visiting a cemetery in a ghost town
So a while ago I mentioned roadtripping north with a couple of married friends, since one of them has family around Portland. This has actually happened several times now -partly because I haven’t had a car some years- and each time I’ve gone north with them it’s been desperately needed.
The last time was in 2015, right after a three week period in which I lost a job, a laptop died and a replacement got a virus, and a cat died.
visiting a cemetery in a ghost town
We took a couple of days to travel up the coast (S grew up on the coast). The first day we got sidetracked by a beach, a game shop, a large local history museum, and we stopped at what used to be a mill town.
A few mostly old Victorian, some newer houses sloped down to the immense river, and there you could see the remnants of the mill; a few small buildings and several railroad sidings, piers and the remains of piers out into the water, chain-link-fenced off.
visiting a cemetery in a ghost town
The main building must’ve been truly giant; the rest of the town would’ve fit easily in the track-broken concrete slab that remained and that was only some of the area behind the fence.
I thought I saw a cemetery on the hill opposite where the mill once stood and my friends were interested enough to stop. It *was* a cemetery on this steep slope, little areas linked by steps, part overgrown with blackberry.
visiting a cemetery in a ghost town
Generations of families, the sort of small town America politicians always say they’re about. Stones told stories of family tragedies- kids drowned in the river- but other than long lives nothing to spot successes, joys. No soldier graves; locals who didn’t come back to have service on their stones, must have been interred elsewhere. There weren’t stones any newer than the 1960s.
The whole experience was really striking but it’d be hard to explain why.