Skull Fortress

Brief vacation

Dear all those who love this blog -

I am pleased to announce that we are now entering a new golden age of what's important. Gone are the two weeks in which nothing was posted! Here to stay are numerous posts filled with spelling and various grammatical errors! Let us rejoice in my return! For a treat, I have looked into which page has been visited the most on this blog and have decided to give you more of whatever it is. Based on my research you all can't get enough of "Man throwing up on other man". So let's give the people what the so long for!

There. What fun. You all make me sick.

Goals

Library Days - Unfortunate Stuff

This is a tale that I wrote when I worked at the library. It's actually pretty gross now, but at the time I remember it being down right funny. Anyway, let's take a look....

I have a horrible sunburn. Or did, a few days ago. Now I'm at that wacky point where the sun-burnt skin peels off and goes on its way. This event is mildly disturbing, as one gets used to having their skin remain firmly fixed to their body. I was at a beach in Florida, and in one of my less brilliant moments I decided that it would be a good idea to remove my shirt. I shunned the use of this foolish "Sun-block", thinking that a real man like me wouldn't experience any negative effects from exposing my pasty body to the massive nuclear party that is our sun. Alas! I managed to obtain a sunburn on the entire backside of my body! I would have never believed that a condition of the skin could create pain that seemed to come from every internal organ contained within this strawberry red body.

That night as I was sleeping not so soundly on my stomach, I could hear a faint but constant humming sound. I convinced myself that this noise was coming from my horribly burnt skin, and it would be a lie to say that I didn't get really scared that I was going to join the elite club of people who had died from a sunburn. It turns out that the noise was actually just a fan that I didn't see in the corner of the room. I was relieved to discover this. The next day I inspected my usually sexy body for the first time since my tango with the sun. I laughed at first, cus, whoa, my body is a different color than it usually is. Laughing proved to be really painful, so it was replaced with a string of swears, which hurt was well, both physically and spiritually. So I went back to the laughing. The pain reminded me of how it must feel if you buy a belt sander, and just press it as hard as you can to your skin and go nuts with that sucker. And after you're done, you realize that you paid way too much for that belt sander, which makes the pain last for days after the original wound is inflicted.

Anyway, fast forward a few days to last Monday. I find myself hard at work at the library. The pain from the burn is gone, but I find myself in the afore mentioned stage of a sunburn where my skin is comically peeling off my body, leaving delightful little souvenirs of me all over the place. I figure that the quality service that I provide will more than make up for my leprosy-like tendencies. A fan behind me helps me keep my burnt hind-quarters cool. A nice older lady approaches the desk, and I inform her that I will need her card in order to allow her to flex her borrowing privileges. She mutters something under her breath and starts to fish around her purse for a card. I take this opportunity to give my back a reaallllly good itching. The process of peeling creates a horrible urge to scratch the affected areas frequently, and when scratching is complete, I find myself with the shivers for reasons that would fascinating to figure out should I ever have the time to do so. Anyway, unaware that my itching has dislodged a sizeable quantity of Scott-flakes, I let loose with a mighty shiver. In and instant, the air surrounding both myself and the nice old lady is filled with pure epidermal magic. For a second, I look on terrified as the lady tries to figure out what the devil was swirling around her head and entering her purse. Then she puts the puzzle together, and gives me a look that can only be described as the purest of terror and disgust. For a moment, we just stare at each other. She stutters something that I can't understand, to which I respond with "Uh, I, ummm, sunburn", and I point to my backside. This did precious little to improve the situation. By now, most of the skin has settled on both of us. She has the look that I would imagine the first person to ever have a monkey throw fecies on them had. They know that Something horrible has just happened, and they aren't quite sure if they want to continue being among the living.

Not quite sure what to do myself, I decide to just continue with the checkout, and I hand her the books that she wanted making sure to blow the remaining "bits" off her items. She takes the books with a horrible blank stare still upon her face. She doesn't move, so I pick up her card and hand it to her, hoping that she will realize that this is my way of telling her to just move along and try to put this disturbing event behind her. She put out her hand, and I put the card in it, realizing too late that firmly attached to the card was a 2 inch by 2 inch square of pure sunburnt skin goodness. She doesn’t seem to realize. Maybe she thought it was a post-it note. She again says something in a quiet quivering voice. I don't know what it was, and I have a feeling that in a second this lady is going to lose it. I have no idea what to do. My mind races through all my customer service training, but we never covered what you should do if you accidentally cover a patron in a cloud of your burnt skin. To my relief, the lady slowly turned and headed for the door, never stopping to put her items or her card in her purse. I decided that this was a good time to take a break.


And so I did.

Ghost town wednesday - Sulphurdale, Utah

Towns used to have great names back in the 1800’s. If you found silver in the hills nearby, you named your city Silver City. If you found gold in a nearby hill, then you named your city Gold Hill. I guess to be more accurate I mean towns used to have incredibly uncreative names. There are exceptions of course. Eureka is a great name for a town. Dragon is better still. Ophir is somewhat less great, but at least it’s creative.

Having a great name becomes even more important the less desirable your town is. You could get away with naming you city Gold Hill because people don’t care what you call it as long as they get a chance to lower themselves into a hole with poor ventilation and look for gold. The problem is that not every mine is looking for something as romantic as gold or silver. Or even lead. No, some mines are looking for decidedly less pleasant minerals. You would think that such a place would need a really great name to attract residents, but some people never seem to figure that out. And so begins the story of the city of Sulfurdale.

Sulfur (or Sulphur) would be an agreeable mineral if it just didn’t have a couple of irritating personality flaws. Much like a teenager, it has a very distinct odor which is described as “eggy” at its best and “soul devouring” at its worst. Also like a teenager, it plays an important role in producing several toxic gasses and corrosive acids. Let's take a look at it....

Kennecott Copper Mine produces more sulfuric acid than it knows what to do with each year as a by-product of refining ore. And while there is a limited market for the stuff, humanity still doesn’t really have all that many uses for it. I don’t know where the rest goes. Check your backyard. But sulfur also has several important useful aspects. For example….

1) Matches use sulfur. Well, the colorful part of the match does. The rest is just wood.
2) Insecticides make use of the toxic properties of sulfur.
3) Gun powder has some sulfur in it.
4) Soap does too. Somehow.
5) Sugar refining requires sulfur for some reason.
6) Rubber, paper, paints, dyes, and gasoline also involve sulfur. I’m too lazy to list these individually.

So, as you can see, sulfur does have its uses, and as early as 1850 people were looking out for the stuff. I can’t imagine that you would have to look all that hard. You can smell sulfur long before you see it. It’s like a gassy ninja. As groups of brave souls started to explore the wild parts of Utah (which was most of it in 1850), they discovered outcrops of elemental sulfur sticking out of the rocks in around the city of Beaver. It’s around here…..

In a dramatically less inviting setting than the gold mining towns of the time, the good, sulfur-loving people of Sulphurdale settled in and started to set up shop. The town location was set up by a fella named Charles Dickart, which is a somewhat unfortunate name. Mr. Dickart was responsible for discovering the main sulfur body in 1870, which again, doesn’t seem like that big of an accomplishment. A fancy mill that could tear the sulfur from the rock was built in 1883. This mill….

It probably had a better roof 100 years ago. But it’s still standing, so I guess we can’t complain.
From 1890 to 1905 that crappy little shack turned out 1000 tons of sulfur a year. What’s weird is that there’s still sulfur in there. Just sitting in stinky piles all over the place. As things got a little more serious, the sulfur company built a company store…

A school house….

Check out that air conditioning! There were some stairs right in the middle of the building and I really wanted to go up them, but doing so would probably mean my death, so I didn’t. I like being alive.

And several old houses…

They're out there, somewhere.

Everyone lived the in magical little town of Sulphurdale. I don’t know who named it, but it shows the same creativity as the other towns of the time. Twice a week the wagon trains of Sulphurdale would haul their stinky cargo 30 miles to the nearest Union Pacific loading dock. The mine looks like this….

As you can see, mining was done by the open-pit method, which make for an even more attractive setting for a town. In 1918 the town got away from the name of Sulphurdale and turned to Morrissey (That is to say that the town name was Morrissey, they didn’t actually go to the singer Morrissey). I suppose this is an improvement over Sulphurdale, but what isn’t? Morrissey refers to the man who organized the mighty Utah Sulfur Industries which ran until 1949. At some point everyone went back to Sulphurdale though.

A surprising fact is that a new mill was built as late as 1951, but no sulfur was produced. It just sat there. Another new mill was built in 1961, and just as things were gearing up the owner of the mill up and died and the sulfur dream died with him. The plant shut down, and the town dwindled down to just the watchman. I suppose he lives in this little shack on the hill…

These houses were obviously newer, but they didn’t appear to be occupied. The front door blew open in the wind and a lot of the windows no longer held any glass. I drove up there and started to look around, but I got a really creepy feeling about the place. Maybe it was sulfur vapors getting to my brain, but I decided that if there was a haunted portion of Sulphurdale this was it. I kept my eye on this building the whole time I was there, half expecting a shotgun wielding prospector ghost to come flying out the door and shoo me off in a rain of lead buckshot. But that never happened. Which is good. If there IS supposed to be someone there, I hope someone checks up on them from time to time, because I think they are going to find something that smells worse than the sulfur when they do.

A large part of the city was plowed under in the 80’s because they became too dangerous to live in. I guess they gave up on that policy, as the school is probably a good candidate nowadays.

Overall, there isn’t a whole lot left of Sulphurdale. I can’t see any sign of the two newer plants, and have to assume that they have been removed. Only the original plant still hangs out, still filled with sulfur. A geothermal power plant has been constructed just up the way from downtown Sulphurdale, and now it seems to be the only real game in town.

So what do we learn from the tragic tale of Sulphurdale? I’ll tell you what we learn. Sulfur is gross, and we should leave it be. Also that one house was totally haunted.

Gumby

Unusual Statues