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The 
So, by being half-right, it’s more accurate than the average news story?
By about a factor of 10.
Re the new general store:
We were recently in Abiquiu, New Mexico. We were there for the Purple Adobe Lavender Farm, but most people associate the town with artist Georgia O’Keefe. There is a longstanding general store that has general groceries, but also a lot of supplies for campers and the sport fishermen and kayakers on the nearby river. They also carry a lot of items apparently geared to the tourists who come for the Georgia O’Keefe visitors center. And a cafe. So retail in odd places might have a reason to thrive.
The Google Street View camera went through the place.
Having traveled myself through Cisco on numerous occasions, I must say it’s probably one of the least off-the-beaten-path ghost towns in Utah. After all, it’s directly on the shortest route between Denver, CO and Moab, meaning that throngs of Front Range outdoor enthusiasts pass through it every year.
There are abandoned villages in Utah that are an order of magnitude more remote than Cisco. But I doubt a woman from Chicago would even find them, let alone feel safe living in one of them by herself.
So this post is something of a light-hearted jab at the press for, as usual, providing a less-than-accurate story.
But let’s also look at this article from the journalist’s perspective: this entire story is basically a throw-away personal interest filler story. And the inaccurate sentence in question is really just a throw-away color commentary to set the stage for the contemporary action.
In other words, no matter how good the journalist writing the article is, the offensive part of the sentence will probably never exceed its current length of 47 characters (“…when Interstate 70 was built a few miles north.”). Yet the more accurate explanation here took several thousand characters.
So since we all think we can do journalism better than the professionals, here’s a challenge: complete that inaccurate sentence in 47 characters or less in a manner that is more accurate than the original while still providing some shred of useful information (i.e., not just “…but died off due to changing times.”) and being interesting to read.
Can you do it better? I don’t think I can.
Remember when news articles were supposed to start off with the most important information (the most important who, what, where, etc.) and then fill in the details later? That way an editor could snip off the bottom of the article to make it fit the available space. We had to practice that form of writing for high school English class. They seldom do that nowadays. Nowadays they start off with fluff designed to set the stage for whatever narrative they’re trying to push, maybe using a few carefully selected/crafted anecdotes. I’ve seen journalists ask for anecdotes, laying out the specific requirements for the anecdote they need to finish their story. So the newspapers can cut that out and go back to doing news, and then they can have more than 47 characters to tell about the downfall of Cisco.
If you do pass through it on the way to Moab, you get to go through the amazing Castle Valley
Yes, but only if paid.
They really are amazing, these United States. I learn something new about them every single day.
So you have me scrolling around Google Maps and I find this weird structure near Halchita, UT:
Zooming in reveals not much:
Using the measure distance tool, we find this thing measures 3/4s of a mile at its widest point.
Googling Halchita, UT gets me nowhere.
Any ideas?
I figured it out:
https://www.lm.doe.gov/Mexican_Hat/mexhat-factsheet.pdf
Looks like a catch-basin for something.
No clue what though.
My in-laws live in a ghost town. East Carbon, UT. Used to be a mining town.
Oh, hell no. Some of us like to remember when papers valued colorful language and printed poetry (the sure-fire method of getting 10 lbs. of content into a 5-lb. bag and, in the right hands, have it smell sweet). Although I am well-acquainted with iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls, getting them into any consistent and sensible pattern is beyond me. But here’s the prose of what I yearn for:
Cisco, Utah
Originally dirt, Cisco became a watering hole for engines and crews, proximity to railroad tracks due largely. By and by work rules tightened and Reddy Kilowatt gave the last steam locomotive in mountain service a whack on the hindquarters and said “Git.” Interstate highway planners in far-off somewhere put the final kibosh on the town’s any remaining purpose.
In between times, large numbers of sheep took their final fleecing there before boarding trains to become Scotch Broth, the ultimate reward of any sheep of ripe age (and still available in canned formed in Canada). One does not know if there ever was a Basque restaurant in the town, but there certainly should have been. It would have been a delightful surprise, hearty meal, and welcome dust-cutter for the motorist with one sunburned forearm standing in the fading light before far-off somewhere had other ideas.
In the town now lives the Lone Artist, fending off vandals, waiting for Tonto, and barring the return to dirt.
The purpose of a writer is not to make the life of an editor any easier. As I believe Thomas Wolfe once told Max Perkins.
BTW the wikipedia article on Cisco has an even better non sequitur than that in the OP: “After oil and natural gas were discovered, people began traveling more and Cisco continued to grow.” Makes me suspicious of my interpretation of what was going on with the sheep.
Whatever has happened to journalistic dictates of”Who what when where and why?” as well as things like the scores of the game being reported?
In following the World Series by newspaper during the Great Power Outage of California, I was dismayed to read one whole story about how the Nationals won their first game in the Series, without coming across a single mention of the score. Loads of stats on ball players and also stats on the likelihood of a team who lost the first two games winning the whole thing. But no score!
Who what when how and why