A "sandal-level view" of our road. Not bad after 18 centuries, barbarian invasions and modern plowing. |
Things are different in America. We quickly construct transportation systems-canals, then railroads, then highways, then superhighways-and then more or less abandon them.
These vestiges of earlier transportation systems are mostly still there, and are a great place to search for artifacts of earlier times.
On a recent trip home after working out of town I photographed some good stuff.
This is an early gas station. It stands alongside what is actually a fairly well traveled road , but is in a tiny little hamlet. There are modern gas stations a few miles in either direction, so in an era when folks never even slow down for wide spots in the road it clearly went under many years ago.
Here's a side view. I took this picture on a crisp winter morning that smelled of wood smoke from nearby houses. The brick chimney, which seems to have a nasty lean to it, indicates a probable wood stove here as well. Gasoline and a wood burning stove just seem like a bad mixture.
It is difficult and even a little depressing to imagine somebody here working a lonely night shift. Over the doorway would have been a single glowing bulb indicating that the place was open.
Well there's something you don't see every day. A gas station with a stone foundation. Actually stone and cement, but not substantively different from the foundations of some of the flimsier buildings I helped excavate in the civilian settlement outside the Vindolanda fort.
Sometimes I try to figure out the story of a place by the clues left behind. The gas pumps have been gone from this old station for a long time, and the paint has not been redone for at least a decade. But out back there were some fairly un-rusted barrels that seemed to contain old auto parts, and what I think to be a modern fuel container. My guess is that after it stopped being a real gas station it became somebody's mechanic shop. In this it was probably less useful than a conventional garage, as I could not see and service bay or other means to work on things in bad weather.
Come back Wednesday, I'll show you some more things from down the road a stretch.
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