I expected broken windows, graffiti, boarded up doors, wall-engulfing vines, dilapidation, decay, and, yes, even the occasional tumbleweed.

After all, Goussainville Vieux Pays had been described by many writers as a ghost town. A flurry of recent articles told the dramatic story of the exodus that had happened forty years earlier.

The images and words painted a bleak picture. A once-thriving farming village had died—an innocent victim of the invasive noise of a new airport.

In the Flight Path

The quiet rural town just north of Paris landed in the flight path of Charles de Gaulle airport in 1974. Jets came and went every few minutes, shaking the walls of the village houses, breaking the silence. The residents began leaving the town.

Even the year before the airport opened, the fate of the town seemed sealed when a Russian Concorde prototype crashed into the village during the Paris Air Show, hitting several buildings, including an empty school, and killing all six people on board and eight people on the ground.

By the end of 1974, almost all of the residents had moved to a quieter (safer) location in neighboring towns and Paris itself.

Ghost Town: A Phantom Adventure

The “abandoned village” is where most of the writers and bloggers left the story, with photographs of the buildings artfully decomposing, a few structures appearing consistently in all the articles.

Armed with these backstories and visions of tumbleweed dancing in my head, I set out for Goussainville Vieux Pays a few weeks ago. I was ready to capture the essence of fantôme and decay, the sad story of human displacement at the expense of “progress.”

Media Spin

I was surprised to find something different from what the writers had led me to believe, a real-life example of the selective presentation by the media to dramatize a story.

There were parked cars, curtains and flower boxes in some of the windows, a bit of building construction, a working school, a bookstore stuffed to the brim, an occasional pedestrian, a beautifully maintained park . . . and no tumbleweeds (or at least they had been cleaned up in the daily trash pickup).

Granted, the town was less populated than most. There are no restaurants or markets (yet). And, it was true that many of the buildings that had been purchased by the airport authorities to compensate the townspeople had not been maintained.

Many were in disrepair, and the main manor house in town, owned by descendants of the early 1800s mayor, has evolved into a collapsing outer shell and rubble.

Life in Goussainville

The people who have come to live here are a special breed. They must live with the relentless sound of jets—every two minutes or so. And jet engines are loud, very loud.

“The planes don’t bother me,” said Monsieur Essel, a town maintenance worker who has lived in Goussainville for 26 years. “I don’t hear them much anymore.”

Nicolas Mahieu, the owner of the Goussainlivres, an antique Librarie (bookstore), doesn’t hear them either. The sound of heavy metal music amidst the stacks drowns out the jet engines.

And since people come to him from many miles away to bring him antique books or to buy from his special collection (in person or virtually), he doesn’t mind that there isn’t much foot traffic in Goussainville.

The Art of Traveling

I admit I was disappointed when I entered Goussainville and saw immediate evidence that it was not a ghost town.

I was upset with all those writers who had misled their readers “by omission” and painted a picture (with well-selected photos) that made their story more dramatic.

But, the art of traveling is based on being open to whatever you find. Or better still, traveling with no preconceptions.

Oh, I See

What I found was an interesting town—one that had its share of dramatic decay and photo ops, but one that was coming alive again.

The property prices are low (fixer-upper anyone?), the town is friendly, and, with the rate of air-travel-related strikes in France, there might be more moments of quiet than one might expect.