February 3, 2017
In the dead of night when grave diggers
and trainmen earn their living butted SD45’s come to rest in the
ghost town of Govan: the crew has died on time. Many moons ago, a
thriving community with depot along the 1889 laid Central Washington
Railway, Govan is likewise dead save for three horizon-piercing
concreted and corrugated elevators; more abandoned homesteads than
inhabited; and flee-bitten, howling hounds that roam the channeled
scablands infinite. There is no light to see of where black
steam-belching-shovels had extracted sand nearby so vital to
constructing the railway but for the train’s temporal beam
searching the right-of-way and van lights with its relief crew
finding the 645’s breaking the damned silence, filling the coulees
like the prehistoric waters that flowed here with the industrious
sound of railroading that brought forth this place from nothing just
as it has sustained its agricultural significance even as the town
itself died. Eponymic of R.B. Govan, CWR’s construction engineer,
it is but a fly speck on modern Columbia Plateau cartography. Its
bustling business district incinerated in 1927, the sum 100 or so
residents faded into unrecorded history as Govan’s coup de grâce
came in ‘33: US 2 bypassing it by a half mile. The still-standing,
believed-haunted schoolhouse shuttered in ‘42; the post office in
‘67 about the time these EMD’s came to life. They’ll soon be in
rested hogger’s hands: he’ll crack the throttle breaking deeper
into the disquieting quietus as the six-thousand horses rare to pull
the slack out of so many drawbars bringing the train further west to
posit ravenous empties under grain-gorged spouts far and fewer
betwixt this place of shadows and dust, and the abbreviated “CW”
terminus, Coulee City. “Hiball!” The throaty roar and rhythmic
clickity-clack of steel wheels hitting jointed rail-ends Doppler as
the coupled procession disappears into the envelop of night like a
wandering poltergeist; its headlight pushes ahead into the unending
frozen darkness in search of the next grain-bearing elevator in an
all-but-forgotten community rousing the dead and still-living alike.
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