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A few random shots today, taken at an airshow in Midland, Texas, a few years ago. This was the same trip that produced the shots from Orla, Texas. I was waiting to hop a squat on a plane out. Didn’t have time to go through the actual airshow so caught a few shots outside the wire.
Enjoy!
It’s just a bit more than four miles between the two.
Ghost towns that, had they been any further off U.S. 84, would long since have slipped into unconscious memory. One has 53 people, the other has none; no cattle or horses, no cars or residences or business.
Just dust, tumbleweeds, and maybe whispers of the dead carried on the breeze. It is New Mexico, where Dia De Los Muertos celebrations are earnest and heartfelt.
West of Clovis about 40 miles is Tolar, New Mexico. It was laid out in 1905 as a supplier of sand for nearby railroad construction.
Sadly, it was the railroad that did most of the damage to Tolar. In 1944, an 81-car train derailed. Among the cargo…165 500-pound bombs bound for the military and World War II. It was about 92,000 pounds of high explosives. It was reported at the time that of the 30 residents of Tolar, only 6 were home. There was only one fatality.
Four miles west of Tolar is Taiban, New Mexico. Another railroad town, built at the same time, populated with the same kinds of people, one of the many railroad towns that dot the west and have since withered. Though there are still people in Taiban, about 50, on any given day I suspect there are more amateur photographers than that.
Why?
The Presbyterian church. It stands alone, literally, in a field, and stands, impervious to time or human dictate, allowing whoever need stop to do so; to photograph, to pray, to leave prayers marked upon its walls.
Its walls are littered with graffiti, with prayers and hopes….
…with esoteric quotes….
“I strove toward God…and stumbled upon myself.”
“For the last 50 years, the West Texas wind has been doing its best to blow the remnants of Orla away, but in a true show of Texan grit and determination, the small cluster of buildings at the intersection of 285 and Farm to Market Road 652 refuses to budge.”
Nick Zantop (http://www.letsbewild.com/orla-texas-ghost-town/)
A bit boiling, the prose; Texas independence and own bootstraps, the hard Texas mythos, the thing that keeps west Texas alive when by all rights it should sink back in to the desert.
Built in 1906, Orla hardly had a population to speak of. Less than 10 through the end of the World War II.
But in the 1960s, supplying oil fields, Orla became a real place; shops and cafes, filling stations. And just as quickly, Orla became a memory. With a dear friend, I visited in 2013 and while it wasn’t lost to time completely – sitting at the major crossroads of US 285 and FM 652, the rumble of oilfield trucks and equipment so embedded in the landscape it never completely leaves your bones – it was getting closer moment by moment.
I realized it was getting more and more difficult, as the hours passed, to get a picture without passing trucks blurring through the background. The intersection is a major part of what was, at that point, still an expanding energy sector in Texas. Two years later, the price of oil has crashed and no one seems to know where those oilfield trucks might head next…another field or storage.
There weren’t many buildings remaining but there was much of previous lives left in those buildings; the cans in the refrigerator, clothes hanging in a bedroom….
An empty box of booze….
A rusty blade on a shop’s saw that has seen no work in a while….
And tires. Everywhere tires. Left from how many thousands of cars and trucks traversing the west Texas desolation, each seeking that next place with energy.
An interesting place. Created, then forgotten, remembered before being left to itself, then discovered as a bleak and lonesome crossroads in the energy field.
The remains of a house, long since burned out and left for the ages.
Summer, 2014, time lapse on a clear night.
Reminiscent of the battered ramparts of long ago castle.
The Elmira school, built probably in 1902, now lost to time.
The high school began holding classes in 1902. The last HS class was 1915.
Grade school students kept the halls noisy until 1952, when the Elmira school district consolidated with nearby Osceola.
The building is privately owned now, withering away beneath the heat and wind, the snow, of north-central Illinois
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