Abandon

For the past couple of years my family has been coming to Silverton, CO for vacation.  It is honestly my favorite place on earth and one of my dreams is to be able to build or buy a house out here.  Its one of our favorite vacation spots and we enjoy hiking, four-wheeling, exploring the town, etc.  About two years ago we decided to tour the old jail which was really neat as it had far more than just the old jail.  At the end of the tour there was a gift shop that you could check out.  We ended up looking around for a bit and me being me, I zeroed in on the books.  The one that really caught my interest was titled Abandon.  Upon picking it up I found that it was fiction which really caught my interest.  The brief summary which revealed a story of a mining town where every one of its inhabitants disappeared on Christmas Day 1893 leaving behind all of their belongings, food on the table, etc. fascinated me especially as it went on to describe the group of people who went up to try unravel what happened on that fateful day in 2009.  As I began reading it I was immediately drawn in.  Naturally just as things started to get really interesting, my parents decided it was time to go and since I didn't have enough money to purchase the book, I had to leave it behind.

Two years later yesterday, I went back to the museum only to discover that they no longer had it and moreover, the lady behind the counter had never even heard of it.  But she was able to direct me to the public library, where the moment I mentioned that I was looking for a book titled Abandon, the librarian knew exactly what book I was looking for and promptly found it for me and gave it to me to read.  Between around 4:30 pm till 10:30 that night, I devoured that book.

When I had finished reading it, my mind was racing.  It had been one of the best books I had ever read, but it was also probably the most disturbing book as well.  The way the story came together, bouncing between 1893 and 2009 was fascinating.  It was probably one of the few books that did that where I haven't skipped one of the sections just to keep reading the one I was already reading.  Before I go any further though, I will say that I do not recommend this book for anyone else to read simply because it is so disturbing and I know that I will have difficulty sleeping for a while after reading it now.  Moving on, the reason it was so disturbing wasn't because it was anything paranormal and thus scary in that sense which honestly was what I was expecting.  What made it so disturbing was the idea that the events in this book could truly happen.

I won't give you a complete synopsis of the book but essentially what it turns into in the 2009 parts is a treasure hunt for the lost gold of Abandon.  And by the end of the book, nine people are dead as a result of this treasure hunt because they were murdered or, in one case, committed suicide out of despair.  Nine people dead all because of the love of gold.  In the 1893 parts, six people end up dead as a result of two greedy men trying to acquire the gold and then hide it and a young mute woman ends up with no limbs due to the greed of the doctor treating her.  Again, what made this so disturbing was the fact that this could happen, that there truly are people in the world like this, who are willing to do anything for a couple million dollars.  And at the end of the book that's what had my head spinning, the realization of that, of how sinful we as human beings can be.  It also brought to mind 1 Timothy 6:10:  "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil..."  The love of money that several of the characters had led them to threaten, beat, mutilate, and even kill other characters in their desire to find the gold.  Having never had that kind of love for money, it was inconceivable to me how they could do those things to other human beings, much less how they could imagine living with themselves after doing such things.

The other part that I found disturbing was how Abandon's inhabitants disappeared seemingly without a trace, only in 2009 to be found locked in a mine, all of them dead from starvation and lack of water.  And though that was horrifying enough, the fact that they were locked in the mine by the town's preacher took it to a whole new level.  And again that escalated upon discovery that he thought it was the will of God for him to do such a thing.  Not stopping there though, he proceeded to murder two more people and helped a little girl he adopted who had been accidentally left behind to murder one man and almost kill a young woman as well.  And, again, the horrifying part was that he thought he was doing the will of God in all of this.  Upon witnessing two murders committed by the men who originally stole the gold, and finding that it was gold that had prompted six murders in one day, the preacher was overcome with grief, horror, and rage.  "All this for gold," he says in disbelief.  And it was after this that he believed it was God's will for him to punish the town by falsely claiming that Indians were attacking and the people needed to take cover in the mine, where he locked them in to die a slow death.  It was also sad to slowly watch this young man dissolve into madness.  Perhaps the one reason I found this part slightly less horrible than the murders surrounding the hunt for the gold was that he truly hated what he was doing and he was sorry for it at least until he began to go mad whereas the gold hunters had no pity or human decency.

Though these two events took up much of the book, there were other parts that were sweet and happy.  Possibly one of my favorite parts, though incredibly sad was at the end, as one of the women left in the mine is dying, she sees her husband, who was killed by the two gold thieves, and he tells her that soon they'll see their son who had died several years back.  When she tells him to go on ahead of her, he refuses, telling her that he'll wait for her.  Despite the sadness that this woman is dying in one of the worst ways you can die, this part is so sweet, that her husband won't go on without her.  I love that.

And so despite the fact that this book has truly shaken me and certainly made me think a lot, its nice to have that silver lining of sorts, a glimmer of sweetness and love that helps to keep the darkness from engulfing all else.