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I headed out again on winding, dusty, bumpy roads, determined to find the phone. I was on open range part of the time, and stopped to photograph one sign indicating I would be entering such an area. Street marker signs were there, too, telling me the roads that intersected at that point.
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All went well until my odometer indicated I had gone 14 miles south on the Deerfield/Aetna road where I was supposed to find the gate near the rural fire station, and a sign that said Z Bar Ranch. I saw a gate, I saw a white building that looked like a house and had a small, broken, satellite dish outside, but I didn't see any Z Bar Ranch sign. I knew that had to be it, but I drove on a bit further, crossed the river, and turned around.
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I headed east and wound around a bit on open range after crossing the pond dams Jim had mentioned, and I stopped to photograph some cows with calves under some trees. After I drove a couple more miles, I reached a point on a small bluff where the road went downhill, and then curved back to the north. There was the phone in a box on a post next to an old telephone pole!! |
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I photographed the phone from the bluff to show how isolated it really is, and then went on down the hill. I did shots from several different angles, and then approached the phone and did some shots up closer to it. At one point, I did a shot into the sun, shading my camera with a shadow cast by the old telephone pole that looked like an old rugged cross. As I did that, the thought came to me, "Lost Child.....Call Home," and I wondered why so many people won't do that. Finally, I approached the box, opened it, and saw a brown Radio Shack phone attached to the back of the box, and I imagined an old rotary dial phone had once occupied the rusty box instead. When I picked up the phone I found the number written clearly on it: 316-886-5205......but it was dead. No doubt; a victim of cell phones, I thought. I picked it up and put it down several times, hoping it would give me a dial tone, but it didn't happen...........A little while later, I went back to the box, opened it, picked up the phone, and tried again. Nothing. I picked up some rocks for my wife, sat in my car a while and wondered some more about the history connected with the old, really isolated phone, and I left. |
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