767. Davenport, Lincoln County (WA32)

This courthouse wasn’t bad at all. It was a nice brick structure, and the tower offered something to differentiate it. I also have to admit that, while it didn’t disappoint me, it didn’t exactly move me, either. Not every courthouse sparks joy or induces ire. I give it a firm meh-plus.

There’s always a cemetery. You can see the beautifully maintained grounds and the lush greenery where some lie in the sacred ground for their eternal rest. The thing is, the cache is not in this cemetery.

It’s in this one.

It’s really old, older than anything in the “new” cemetery. It also has that spooky vibe that some seem to treasure and the superstitious avoid. Overgrown as it was, I couldn’t help but wonder why the two cemeteries were divided this way. Maybe the older one was a black cemetery. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen this on the road. But I have some trouble believing that an early settlement of blacks made it to Washington and died out there, especially considering the demographics of nearby Oregon and Idaho. It could have been a religious division, but I saw no evidence of that. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The dead are, well, dead. They neither know nor care about the ground in which they lie. In this case, the needs of the living were met.

The cache was behind a tree. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. With that, I walked back, out of the gold and dead, into the green and living, and back to the car. An hour later, I was ready to tackle the requirements of…