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Frederick Manfred Simon ~ Railway Industry Photographer & Multidiscipline Creative
03:55. Telford Road. Some now-nondescript dirt ribbon of gravel christened on the 4th of July 1909 for prosperous local cattle and Scotsman M.A. Telford. Here. Where grade and gravel meet, a long-vanished eponymic, peopled town, post office, and rail-served flathouse existed along the Central Washington Railroad. I’m waiting. Waiting for my colleague to weave our grain-laden train through Web Canyon. A solitary half-hour passes before the searching lighthouse-like headlight, twisting and turning through the last of curves, breaches the near horizon. There isn’t another soul around, surely none that isn’t sanely dead asleep. I am alone with the infinite sky; the infinitesimal sound; the infixing voice in my head. I wander. I wonder. I cannot help but ponder how deceivingly tiny the stars appear to my naked eyes compared to my “being” and world at large, and then, I explore that tacit so self-deceiving perception for the truth is quite otherwise: I am the infinitesimal speck upon a speck; the stars infinite, interminably immense. Reality does that; unnerves; discomforts; turns one’s perceived, often preconceived “world” on its head, or rights it. (© 03Mar17)