The Salem Orientalist Society

My little brother and I went out to Dividend whilst I was busy trying to do as many things as I possibly could, and we brought a few props to take amusing photos to show people back here when they ask about Utah. We managed to find the road after one wrong try (it's not marked, so you have to know which place to turn off the highway just outside of Eureka) and had just parked and were looking around when a truck pulled up. That's not that common a thing, by the way, in Dividend, and I was glad I hadn't yet donned my silly hat and bandanna. An elderly couple got out, evidently just as suprised as we were to find someone else there. They were both wearing name tags, and explained that the annual Dividend Reunion in Eureka had just finished up, and that everyone was heading up to walk around what was left of the town. Sure enough, they were followed by a half dozen more cars with similarly wizened occupants who stopped just long enough to get out and look around before heading off. The man we spoke with, by the name of Davis (don't remember his first name), told us how he'd grown up there while his father was the deputy sherrif in charge of guarding train cars once they were filled with gold ore. Once, he snuck home a piece with a streak of gold about two inches long, he told us, but his father noticed and made him take it back. His wife showed us some photocopies of photographs of the town by way of answering my question of how they possibly built an entire city on ground as rocky and mountainous as that - evidently a lot has changed since all the buildings were taken down in the 40s, and there used to be nice level streets carved out where now there are boulders and washes. They did build right up the sides of the slopes, though, too, and just to the left of the water tanks that are still there was the mine itself, the dormitories where single miners lived, and the mine offices. After the Davises left, we went ahead with the silly pictures, using the scaffolding from the mechanism that loaded ore onto the trains as a background. There was a time when I would have tried to draw some kind of moral from all of this, but now I realize just how phony that kind of stuff is, so all I can say is: I love you!

This is a restaurant somewhere south of Fort Payne, Alabama, that we surely would have stopped at had most of us not been vegetarians.