Imitation is the most acceptable part of Worship.
Three hundred years ago, Jeremy Collier and André Dacier wrote those words in a biography of Marcus Aurelius.
More than 100 years later, Charles Caleb Colton penned the idiom that’s far more common:
Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.
Bella and I are bachelorettes for the week, while Our American is away on business.
I told her we were going chasing sunsets.
She seemed excited.
It’s a beautiful, blue-sky day in Eastern Washington.
Part of me wants to hit the road and go somewhere fun.
Today, however, my beautiful Bella is recovering from surgery. It was time to get her spayed and add on a prophylactic gastropaxy (a procedure in a which her stomach is attached the chest cavity to prevent bloat and torsion).
That means we’re grounded for a few days or a week. No matter, we still haven’t shared our story about the first great road trip since moving to Spokane.
November?!?!? November was the last time I wrote about an adventure?
Shame.
What’s worse is how much time I have on my hands these days. In late January, Bella and I packed up a U-Haul and moved to Spokane, Wash., to join Our American in our Happily Ever After.
There must be time for adventure.
There is.
Last week, Bella and I set out for two photowalks.
Read more →
I try to take a 360-degree approach when I’m out exploring and taking pictures.
I take some shots of what I see, then turn and turn and turn, making sure I don’t miss anything.
Some places draw me back for more. Dorothy, the Atlas Mine and Rawley are my Alberta favourites. I’m keeping a mental list of Washington spots.
Sometimes I get home, look at my pictures and think, “I didn’t quite get that right.”
Or maybe, no matter how many times I turned around, I know there’s more to see.
This is my favourite time of year for shooting.
I’m always excited by the bright reds, yellows and oranges against a brilliant blue sky.
Since I moved back to B.C. temporarily, I’ve passed by this lake countless times, en route to Spokane or Omak to visit My American. We spent last weekend in Omak with Bella, our seven-month-old Maremma sheepdog.
The lake again caught my eye on a day trip to Oroville. It was surrounded by trees losing their leafy green colour and the water was so calm, it could have been mistaken for a mirror.
Bodie is a popular ghost town in California.
It’s a state historic park and it’s known as the most well-perserved ghost town in the state.
Bodie, Calif., is on my bucket list.
So when someone mentioned recently they’d been for a day drive to Bodie, I got confused. (If you’re a regular reader of our adventures, you know that happens a lot.)
It was right there on the damn highway.
I only drove past it three times.
It must be Our American getting in my head. Usually, I keep my head on a swivel … looking left, right, left, right the entire time I’m out exploring.
He thinks it’s unsafe driving.
I don’t know how I could have missed it.
The beehive kilns of the historic American Brick Company sit on the corner of State Route 27 and Belmont Road, just south of Spokane Valley.
The Historic Spokane website says brickyards were established in several locations, following the devastating Spokane fire of 1889. The yard in Mica, the one that produced the brick used in many Spokane buildings, is the only one that remains.
It isn’t deserted or anything. The current plant, built in 1957 to replace the old one, is still firing away, but at least five of the original kilns built between 1903 and 1911 are still there.
I’m not sure if I’d even be able to get onto the yard, but I feel like I missed something by not seeing it.
Instead, I was intent on another set of bricks.
I spied the remains of a brick house while we drove past Mica, on the way home from our camping trip in Idaho.
It sits forlornly on SR 27, just north of the community of Mica.
There may have been, at one time, a fence protecting the yard, extending out of this gate that still stands.
Mica was never a town or city. It was a station stop on the line of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, and the hills were rich with basalt, granite, gneiss and schist — rocks that decompose and create the clay vital to the American Brick Company. (S. Shedd, 1910. The Clays of the State of Washington. State College of Washington.)
Along the main drags, it looks like a rural subdivision of Spokane Valley … homes, dotted around great barns and rolling hills of farmland.
Few western towns are without a piece of history that gives me a chuckle.
It’s even better when that history features a woman or two of great fortitude, like Lady Jane Fortune of Kamloops, B.C.
In my research of Mica, I stumbled upon the story of Helga and Clara Estby, a mother and daughter from Mica Creek who walked from Spokane to New York City in 1896 on the promise of a $10,000 bounty.
Helga was a 36-year-old suffragist (woohoo!) and mother of 10 (holy sweet Mary Murphy!) but she and her husband, Ole, were struggling to keep the farm going. The $10K would come in handy.
When Helga and Clara got to NYC, their sponsor stiffed them and they had to rely on the kindness of the railyards to get them home.
Read the whole story at HistoryLink.org. You won’t regret it.
And don’t forget it’s women like Helga who forged paths more than 100 years ago for women today.
Helga was an outspoken supporter of woman suffrage. She believed that women were capable of doing anything men could do, and thought of a way to raise a large sum of cash and, at the same time, draw nationwide attention to the suffrage cause. ~ HistoryLink.org
My research, however, left a hole burning in my brain.
I searched to no end for the identification of this building:
I thought it might have been a jail, but maybe it was the bank where the Estbys stored their family savings.
If anyone knows, please tell me in the comments. Or, it may beg a trip to the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum, something I’ve been meaning to do anyway.
I’ve driven Route 2 from Wilbur through Airway Heights more than a handful of times since I moved back to the B.C. Interior.
Typically, I’m on a mission to get to Spokane Valley, our second home where Our American lives.
It was only recently that a building, almost hidden behind overgrown bushes, caught my attention. I don’t know how my eyes had missed it on previous trips.
The bell tower is familiar to this ghost-towner, who revels in finding the buildings once considered important, from schoolhouses to homes and churches.
The pretty little church has fallen into a state of disrepair.
The bell seems to be gone, windows are smashed out and boarded up, and its paint is peeling badly.
It’s on private property, so getting too close is out of the question.
Little information exists on the web about the church.
One photographer took a picture of the former schoolhouse-cum-residence just up the road and a commenter mentioned the church.
I belive the Church is of 1929 vintage and sadly the owner has no interest in preserving it. Deep Creek Falls (now just Deep Creek) was a town from 1883 or so till 1939 (I believe).
Oh, if I had my way, I’d win the lottery, buy the little church and restore to its former beauty.
You see, I grew up in a small town on Canada’s east coast. Antigonish, N.S., is known as “The Little Vatican” and my family dutifully attended St. Ninian Cathedral every Saturday.
I’m not a religious person as an adult but I remember the value church gatherings bring to a community. In Canada, the community churches are complemented by a community hall and, without question, the hockey rink — a part of our culture well documented by hockey personality Chris Cuthbert in The Rink: Stories from Hockey’s Home Towns. I used to have a signed copy, interviewing Cuthbert in Kamloops during my career as a sports writer.
And I wonder if, as we start to let these wonderful little churches wither away, it only symbolizes the loss of our sense of community and togetherness.
Ah, but maybe that’s too profound a thought for our little exploring blog. We stumbled onto a few other churches along the way.
When I took a wrong turn on my way back to Spokane from Vancouver, I saw the little Anglican church of Douglas:
Saint Paul’s Lutheran hasn’t been used in many years, says the Douglas County PUD website, but the folks who live in the area are trying to restore it. The website, unfortunately, has dated information as it says the Douglas Community Historical Association wants to have the church fully restored by 2006 and rent it out for weddings and other celebrations.
The site says the church is on the National Register of Historic Buildings, the official U.S. federal listing of significant historic, architectural and archeological resources.
Drilling down takes me to the Washington Historic Register. Its database shows the application of historical landmark status, prepared by Kenneth Duane Britt of nearby Wenatchee. Dated 1980, the application shows the church is (or was) owned by the Westerman family.
The Church is what is left of a once thiving Community. It is a landmark of the courage, strengh, ingenuity, morals, ideas, beliefs, and culture of the early settlers of Douglas and our whole State. I would love to see the Church on the National Register, and I believe it is a Landmark well worth it.
They’re words that apply to any of these old buildings that Shep and I find along the way.
The churches and schoolhouses and grain elevators and farmhouses, all long abandoned and nearly forgotten, are testaments to who we are and where we’ve come from.
And without those touchpoints, we’ll never know where we’re going.