October 31, 2017
On the way home from work today, I
couldn’t resist breaking out my ne’er-without gear to work this
ephemeral, “General Purpose” sunset. Tied down at Espanola with a
string of CH’s gathered up from “High-Line” elevators the likes
of Harrington and Odessa and a few other, all but ghost towns with
station names in between, the “Scud” local with an A-B-A trio of
Geeps will need another crew to bring it into Yardley less than 25
mile poles east. Here, in Espanola, a hamlet of say 30-if-that
inhabitants, where Manila is the main and only “drag” that
crosses BNSF’s Columbia River Sub and disappears into an endless
field of dust; where the long since closed mercantile and post
office; a dilapidated motel and forgotten storehouse; the brick, now
renovated schoolhouse; a harvest-filled cluster of elevators and just
the other side of the right-of-way a concrete slab is all that
remains of the tiny section house complete with rails to tuck away a
speeder, one gets the sense that the place might have been a
microcosm of trade, travel, and teaching decades past. But like so
many start-up townsites that sprung up as railways like the Great
Northern built west in the late 1800’s, it has succumbed and
shriveled in the face of progress just as quickly as it sprung out of
the ground.
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