nWoD Nespelem Springs 1st ED
Nespelem Springs:
The mountains' shadows fall quickly over Nespelem Springs each night. Human kind's long road, always and forever Eastward from Eden at last brought it to the Ultimate West, and as has always happened, the shadows followed. For a while, they called it Paradise; perhaps here, in the land of freedom, a measure of grace might be theirs. It was not to be; the great sins were repeated and it gradually came to be accepted that here, on the last frontier, there was no escape.
In a valley where the river runs down from the high grey mountains into the green, there is a town. Once merely a few trappers huts and a general store, the town now fills the valley. Standing in the peaks by night, it shines, a tiny gem tucked in among the coarse forest. They named it Nespelem, presumably only to spite the people they took it from, and Springs, despite that all these were diverted into steel culverts and paved long ago. From the peak it all looks the same, the light spilling out to hold out the night, only succeeding in blocking out the stars. By day, the line of the Trans-Canada Highway draws a ribbon of new-builds to the mouth of each valley; these are the ones who abandoned the 'student ghetto' downtown, who knows why, a thousand reasons. Half of them have "For Sale" signs and stand empty. Those that ran to the edge of town in prosperity were driven back in or out to the forest in the wake of the Great Recession. Downtown in split between two institutions. Keystone University is not exactly in the league of the University of Toronto, or McGill, but is well enough respected to draw students from across the country. Against it stands, in contravention of both zoning laws and taste, Nespelem Springs only highrise, a glass tower in the heart of downtown. These are the offices of Fish Sure Geological Services, who employs most of Nespelem Springs non-students one way or another.
The forest, that appears so unbroken by night is in fact a patchwork quilting life and death. Some mountain faces, the sides that most people don't see, are naked, laid bare of their old growth and left to slough off their earthen skin down to their grey stone bones. In some of these, steel towers peek from around the mountainside, just visible from town. Elsewhere, the trees grow in straight rows like a field of corn; crop dusters pour chemicals on these once a season; the mist drifts over town and asthma attacks spike at the hospital but no one makes the connection. Still elsewhere, vast stands of trees stand naked, victims of the pine borer beetle that sweeps like a plague of locusts all along the forests of the boreal rockies. Many of these are not merely brown but black, the victims of controlled burns to try to cauterize the wound. The wild green is vanishing; even the National Park's long war against the encroachment of the brown is slowly being lost.
Nespelem Springs flickers and the night holds its breath.
This message was last updated by the user at 08:50, Tue 31 Mar 2020.
