Cairo revisited
A road trip crisis summons a convo with rural documentarian Chris Harden
One week ago, late on a Friday night, I found myself on a stretch of I-57 in southern Illinois when my gas light began to glow. No problem. I was on an interstate. Gas stations abounded. But when I searched for gas on Google Maps, the results were grim: the closest station was 37 miles away.
I weighed my options as I churned north at 70 mph. Should I keep plowing up the highway and pray the 86 octane gas I bought in Oklahoma would keep me going for 37 miles? That seemed like a long shot. Or should I take the next exit at Cairo, IL, and search for a small station that had somehow eluded Google’s algorithm?
Then it hit me. I’d been to Cairo before … kind of. I’d seen the town in a YouTube video created by a former radio guy named Chris Harden. Harden’s eponymous channel documents the unsung towns of America with car-mounted GoPros and hard-boiled narration. The video I’d seen was titled, “Is THIS the SADDEST Town in America?” It portrayed Cairo as a bleak, desperate sundown town.
I swallowed hard and took the exit anyway.
As I floated down the dark main drag of Cairo, I saw ramshackle convenience stores and groups of men loitering beneath sodium lights. But no gas stations. Which in my heart of hearts, I already knew. Because Chris Harden told me so.
“Cairo is a place I've been fascinated with for a long time,” Harden told me when I talked to him in late 2021. (Our conversation was intended for the Talking Documentary podcast but didn’t quite fit the format.) “I was fascinated by the fact that Cairo used to be a bustling city … it once had a ton of people living in it and now it’s just getting empty.”
Documenting towns like Cairo is Harden’s passion. It started as a hobby, evolved into a pandemic side hustle, and now is Harden’s job as a full-time YouTube creator. Rural anthropology might seem a curious pasttime for a guy in his 20s. Harden is normal enough to be married yet strange enough to spend weekends crisscrossing the streets of places like Keokuk, IA and Nicodemus, KS. (My kind of strange, mind you, but strange nonetheless.)
“When I was bored as a teenager, if I wasn't looking up sports stuff, I’d be looking up stuff on a map just out of curiosity, “ Harden said. “There are a lot of towns scattered across America that people just don't know about. And nobody's making videos about these places on YouTube. My channel is a library of all of those places.”
Harden’s work is gripping for a person like me: nerdy, curious, and a lover of things forgotten and unloved (which describes many towns in the middle of America). So it stands to reason that Harden’s journeys through crumbling heartland towns provide a strange dopamine rush. But these videos are not travelogues … not by a long shot. You won’t see shots of parks or glittering hotels. Instead, you’ll see a locked-off shot from Harden’s car as it weaves up and down ordinary American streets. The sights to be seen here are a chubby shirtless guy mowing his lawn. Or an abandoned gas station. Or a collapsing shed. This is America writ small.
Harden’s tours are simple, prosaic and wholly satisfying. The America he explores is the America you don’t see in the media. It’s the America of Fake It So Real, Robert Greene’s excellent documentary on small-town wrestling.
I should note that Harden understands the nature of what he’s capturing. Yes, these towns are fascinating (urban decay is catnip to a certain set, as the 1.38 million subscribers of Proper People will attest). But for many towns Harden visits, the future looks bleak. These are towns laid low by economic forces beyond their control and that may never reclaim past glory.
To capture these complicated backstories, Harden researches each town and adds a narrative track to provide historical context. Harden doesn’t spin these places into something they’re not. His commentary is blunt and unsparing.
“I know from living in southern Indiana that drugs are a huge problem in every rural area in America,“ he said. “It just is. It's destroying a lot of hope that these places can have in the future. It will be interesting to see how many of these towns still have a population close to their peak 40 years from now.”
Documenting small towns is no passing fancy for Harden. His channel features 285 videos as of April 2023, and he claims he’s in this for the long haul. “It's turned into a thing where I'm trying to go everywhere in this country and I think it's possible. It's an ambitious goal but I think it's definitely possible.”
I hope he gets there. As a lover of back roads and small towns, I find Harden’s work reassuring. It honors the existence of rural America. Without small towns, America would be different country. And a lesser one.
BTW, I did find gas the night of my “second” Cairo visit. I had to cross the terrifyingly narrow Cairo Ohio bridge into Kentucky and eventually ran into a station near Wickliffe, KY. Inside, I found the weary owner mopping the floor. He shooed me away from the bathroom. “I just sprayed bleach in there,” he said with a shrug.
Harden hasn’t chronicled Wickliffe just yet. But give him time.
Had a similar experience in Cairo. I crossed in from Kentucky close to sundown when the mists from the Missouri and Mississippi overrun the whole place. Eeriest town I’ve ever seen. I managed to roll on to Cape Girardeau for gas. Lovely article.