| There's something heartbreaking about an abandoned freight train. Impossibly still and heavy in the desert heat of Southeastern Utah, it is a rusting wall that blocks Cisco from I-70 to the north. |
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Cisco- this dead town, like the train, tears at the soul. July's midday light allows neither mercy nor romance, and at first glance the abandoned buildings read only dust and decay. A light wind blows hot and gusty among them, rustling any brittle golden grasses that remain by mid-summer. |
| At the entrance to ''downtown'' Cisco, the crumbling and charred gas station stands sentinel, its mural adding a ghost of life and faded color to this lifeless landscape. Inside, the walls flash clues from the past: rooms painted blue, peach, grey, words scrawled pre- or post- this structure's destruction. Here and there the roof has caved through and one walks alternatively on floor, on ceiling. |
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Cisco began as a stop for the steam train, and was kept alive by surrounding ranchers as a livestock shipping station. Later, mining prospectors came and went, until finally the interstate passed the town by and sealed its doom. Despite its current inhospitable state, it's possible a few residents are still hanging on in Cisco. South of the gas station across scorched fields lie several mobile homes, and some cars that, though nested in tufts of tall grass, might still run. But Cisco, in the heat of July, feels short on hope. |
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