Long before the hominids crossed Beringia with their crude tools and their dogs, rain and snowmelt as yet untainted by smog and unseen by man, gathered amongst the pores and fractured rock and the high meadows and followed gravity down out of an uplift yet to be known as Sangre de Cristo, cutting at first a channel and then a chasm as it found its way to the sea over the course of a few million years.
Over the eons, glaciers came and went, and in the temperate years fantastic creatures that roamed the lush lowlands drank of its waters; giant, heavy beasts with long tusks and a long trunk with which they foraged of the local flora and fed themselves with.
Then, whether through a gap in the continental ice or by the warmer coastal route, Clovis Man came. He fashioned spear points from rock and hunted the beasts and used their ivory as weapons and tool handles, and he recorded his comings and goings in etchings and paintings left upon the rocks and the walls of caves.
And he brought with him a gene that is still found within the DNA of native people today.
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Long after Pangea split apart and the ice melted, the Late-Lima Epoch saw great behemoths roll here, mechanical megafauna of Yellowstonian proportions achieving near-mammalian status as Walschaerts valve gear transmuted 250 pounds of boiler pressure into tractive effort, helping to apply 123,364 pounds worth to 63-and-one-half inch drivers all while stoker screws voraciously digested Dawson bituminous in the process, scattering it about a white-hot firebox and exhaling a great billowing sacrament to the Gods of Steam and Skyline Casings.
The great Espee AC-9s followed in the footsteps of ALCo Consolidations and Baldwin Prairies and Pacifics of the El Paso & Northeastern, speeding tonnage across the Golden State Route and the desert Southwest, in the busy years doing so with Lima brethren in the form of orange and red GS locomotives on loan from The San Joaquin Daylight, and a few ex-pat Berkshires from down Northeast way, the ghosts of the Eddy Brothers and William Hawkins standing trackside enjoying the grand manner of things and beaming with great delight at what their enterprise had become.
Rubbing shoulders with them were Kindig and Maxwell and Hale and all the others who cleaned their lenses and ventured to the Great Southwest to stand as witness and record an era, creating modern-day pictographs for all the world to see. Without them, the existence of such beasts would be nothing more than fantastic tales handed down by the elders, legend and lore for the excited ears of the youth, doomed to lose its vigor the farther through time and generation it passes.
Indeed, they are all gone now; not casualties of ice ages or Darwinian Theory or .50 caliber Sharps rifles.
A great paradigm shift occurred in the cosmos and brought about their demise; internal combustion and electric traction motors wiping away all traces of their comings and goings, sending them first to a last stand on the Modoc line, and then to the scrapper.
But here, in the clearing storm light early on a summer morning of recent times, Golden State iron is still high over Pecos waters at Santa Rosa, and the trains that carry the commerce of a nation roll across it now behind GEVOs and 710s, the ebbs and flows of supply and demand and profits dictating such.
Yet, there is still a thrill in the throb of diesel prime movers laying down more tractive effort per unit than the 3800s as they roll eastbound tonnage across a 121-year-old bridge set on cut stone abutments, awing those onlookers who are innocent of an age when coal smoke and steam whistles where heavy in the air.
Perhaps someday, in the wake of another towering desert monsoon thunderstorm, the aroma of diesel exhaust and the echo of longs and shorts will be washed forever from the walls of Arroyo Pintada and fade into memory; hopefully a well-illustrated one that the elders will pass down to the generations.
Some might scoff at such fallacy.
Evolution will be unkind to them.
Eastbound just after sunset. Santa Rosa, New Mexico. April 2022.