The Ghosts of Walhachin
These hills are eskers
and dry impoverished clay
supporting bunchgrass, sagebrush
lone ponderosa and, some rare times
a shy beautiful brown chocolate lily or a
tiny vivid yellow flame-tongued jack-in-the-pulpit.
There must have been a thin line of green once,
following the dripping flumes as they marched zig-zag
down the thirsty hills, bringing water from Deadman Lake
to the apple trees regimented in orchards on the benchlands below.
Now the flumes are bone-dry,
crumbling, haphazard, meandering.
And the apple trees are unkempt,
unwatered, unpruned, unpicked for seventy years.
These are
the tangible ghosts of Walhachin
the ghosts I remember from my childhood.
Broken flumes, scruffy apples:
testaments to a grand undertaking undone.
jimmy shaker writes this
