The Silent City Spangle Grain Elevator Is Populated With Fruits Of Harvest
They’re the skyscrapers of the rural landscape.
The silent city is made up of grain elevators surrounding the tracks in Spangle.
It can be seen from the highway, gleaming silver in the sunlight, cradled by golden fields.
This is the view of truck drivers on most clear autumn mornings. The buildings solemnly wait for them to bring their treasures of soft white wheat or legumes.
A driver comes in with a load of delicately colored dry peas. They bounce to the ground and through the grating as the truck dumps them into the elevator. Some scatter along the floor like pearls.
Outside the elevator, next to a makeshift bench, an empty coffee can holds a potpourri of cigarette butts, testament to time spent between deliveries.
With the coffee percolating in the tiny main office, Faye Klassen rides her bike down to her station at the wheat scale on the south end of the compound. She picks up a broom and starts a job that everyone at the elevator does several times a day.
“This is not really dust. It’s the chaff from the wheat,” said the part-time scale operator, cleaning out her block-shaped office.
Jack Olsen, the elevator manager, comes over and cranks the lid off the grating at the front of Klassen’s scale, which is strong enough to hold 35 tons.
Though he moves at an easy pace, Olsen has a schedule. He is quick to climb to the top of a 60-foot wheat bin behind the scale to measure the grain level. It’s a task he performs several times a week to ensure that the bin doesn’t overflow.
The gleaming metal containers tower over Spangle, but Olsen, who has worked at the elevators for three years, has no problem scampering up the thin metal steps to the top.
“The first time I came up here, I held on to the rail so tight, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I wasn’t about to tell anybody I was afraid of heights.
“Now it’s just second nature, and I come up here sometimes just to watch the scenery.”
But this morning, he doesn’t have time to linger for the view.
“It gets to be a dance around here with all the trucks coming in,” he said.
Even when it’s busy, Olsen gets to every cranny of this concrete and metal kingdom, from the top of the 100-foot bins to a dusty labyrinth of tunnels to clean and repair the equipment beneath it all.
Elevators like those around the tracks at Spangle are vanishing. Today about 500 remain in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and the numbers keep dropping, according to the Pacific Grain Growers Association. As the railroads consolidate and merge, the smaller elevators are falling into obscurity because they can’t handle the larger trains.
Even though it’s not the largest operation, the days are often action-packed. The Rockford Grain Growers elevators in Spangle sometimes handle up to 150 loads of grain in a day. That’s heavy traffic for a tiny town where two cars on the same road are considered congestion.
Even on the slow days - between harvests or during a wet spell when farmers aren’t cutting - the elevator operators keep busy by double-checking their records and cleaning out the machinery.
“We can’t improve the quality of the grain, but we can make sure it doesn’t get worse,” Olsen said.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 photos