" The dead bring us to life, vivify us, give us scale. We are the unjoined part of them and at their graves we stand at our own.

In Ruby Park Cemetery, in the once-famous silver lands of Colorado, the graves are unmarked. There is a single column of marble above a miner's daughter who died at the age of seventeen. The town of Irwin drew thousands of people in the 1870s, some from as far away as England and Scotland. The cemetery is abandoned. The mines have vanished. All but the silent warning,

'My good people as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I
As I am now you soon must be
Prepare yourselves to follow me.'

The dust of the pathway whitens our shoes. "

― James Salter , There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter