Skip to main content

A Ghost Town Interlude

On our way from Prineville up to the Columbia River Gorge, we were excited to check out a couple of supposed ghost towns. The first is Antelope.



Antelope has the distinction of having suffered through a takeover of sorts.   You might remember news reports on the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the early 80's.    It's a long and strange tale.  There's a Wikipedia link below if you want much more detail. 

Antelope isn't quite a ghost town these days, but it's close.   There are some houses around the few blocks of the town site.  But the school is closed and fairly gutted.   The town does have a post office, something of a mobile home, outside of which, at the base of its flagpole is a plaque commemorating the Rajneesh "invasion."
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram

If you head north out of Antelope on Oregon 218, wind your way up the hill and proceed about six and half miles, you come to Shaniko.  




Again, not a ghost town in any strict sense of the term. There are actually a couple of convenience stores at either side of the modest town center.   There's also a nice old hotel.  As with some of the businessses in Mitchell, we couldn't tell if the hotel was closed for the day, the season or indefinitely. 

The photos of the old cars were taken in or around a museum housed in an old barn.   It's full of vehicles from the first few decades of the 20th century and even a beaten up stage coach.   The town, such as it is, is obviously trying to trade off the ghost town angle.   Kind of a strange approach, playing dead to stay alive, but what else is a tiny town in Oregon to do?  

The irony, at least for a visitor at this point, is that they haven't had a chance to be more successful.   There's just a few, short-lived wooden sidewalks.   The beauty of the barn, the museum, is that it's a dark, fascinating jumble.   All the more so for the vehicles outside being claimed by the high grass.   One fears that an infusion of money and energy would result in history getting all neatly organized and labelled. 




Comments

  1. luciteboxApril 8, 2010 at 2:39 PM

    Great pics, Danny. And, yeah, somebody's gonna wreck it. Can't things ever just be left to decay in a way that's honest and natural?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Baby Driver

B-A-B-Y-DRI-VER!  Edgar Wright's sixth film has arrived in the summer of 2017 with all the insistence and irresistibility of a great pop song.  Already in his splashy career the Englishman has written better tunes than this. And yet Baby Driver pulses with more precision and originality of expression than most of his contemporaries can approach at their best.   Resist if you dare.  As summer fare goes, fast, furious and not lobotomized is hard to pass up. Wright has apparently had the notion for Baby Driver bouncing around in that energetic mind of his since the 1990s.  You can see a version of the film's first scene in a music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" Wright directed in 2003.  The super kinetic action is certainly a perfect fit for the writer/director's crisp editing, wit and inimitable unison of sound and action. Baby Driver both charges from the start line and yet saves it feeling for character and emotion for a bit later.  Here on
11 comments
Read more

Young Adult

"Low hanging fruit," complains Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) to visiting home town girl - or visiting "psychotic prom queen bitch," depending on your point of view - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), as the two go about their sparring, if not unlikely friendship in Young Adult , the second collaboration of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody.   This after their wildly successful Juno in 2007. Mavis, going through something of a pre-midlife crisis, has returned to her old stomping grounds of Mercury, Minnesota to reclaim former boyfriend Buddy Slade.  Never mind that Buddy is by all accounts a happily married man, or that his first child has recently appeared on the scene.  In fact, it's the arrival of her old flame's baby, whose picture Mavis retrieves from her e-mail in box one day during a bout of writerly procrastination that ultimately inspires Mavis to jump in her Mini Cooper and speed out of Minneapolis in favor of her hometown, a place Mav
5 comments
Read more

Midnight in Paris

He must be stopped.  I realize that he's old, diminutive and myopic (boy, is he myopic), but don't be fooled. He keeps rampaging through Western Civilization. For decades, he roamed the streets of New York (mainly Manhattan, mind you). It was believed that he couldn't survive out of his native habitat, but then he somehow crossed the Atlantic and was let loose on London and English culture. The results, for the most part, were not pretty. He crashed briefly through the streets of Barcelona. And now, I am sorry to report, he has landed in Paris. And it gets worse. His damage has taken on a new dimension; it's no longer just spatial, it's temporal. Woody Allen is delving into the past to divest long-dead artists - fortunately, he has little concern for anyone else - of their ability to sound even remotely human. If this is allowed to continue, before you know it the Renaissance will be here and everyone will sound completely ridiculous. So yes, Wood A
4 comments
Read more