Editor's note: Columnist Lee Benson is bicycling the length of Utah along U.S. 89, a k a State Street, starting at the Arizona-Utah line and ending at the Idaho-Utah line. His columns will chronicle what he sees, hears and avoids along the way.
THISTLE — The half-sunken farmhouse is startling enough when seen from a passing car. But slowed down to bike speed it takes on an added dimension of forlorn. A roadside attraction for dashed dreams.
Whoever built it sure never expected it to be the centerpiece for a lake.
But there it is, big as life, its roof and upper walls sticking out of a pond of stagnant water.
All that remains of the houses that once made up Thistle Junction, Utah, a k a The Town That Drowned.
It was a dead-quiet mid-morning when I came around the corner about 300 miles into my Highway 89 odyssey and found myself face-to-face with proof positive that there are no guarantees.
The farmhouse is only about 10 feet off the road. Back in the day, it wasn't that close, of course, but that was before the mountain to the northwest sent a mudslide 1,000 feet wide, 240 feet high and a mile-and-a-half long toward the Spanish Fork River, putting into play a chain reaction that destroyed the railroad line, covered up parts of two U.S. highways (89 and 6), blocked the river and drowned the town.
That was in the notoriously soggy April of 1983.
Since then, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad has spent $125 million tunneling new tracks through nearby Billies Mountain, the Utah Department of Transportation has completely refigured the junction of highways 89 and 6, and the Spanish Fork River has been put back in its channel.
But as the soggy farmhouse silently testifies, the town of Thistle Junction was left to rest where it fell.
In terms of total per-capita physical disaster, few town tragedies can compare with what happened to Thistle. One day it was there, the next it wasn't. Everyone who lived there — about 50 people in a dozen families — became an instant refugee.
The good news is that no one died. The mudslide moved slowly, allowing 100 percent evacuation, unlike, say, Katrina.
But not all of New Orleans was destroyed.
Thistle was.
I got off my bike and walked the few steps down the dirt path to take a look inside the drowned house. There is no front door. Inside, the rooms are laid out as they were the day the waters rushed in. You could take a rubber raft and go from living room to bedroom to kitchen. But the water is so still — like a bathtub that hasn't been drained in 23 years — that the idea is hardly welcoming. The only inhabitants are birds that swoop in and out of the open door and windows. M. Night Shyamalan might make a movie here.
Equally eerie is the half-submerged shed in the backyard, its corrugated tin roof twisted on top of barren wood surrounded by pale green algae.
But when it comes to real melancholy, nothing of the little that remains of old Thistle is quite as sad as the display at the nearby Thistle Memorial.
At the memorial, information plaques tell of Thistle's not inconsequential history. There are pictures and facts about the town getting its start in the 1870s as an important railroad center, about the "helper" engines that were stored there to help steam locomotives make their way to the top of Soldier Summit. In 1917 more than 600 people lived in Thistle Junction. There were three stores, a saloon, a pool hall, a barbershop and a post office.
By the 1950s the town's population began to dwindle, on account of new trains that could make it to to the top of Soldier Summit without help. But farmers and ranchers took over and the town remained.
Until the flood of 1983.
After the flood, hundreds of people in a mourning mood with fond memories of Thistle donated money for the Thistle Memorial. Their names fill the side of one of the plaques.
But the memorial is falling down. Two of the information plaques are missing and the rest are sun-bleached and yellowed almost beyond recognition. Weeds have sprouted through the concrete. The place has the air of a Greek ruin. Worse, there is no sign on Highway 89 announcing that the memorial is even there, a quarter-mile off the beaten path. I would have missed it entirely had it not been for a Utah County sheriff's car parked at the adjoining rifle range that piqued my curiosity.
Even Thistle's tombstone is crumbling. How do you like that? There's nothing quite as gone as a town that used to be.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.