“The return to Nolan County”
‘Missa pro defunctis’ moans in rhythmic replay for the sunset service---
We shall light a candle in vigil---
And genuflect once again among the roadside grasses and windblown tufts of cotton.
Time has rolled by, perhaps incrementally as the universe knows it---
A procession of progress that has, in itself, left things behind in its wake---
Once-useful things that have succumbed to migration and evolution and necessity---
And, quite possibly, destiny.
Yet, the more that things change, the more they stay the same.
In the whir of 11R22.5 Bridgestones and Michelins pressured up to 110psi, the commerce of a nation rushes past at 75 mph, the violent slipstream and attendant vortex of disturbed air drowning out the Gregorian-like chant of the countless turbine blades farmed across the South Plains of Texas, their tips themselves rushing through the air at speeds reaching 70. Load-locked securely within the 4,050 interior cubic feet of our 53-foot XTRA Lease trailer ride the items of Everyday America; staples to feed, clothe, and shelter a nation, and to satiate the consumption appetite of a population---
Barbie Doll cars and X-Boxes and wide-screen TVs; Wrangler jeans and shirts, quite possibly loomed of fibers harvested from the local fields; bottled water and bottled beer; pantyhose and Eveready batteries; and animal feed milled at Ezzell-Key in Big Spring, ne’er again to rock along the jointed rail of a long-abandoned roadbed hidden in the scrubby mesquite trees and prairie grasses that have grown unchecked for the past 40 years.
A return to Nolan County was long overdue.
The winds still shift its sands, and things still live and die here---
And things still hang in the balance, their fate uncertain at best.
It is where the rails of the old Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific come to grief, the dreams of reaching Fluvanna long dead now---
And the old SW8 still bides its time, languishing in angst at the end-of-track as the world rushes past in a highway blur, its form to gather another layer of dust offered up by the combines as they churned across the fields and scooped up this year’s cotton crop---
Its black paint to oxidize farther into the ranges of gray---
The rust to bubble up in ever greater blemishes and wounds---
Its greases to congeal as paste within its bearings---
The winds to moan an epitaph that few will ever hear.
The faithful know its form as a lost token of their own past; a youthful memory from a more innocent phase of life, one in which there were few worries more pressing than ensuring that the circuit was complete on a simple loop of snap track laid out on the Christmas morning floor.
We smile as those memories make the rounds through our consciousness, tucked in alongside the kitchen aromas of roasting turkey wafting throughout the childhood home, and the gentle glow of lights strung upon the Yule tree.
Yet, melancholy is the price exacted for those remembrances.
We, too, have suffered the passage of time.
As if we need a reminder.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
A Plain Freight.
Under cloudy summer skies, a BNSF freight rolls south across the cotton fields of the Plainview Subdivision near Abernathy, Texas on the afternoon of August 30th, 2024.
Carson County, Texas is not known as a hotbed of oil & gas production, yet on the cold morning of February 3rd, 2024, a lone drilling rig is the only thing to mar the horizon as an eastbound train of 2-bay hoppers rolls across fields stubbled with the remnants of last year's harvest near White Deer.
There are whispers in the leaves
Truth spoken on the wind
For the court of memories
Held close in the shadows
Yesterday fades
As the sun o’er horizon distant
And winter’s frost but a melted whim
In the warm kiss of July
To follow dreams
Where’er they lead
Perhaps dim in the glow of Polaris
But ne’er gone
A breath
A beat of heart
A footfall in the muddy light of dusk
A cry to the heavens that I am lost
Tears fall
As the sheaves of Autumn
Flutter aimless
And cast about the land
I am bent
To the torment of the winds
And the rains not fallen
Snows heavy upon my form
I wrap the stars ‘round me
Grasses soft at my feet
Arms reaching to the night sky
And listen
Alone
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
A rift in the sky.
BNSF grain train eastbound near Panhandle, Texas on the evening of July 19th, 2024.
A visiting CSX unit grain train has checked in for the night at the siding at Glazier, Texas and has a front row seat to the thunderstorm that rages over western Oklahoma on the evening of July 2nd, 2024.
Ogallala Rain
Paleowater drawn up from the Ogallala Aquifer rains down upon a field of young corn swaying in the hot winds of a June 2020 afternoon as Frederick Simon pilots a hand-me-down B40-8 near Satanta, Kansas along the Cimarron Valley Railroad.
Once upon a dawn
With slumber far behind
On the chill morning air
Play the melodies of night still
Of distant tires fading to horizons
And the silence of trains going nowhere
We receive the sacrament
The dawn
As all those that have come
And gone
Perhaps ne’er to come again
To exhume a heart
And render the contents upon the land
The blood
The soul
The very breath of life
We have no questions to answer
Nor answers to mysteries
Yet there is wonder in the sky
In the shadows of the wheat
And the caress of love upon a heart
To stand against the day
And the withering sun
And the winds of good and ill
To spread forth upon the earth
As a mother casting down upon winter’s bed
Pour it forth upon the day
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
Prairie sunflowers stand-to on a summer morning and greet a westbound BNSF freight rolling around the curve at Shattuck, Oklahoma. 2023.
That those of perhaps a more seasoned nature in both the imaginative and worldly historical aspect of things might summon the creative works of Trudgeon or Phillips of Liberators leaving Ploesti a flaming wreck in August of ’43, is purely coincidental, assurances must be meted out that no such drama exists here on the plains of Grant County, Kansas in the year 2020.
Instead, the scene is of a pastoral nature in the truest sense, the peaceful homestead and its attendant fields in various stages of cultivation marred only by the towers and stacks and tanks of Colombian Chemical’s carbon black plant standing stark against a dusty sky on a hot June afternoon near Hickok.
Skyland Grain and Garden City Co-op are represented farther back in the hazy sky, the white elevators sitting abaft the trackage of the Cimarron Valley’s former Santa Fe Manter Branch as its rickety iron knifes through Hickok proper at an acute angle on its way out to Ulysses and Johnson City and the Colorado frontier.
These entities provide carloadings, both inbound and outbound, for the little shortline carrier who will freight out the goods of southwestern Kansas to Dodge City and a connection to the outside world via the BNSF.
It’s 5:57 pm on June 16th, 2020, and the temperature has maintained 104°F nearly all day long, thanks to a stiff southerly wind that has been bringing up Texas heat for the past several days, making miserable the three hours that engineer Frederick Simon and conductor Gary Noah have spent switching cars in the carbon black plant.
Fred has the con in an old patched-out GE as he rolls the short train back to Satanta, and Gary has taken the company Ford out to the roads and sped ahead for a roll-by inspection at the highway crossing in Ryus.
When they reach Satanta, their filthy, covered-in-black-from-head-to-toe forms won’t find respite. There is still a couple hours’ worth of switching to do and paperwork to complete, and then the long drive back to the motel in Ulysses, where hopefully the tavern next door is still open and the griddle is hot.
And a shower before bed would be nice.
The maid would appreciate that.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2024
The Ghosts of Sheridan Lake
There is no shine here---
Only rust in 115-pound-per-yard amounts.
But once railheads glistened in the landscape, burnished bright as 6-axle heavyweights rolled patrons from St. Louis and Kansas City toward The West and all the grandeur that The Scenic Limited implied, the wide open plains of eastern Colorado funneling hungry and wide-eyed travelers to the bankrupt rails of the Rio Grande at Pueblo, there to carry them through the Royal Gorge and up and over Tennessee Pass and across the wastes of Utah in a Gould-ian vision of transcontinental proportions that would see them roll down the Wasatch grade and brake to a stop on the doorstep of 300 South Rio Grande Street in Salt Lake City, where the newly minted Western Pacific would escort them through to Oakland.
The year was 1915 and the legacy of the Robber Barons was still entrenched in the financial landscape of America: Paul had robbed Peter so George Gould could pay for the Feather River Route, a direct affront to Harriman’s Overland empire across The West, and in the process laying destitute the fiscal health and physical plant of the Rio Grande.
Though Harriman had been dead since 1909, the same year the WP was completed, the two feudal financial camps remained at odds with each other and continued to entertain themselves with high-stakes maneuvers on Wall Street and legal one-upmanship in the boardrooms of the railroads themselves until they became somewhat intermixed and nearly indistinguishable from one another, and any perceived rivalry faded from importance.
But our berth holders and patrons of the buffet lounge car would be uncaring of such financial machinations as they rolled along the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake toward an immersion within the vistas provided by Nevada’s Great Basin and the Humboldt River Canyon and the glory of California’s Sierra Nevada as nature awed them and the WP wined and dined them on their way to the Pacific.
The Scenic Limited had, at least west of Pueblo, lived up to its billing, and the well-to-do liked to travel in style.
But here, on the windswept wastelands of the Great American Prairie, the Missouri Pacific possessed no such splendor, and when Train No.12 rolled back east and the sun sank below the crests of the Front Range, it was well after 8pm. Few passengers would have cause to raise a window shade or glance up from their highball glass as the hogger whistled for the Colorado Avenue grade crossing. They would, perhaps, stir in their thoughts of The West as remembrances and daydreams danced through their heads and mingled with the gin & tonic or the third Kentucky bourbon sipped neat, there to concoct a foreboding knowledge of the massive and dank trainshed at St. Louis Union Station where, 760 lackluster miles from the grasslands of eastern Colorado, their journey would end the following afternoon.
There would be plenty of time to imbibe still, but there would be no stopping tonight in Sheridan Lake.
In a somewhat hushed affair in the wartime year of 1942, the streamlined Colorado Eagle swooped in and snatched The Scenic Limited from its exalted status, inserting itself into the same train numbers of 11 & 12, and flying through here behind blue & gray portholed EMD E6s that were authorized 100-mph speeds where track conditions warranted, the diesel hogheads paying special heed to Page 1 of their employee timetables which reminded them that “…the revenue passenger is THE BUYER, and it is your job to make sure every buyer is a satisfied customer,” a prideful undertaking that would be embarked upon until the efficacy of rail passenger travel waned, and financial red ink doomed it. The Eagle fluttered from grace and fell from the Official Guide in 1964, and then-secondary trains Nos. 11 & 12 ceased to exist two years later, leaving luxury passenger travel on the Plains of Colorado to the Santa Fe.
But the ghost of Harriman would have the last laugh, and it rolled from St. John’s in Arden all the way across the Plains on the winds at Sheridan Lake. It gathered the MOP and the WP and the Rio Grande under the shield and Armor yellow at Omaha, severing the line in Kansas and all but abandoning the route through the Royal Gorge and over Tennessee Pass, a wicked, and some would say well-deserved dagger in the corpse of the long dead Gould.
The signals have turned their heads and shrugged their shoulders with indifference, standing motionless as vandals arrived in the dead of night and ripped out the copper wiring and plucked out their eyes, a chill north wind now whistling through hollow sockets where once colored glass lights hailed a clear track ahead to the hogger of the Colorado Eagle, and perhaps an ‘advance approach’ aspect to the mismatched and colorful consists that rolled towards KC in the Anschutz era.
All circuits are dead as well; the line poles sawed off waist high and robbed of the prized and colorful insulators that once carried messages of concern to those in the employ of D.B. Jenks at 210 North 13th Street in St. Louis.
For the Colorado Pacific, block indications are no longer necessary.
Train movements are few.
---Rick Malo©2023---
Many thanks to Mark Hemphill for his assistance with this piece.
Photo caption:
Looking east toward Sheridan Lake, Colorado along the former Missouri Pacific line on a very cold morning in January 2022.
Photo by Rick Malo.
Welcome to our latest gallery---
In Plain Sight---
Where we'll have selections from across the Great Plains, the Llano Estacado, and their immediate environs, regardless of railroad or subdivision.
Our banner photo depicts a farmer heading out to tend his fields near Happy, Texas just moments before a marauding springtime thunderstorm unleashes a torrent of rain and hail on May 3rd, 2024.
