Photography by Ed Book
pump house that somone had labeled "Jail" as a joke at the Almota Docks on the Snake River, La Crosse, WA (Ed Book)
I was traveling along some back roads in southeastern Washington state and came across this building labeled “JAIL”. I had stopped to photograph the overflowing wheat elevators along the Snake River and included this building in my captures that day.
A couple days ago, I was optimizing and adding metadata to images and converted this image to monochrome which seems to work better than color for such images. I add metadata to all my images (stuff like who, what, where, when, etc about the image including keywords that would apply to the image for search engines to locate and list in their searches. I remembered the location being along either the Columbia or Snake rivers but although I could remember the lay of the land and what was about, couldn’t recall the exact location…
Google Maps and Google Earth to the rescue. I remembered that I was on the north bank of the river and there was a stream leaving the hills nearby with a road climbing out of the river valley up that canyon. I started on the lower Columbia River looking for the grain elevators cruising up the river and then up the Snake till I found the location… fairly easy but I was distracted by all the other features along the way, several times forgetting that I was looking for a specific location.
I found the grain elevators on the dock and the small “jail” and added the location information but what was it about this small jail? I Googled the location of the elevators to find that it was a county coop and found a phone number for the site… I called… ‘was told that labeling their pump house as a “JAIL” was someone’s idea of a joke but there really wasn’t a story behind it…
So, if there was a story behind it, what would it be? and why would someone paint JAIL on a pumphouse? What was the joke?
Peace