these days in building for that simple reason. That and it is nearly impossible to find good quality building dirt anymore at a price someone who is willing to live in a dirt house will pay.”

“Number two, and this is very apparent if you look closely at the picture. Whoever the contractor was neglected to put a roof on the structure. This is of paramount importance when building any kind of building someone would live in or spend any time in. A roof keeps the weather from falling into the building from the top due to gravity. It stops it and sends it to the outer edges of the roof, which again to use an archeology word, is where the ‘eaves’ are located, and the weather, presumably moisture, drips off the top of the building onto the ground making a mess around the outside of the structure, but it does keep it off of the occupants inside and prevents it from soaking and saturating the walls, which has been proven by numerous tests will often make them collapse due to internal muddiness and loss of structural intent. It is my belief that is what happened here. No roof, muddiness ensued, building fell down. Pretty clear-cut to us trained in this kind of stuff.”

We had several more “Yeah, But…” questions but these were busy guys and soon they were off to do archeologist things in some god-forsaken wind-swept desolation that these guys like to hang out in. We yelled our thanks as they drove off in their jeep and one cheerfully waved a pick axe at us in farewell. We weren’t entirely convinced of our experts opinion but as we had no more time to spend on this problem and we were hungry we decided to do lunch. We passed by several restaurants built with this dirt type of construction for one that was made out of cinder blocks. We figured this was much less likely to fall down around our tacos than the dirt ones. If you are in the market for Western real estate we highly recommend a cinder block building or even a well made double-wide with tie-downs. You’ll be a lot happier a few years down the road.