Ghosts in the Silence

A few weeks ago I stumbled onto some Facebook page about high school football in Southwestern Virginia; immediately after getting sucked in I started to notice that even though the southwestern part of Virginia is seen as more Appalachia poor than most parts of the state, there seems to be an unending source of game footage all the way back into the 1960s & while I really couldn’t care less about those schools themselves, certainly not in, say, 1968, I find myself staring at the clips for minutes at a time; the black & white film’s absolute silence draws me in as if I’m looking not just at ghosts, but ghosts who may still be alive and stumble upon the footage as randomly/easy as I have, and I wonder what it’s like for them to watch themselves on film whose silence makes it seem as if they’re already long, long gone to the dustbin of time.