THE PERSISTENCE OF PRESENCE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

REVOLUTIONS IN TECHNOLOGY ARE CYCLICAL IN NATURE, in that, in ushering in the transition from one era to the next, they also create an entry door for future revolutions, to one day facilitate in the unseating of the age that is currently unseating something else. We see discoveries tear free from past versions of themselves, even as they guarantee that they themselves will be rendered obsolete. The loop is perfect and consistent.

The history of the railroad is the tale of  worlds being annihilated or repurposed, of distance and time being shattered in favor of new means of measuring both. If trains were already completely obsolete, it would be necessary to erect monuments to their once-great power, but, as it is, their fade has been gradual enough that the infrastructure of the railways themselves serve as their own headstones. We can only imagine the true muscle they once flexed across the globe, but they are also in enough daily use to serve as miniature museums to their former glory.

The depot seen here was erected in 1879 in Pickerington, Ohio, the same year the Toledo and Ohio rail line first sliced a diagonal across the town. The city, permanently frozen in size as a small farm village, never required a bigger version of the building, which is only slightly larger than a standard boxcar. One historian has noted that the architecture of such places was little more than an echo of the railroad itself, parallel to the tracks and low-profile in both shape and height. One thing seems certain about this particular depot, and that’s that it helped usher in its own obsolescence, when a local named D.B. Taylor took delivery of the first automobile registered in the town shortly after 1900. By 1956, local train service to Pickerington slowed to a trickle, then winked out completely. The station was restored in 1975 by a man named Grunewald, whose family still retains ownership, landing the building a prized berth on the National Registry of Historic Places.

I have visited Pickerington dozens of times over the years, and each time, I shoot the depot all over again, somehow seeing some small something different in it each time. Good weather and bad, fancy cameras or plain, film or digital, wide-angle, macro or soft focus lenses (like the Lensbaby Velvet 28 used here), I can’t resist having one more go. I suppose I’m actually photographing the different persons I have been over a lifetime, and so, even when the village is out of my way on a given trip, I drive to “Picktown” to assure myself that something of value from the past, however drab or simple, has been allowed to remain, to instruct, to educate, and to fill wandering man-boys’ heads with dreams of riding the rails.