Riding the Rails at the Yankee Boy Mine, Grand Forks, BC
From Frank, in Boundary Country
The drill steel was still leaning in the corner where a man set it down at the end of a shift, some day in the fifties. You could read the whole morning in the dust on it. I put my lamp on the timber and didn't say anything for a while. Some rooms you enter like church.
People ask what I'm looking for down there, and the honest answer is nothing. Everything worth taking left these hills seventy years ago on somebody's truck. What's left is better than valuable — it's true. A tool leaning where a working man set it down tells you the shift bell rang, that supper was waiting somewhere below, that he meant to come back Monday.
He didn't. The price of zinc did what cave-ins couldn't, and the whole camp walked away in a season. The steel stayed leaning. It's leaning there tonight, in the dark, while you read this.
I filmed it, measured it, and left it exactly where it stood. That's the rule down here: the archive takes pictures, the museum takes what the mountain is about to swallow, and everything else stays on shift.
See you next month. Mind the timber.
P.S. — This month's films from both channels, and what came down the mountain for the museum, are below the signature as always: the films · the museum.
— Frank Schlichting
One photograph. One story. Once a month. No algorithm between us.