That there are more important matters on the agenda than the eventual fate of the long-dead Northwestern Pacific Railroad – this I will grant you. The county’s drawn-out general plan update will shape the future of the region in profound ways for the next 20 years or more, if the powers-that-be ever allow it to be completed. As discussed in this space last week, there are good reasons to suspect that our economy is headed toward the skids. Someday in the next few decades, our geologists believe, the subduction zone right off our shore will release an amount of energy comparable to that unleashed upon Japan earlier this month.

But the non-railroad is a fascinating story, and to my mind it’s a perfect little window into local society, culture, government – all sorts of things. Religion, maybe. There is a sizeable portion of the population that believes not only that the untold hundreds of millions necessary to repair the fallow line to Humboldt County will magically appear out of nowhere someday soon, but that all our problems will be only be solved once they do. Though it still has believers on its board, even the North Coast Railroad Authority – the public agency that holds title to the tracks – has, after a long struggle, been forced to deny that there is any foreseeable path to opening the line back up to Humboldt County. Since there are no identifiable funding sources for reopening, no plans, no architectural drawings, it is held purely a matter of faith.

Pity the heretics! In the last few years, some have suggested putting this nonproductive asset to use by building trails along or upon some sections of it. They probably can find the money to do it. It would not be easy, but it would be possible. Despite this – or because of it – the train believers have dumped truly eye-widening amounts of scorn on their heads. At an NCRA board meeting in Eureka earlier this month, a woman stepped to the mic and invoked Jesus to shame the would-be trail builders who “coveted” this disused, publicly owned resource.

The latest development is perhaps inevitable – a would-be trail-builder has arisen who mirrors the train believers in zeal and disregard for reality. Chris Weston, a Southern Humboldt landowner, is a well-meaning man who has gathered thousands of signatures supporting the conversion of the remote Eel River Canyon, the most impossible section of the railroad, into a 75-mile backwoods hiking trail.

Weston is a well meaning guy with a neat idea, but like the rail believers – also well meaning guys and gals, in their way – he has no plan at all in sight for such an enormous undertaking. Yet he has vast energy, and he comes on at a million miles an hour. At the Eureka NCRA meeting, flat-out told NCRA directors what he “intended to do” with the right-of-way through the canyon. From there it went downhill, and shouting matches between the NCRA board and Weston ensued.

Does such frenetic, unfocused energy hurt the trail advocates’ cause? It’s hard to see how it wouldn’t, in the end. The people who have been working for a Eureka-Arcata trail have done their homework, and are cognizant of the challenges they face. But in Eureka they were mostly drowned out by Weston’s drama, and it became easier for critics to throw them all together in the same mental bin. If that becomes so, then the trail advocates look as unrealistic as the train people.

In talking about the Eel River Canyon, the most sensible voices at that meeting came from some of the backwoods ranchers whose land borders on the railroad right-of-way. They pointed out the grim state of affairs along the railroad – the slides, the washouts, the collapsed tunnels. They wondered about the sort of amenities that would have to be built to accommodate hikers along a punishing days-long through the boondocks. They worried about trespassers, fire, rogue ATV enthusiasts, dogs going astray and chasing cattle.

After some time, an idea occurred to one of them: Wouldn’t it be possible, he asked the NCRA board of directors, to simply abandon the line and not put in a trail? Hard as it may be for either the railfans or Weston followers to swallow, the idea made immediate sense, at least when applied to the Canyon. Southern Pacific wanted to roll up the carpet back in 1982, after many decades of rails, ties, cars and personnel rolling down into the river, never to resurface, and no one yet has come up with any more reasonable future for a stretch of railroad built inside a long, steep groove of mud.