Ancient Places by Jack Nisbet

Author:Jack Nisbet [Nisbet, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57061-981-6
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2015-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Unspooled

I arrived in the Colville Valley only two years after Northwest Magnesite closed, and many of its key facilities seemed frozen since the moment when the last whistle blew. That was certainly true of the Red Marble when Tom and I stopped there in the stillness of a summer afternoon.

We rambled off the top of the ziggurat and fell in with a well-maintained road that made an extrawide loop before ending at a heavy steel grate set at an angle off the lip of a sidehill precipice. Big wheel chocks remained secure at the edge of the drop-off, where trucks filled with raw ore once backed up to dump their loads through the grate. One worker, usually the newest man on board, would wield a heavy sledgehammer to pound any chunks that didn’t fit through the iron bars.

We descended the steep hill thirty feet or more to reach the level where the sized material would have piled up beside a long rectangular building. Wind had torn a few sheets of tin from the roof, but the timbers inside remained impressively solid. This was the takeoff shed for the overhead tramway, and we marveled at Byron Riblet’s system of towers and steel cables, still firmly secured in place. The tramway’s many ore cars, strung at surprisingly long intervals, waited to be loaded. The cars reminded me of old-fashioned baby prams, solid and squat; the one closest above the takeoff shed had the numeral 37 painted in yellow on each side.

Our eyes traced the elegant double line of cable that sagged between the towers as the tramway system disappeared beyond the up-and-down terrain that led to the Finch Quarry, six full miles away. From there, also standing firm, buckets in place, the next set of towers and cables was poised to make the five-mile run to the reduction plant.

A couple of years later, I would by chance play a very small role in dismantling this operation when I signed on for a temporary stint with the wrecking crew. We released the tension on the cables, allowing them to fly free and terrifying through the trees. We watched a special cable-winding machine, which for all I knew had been used on the Panama Canal, spool the Medusa tangle of wire rope up from the ground. We used an acetylene torch to cut apart the angle-iron towers that had replaced Byron Riblet’s original wooden ones, and I picked up the splattered nuts and bolts that had fallen from collapsing struts to the ground, one by one, and tossed them into an old ore bucket. When it was filled to the brim, we would ship the bucket and its load to a Yakima foundry as high-grade scrap steel. It was a rodeo that came and went over the course of a few months, erasing almost all outward signs of the tramway’s giant footprints from the landscape. Before many more years had passed, lodgepole pines and Douglas-firs had spread back across the abandoned right-of-way, leaving only

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