I was traveling in Europe, going north from Germany, through Denmark and on to Norway. I was awakened in the middle of the night because my train seemed to be going forward a short distance, bumping into something and clanking, and then backing up, repeatedly. We were in Gotland or some such place and the train was being boarded upon a ship, in its belly. The train would go forward, deposit 3 cars, then back up, and repeat. When my car was still, I got up to check things out. Automobiles were on the floor above us, and then people on the floors above that. Being a south Texas denizen, I found this mode of transportation completely weird.
Of course, BaronCarlos is never one to NOT cause trouble, and seeing that Carlos was in his standard black trench coat, (minus the Black Fedora Hat), and looking quite intimidating, standing at six feet, four inches short. (see Pictures of Everythingians for a photo.)
His female associate, we will call her Yung-Pei, was a 5 foot something Asian Female, in her leather jacket.
At this hour of the night, it was a lonely subway car, where Carlos and his friend were seated. Eventually, an unknowing victim entered the car. He was caucasian, lower middle class, and an average joe of a New Yorker, he could have even been a downtrodden tourist.
Baron Carlos decided to have some fun with him.
After several stops of utter silence, Carlos spoke up, "Pei, please don't go berzerk in this car, like the last time."
Pei, just looks at Carlos, wondering, "What the hell is this geek doing?", since she had no idea what Carlos was doing. Carlos continued, "The last time we were in the subway car, you pulled out your gun and held ten people hostage."
At this point, Pei is red in the face.
Carlos continued, "This time, I am NOT going to clean up you mess. You are on your own!"
At this point, the passenger, quickly escapes to the ajoining car.
Pei then sternly rebuked Baron Carlos for being such an ass, and almost getting the two of them killed.
I don't even remember how the train felt as it approached: the first thing I remember is the blinding white of the train's headlight. From a distance, the light reduced objects to two dimensions; the trees to the side of the highway became inverse silhouettes, light and dark, the world reduced to yin and yang. My night vision eliminated any chance of grey.
The wind, thunder, sparks, a flying piece of metal, the ground shaking as I sat still, my hair whipping about my face -- I only have images, stills which capture but are not captured by the motion of the train. Its mass overwhelming me, everything around me -- I felt as small as I do beneath the stars.
But most vividly (my only memory of motion), I remember the shadows rotating as the train passed. Suddenly, the world, projected into 2D, gained depth, like a cube would if, as it suddenly rotated, you realized it to be a hypercube. The cross-sections of tree trunks revealed themselves to be cylinders; the knife-sharp fence shadows swept out volume in the dust in the air.
Because we left our sleeping bags elsewhere, we had to sleep on the floor with blankets. It was uncomfortable and cold and not relaxing.
Later that night, two trains went through town, a mile or so away. They crossed very close to each other. I could hear their horns and the Doppler Effect mixed them together in a hauntingly beautiful cacophony.
It is one of the most lovely sounds I have ever heard.
I met an holocaust survivor, who was a distant uncle of a friend. He was travelling from Poland to Switzerland, at the beginning of WWII. Two German soldiers checked his passport, which had a "Juden" mark. He was lucky, for some reason, they didn't arrest him. He overheard one saying to the other "you should never trust Jews". Later, after much travel through Europe, he and his father got caught and put in a transit camp in occupied France. The French policemen who guarded it told them "we're not watching; the gate is open". The father didn't want to escape, as he still believed in justice: "I've never done anything bad! I'm innocent! I'm not going to run like a criminal!" He died a few months later in a concentration camp.
The son died shortly after telling us his story. He had never told anybody about it before. He had tried all his life to forget it, to no avail.
The cool thing about trains in Thailand is that the walkway between cars isn't enclosed, like they do in the wimpier western countries. Oh, no; they just have open air. Exhilirating.
So I got to watch the sunrise in the south-east asian mist over rice paddies and rainforest, with the wind keeping my cigarrette burning fast.
Some buddhist monks came out to have a cigarette with me.
My cousin and I once drove into the woods on the outskirts of our family farm in the Appalachian mountains.
We built a campfire and stayed there for hours talking and watching stars, shooting bottle-rockets into the sky.
I remember it went quiet and suddenly I was in a concrete tunnel. It was very cold. I could feel the water snaking down my back as it dripped from the ceiling. A train appeared, heading directly for me, its wheels shrieking and sparking.
I stood frozen in its headlights like a stunned deer.
Just as I thought I would certainly be flattened, my eyes came into focus. I realized I was staring at the reflection of the firelight on my cousin's pick-up truck.
Recently, someone suggested that subconsciously I might have been trying to remember my birth.
Like a passing thought, a train pierces the cold midnight around me and is gone
In a world where you can't undo, unsay, or unfeel, I am unrestricted.
When I ride it, I often notice how differently men and women take up space in the train.
Women tend to use constrict themselves as much as possible, minimizing the amount of space they use. Two women riding together tend to stand or sit close to each other.
Men tend to spread out - spreading their legs apart and sometimes taking up more than one seat. If two men are riding together, they sit or stand far apart, even if it means that they must shout to carry on their conversation.
What does this tell us about body images and territoriality? I often try to come to a conclusion while riding the train, but I haven't succeeded yet.
We went through hundreds of miles of rice paddies in the interior of China during harvest season, which was amazingly interesting. But the most interesting part was when I went to claim my bunk in my coach, It had been squated by a mother and her child.
I let them sleep and sat by the window watching the people go by.
My mom and dad and I are driving the 1954 Chevy Bel-Aire back from somewhere late at night. We're quite a ways from home; perhaps we've been to visit grandmother. I think I'm around 4 or 5 years old. The road we're on has a stretch where the train runs parallel and is just a few yards away. My mom is driving (is my dad drinking?) and a passenger train pulls up right along beside us. My dad turns around to me in the back seat and says, "You've never been on a train, have you?"
I say, "No."
He tells my mom to speed up and find the next place the road crosses the tracks. She looks at him like he's crazy, but she speeds up. (Obviously, he's not only drinking, but he's drunk.)
About 10 minutes later, she has stopped the car at a RR crossing and my dad is out waving a white handkerchief at the train. It stops, and he does some talking to someone on the train. (He was a salesman). The next thing I know, he and I are on the train and the next stop is our home town, about an hour away.
He said I'd go to sleep good on a train. I did.
Three stories about trains.
In January of 1998 I was strapped for cash and took a job thirty miles away in the city of Annapolis. The only way to get there without a car was a 2.5 hour public transit ride each way, starting with half an hour on the train. To make the timing work I had to catch the 5:30 train. But by the time I finished work and went home it would be dark again; the only sunlight I saw that winter was a little before getting into my (windowless) office.
After about two months of this routine I fell asleep on the train one night. I woke up twenty minutes later and looked out the window and saw--nothing. I didn't know what time or day it was. All I could see clearly was the inside of the car lit in sharp fluorescent light. And the most confusing part was that I didn't know if I was going to work or coming back.
It was April 15, 2000. I was having a little adventure with a railroad police officer--or rather trying to avoid having one. While I clung to a fence like I meant to dance slowly with it and slowly inched my way along I heard a rumble. Slowly I turned my head and shoulders and saw on the freight line I'd departed a train roll by at a slow and stately pace. I watched it go and almost forgot about my fatigue and dirt and sweat.
Not too long ago I was in the buddha garden and the rain came up in the first of the big summer thunderstorms. And as I leaned back and accepted a soaking I heard--again--a rumble and hurried down the hill to watch the train from close up. It was all intermodal shipping containers, marked with the logos of freight lines in England, Greece, and China. I got to thinking about all the foreign goods that came over vast seas to the Port of Baltimore and that would roll from here to every corner of North America and I felt strange inside, a kind of vertigo, as I contemplated the huge elaborate system that makes this kind of commerce routine.
Enough stories. Go fetch Grandpa some bourbon.
I'd forgotten about the farm for the longest time. Last night we were bundled up, skin cold and warm and a tangle of limbs. We talked and touched and paused and listened. The train went by; rumble rumble clickety click; and in that instant I was young again. Cozy and silent; safe.
Walking along the ribbons of the steelroad, in the Vermont woods, at night. Dark, so dark the atmosphere is an opaque gas and you can feel it rushing over across and swirling about you in whorls of photophilic mufflers. The slight phosphorescence of fungus on the trees, of what small starlight filters through the treetops to flicker (time and again) on the shiny tops of the rails.
First: a whispering, sussuration, tickling reminder. High frequencies dancing in the dark. The feeling (not sound) of torque and stress, the forces acting on the steel jumping across the darkened interstitial space as some flex lightning to creak and gently push our bodies.
Second: faintest smear of brilliant light ahead off faraway and over the hill; a moving wizard's light of flickering shadows and occasional ray bursting up into the night sky.
Third: whispers becoming moans and quiet muffled shrieks; the stereo of the rails making one (almost) want to lay there down on the trackbed and listen to the varicolored slow and lethal speech of steel to steel.
Final: reluctantly moving aside to see the closing lantern slide around the mountain's face, scything down across us in the hellish glare of an angry storm as the locomotive approaches with a ringing bell (-click-DANG-click-DANG-click-DANG-click-DANG) to indicate that perhaps the engineer has seen us walking quietly down the cut besides the rails. The earth moves to the train, but it's hard to feel that when the rhythm of the Diesels is causing the very air to thump its way through your body so that you can feel the train in your lungs, huge and metal and loud and hot and THERE and gone, off, into the night where we had walked to find it for itself, and all that's left
the rhythmic murmuring marching cadence of the cars that followed it sleepily into the night
trucks sounding off the rail joins in steel drum harmony.
A mostly unused railroad right-of-way ran right past our house in Pennsylvania, when dad briefly worked for Dupont. The old man at the end of our cul-de-sac, Mr. Pete, was an old Locomotive Engineer. He had never graduated from high school. Instead, he ran away from home when he was 16 and signed on to shovel coal on a steam engine. He was a big man, who looked like he could shovel some coal. He was a smart man, and worked his way up to chief locomotive engineer. He and my father, a mechanical engineer and something of a polymath of the physical sciences, would have long conversations about steam power
He had bought his house because the lot backed up to the tracks. His entire basement was a giant electric train set. It was so big he had these trapdoors in the middle of the town that he could open and poke his head out of, so that he could add and change things. Anytime we wanted, we could come over and run the trains. It has a switching yard and everything.
Mr. Pete and his old rail buddies had bought an old steam engine and several cars, then restored all of it. He would have them bring the train around and PARK IT IN HIS BACKYARD! right on the tracks. Then he'd give us run of the train. We could hang out in the engine car, eat lunch in the dining car. Once, we got to sleepover in the caboose car. A couple of times, I got to watch my Dad help Mr. Pete get up stream in the boiler and boot up the train.
What a super old guy. I was really lucky to have him next door.
I would wake up in the middle of the night hearing their `chugga chugga' blow in through the screened-in window. I could only catch the rumbling it would let through, it was either that, or hordes of mosquitos buzzing around my head. Their noise is like the symphony of cicadias or the purring of the Boston Whalers cutting the water behind my parent's house. It is a remembered comfort, a lullaby of memory as I get older older.
Trains excite me, I know there is always an adventure waiting at the tail end of them. It's magical to watch them swing through the desert like oblong snakes of Pez candy. They don't scare me, with all of their clanging metal and molten guts of rattling fire. They're like huge beasts to be petted and soothed, not unlike the horses I grew up taming. Trains can take me wherever I want to go, particuliarily in dreams where they carry messages, warnings and pieces of my subconscious back to me. Trains bring me places and people, remembered or present.
When I lived in Jacksonville, FL, my last year in that town, I got to see where it was that they make trains behave. You know trains could figure out a way to get around without tracks, if we'd let them. They're animals, we made them that way. One of my dear friends, okay, deepest scars, worked in one of the roundhouses. CSX...ech! I still hiss everytime I see one of their logos. But I loved walking around that cylindrical building, looking at all of the screens, figuring out which crossings I drove over to get to school every morning. But that wasn't all. I also was able to pinpoint the crossing right by my parents home. I looked at my friend and said, "Hey, there's where home was." He shook his head and dragged me outside. "I want you to meet someone."
We walked over to the guardhouse and in through the open door.. A head of chin length blonde hair whirled around in the chair.
"Kir, this is Scott. Scott, this is Kir, my girlfriend I told you lived in Savannah over the summer." I know I blushed to my toes as soft blue eyes that lit up like Cathedral rose windows touched on me then quickly looked down. "Nice to meet you." Thanks Mom for teaching me all that politeness bullshit. It comes in handy when I'm nervous. "How's it going?" He asked softly and we shook hands, just as the five-`o-clock came roaring by. And there was a JOLT! The wind lifted up around the guardhouse, spinning and flipping leaves, and the noise from the tracks got louder and louder. Wrists! My god, here I am staring stupidly at the hand I'm still holding looking at the bones and dark tanned skin of his wrists. I swear there's something wrong with me sometimes.
We let go quickly, even more embarrassed that a moment ago. Greg, my friend, started shooting the shit with his buddy, as Scott leaned back in the chair and had an easy smile on his face. I looked out the windows trying to find something else to concentrate on, as both of our eyes darted back to one another.
I knew. He knew. And the whistling of the train faded in the distance. Scott began asking me questions, about Savannah, about Daytona. I don't remember how I answered, but I know the words were shaky and shy. Definently not the Windigo style of today. And his voice was light, soft lisp because of those adorable rabbit teeth. And I knew I would know you, know you well, come hell or high water.
I had no idea I'd love you. I had no idea you would set the standard. I had no idea you would be my handfast. No, I didn't forget. Not until you did. And Maryland got reborn into a place for other people. But you were supposed to go.
God, you'd laugh your ass off at all the trouble your Kir's gotten herself into now. But you knew I would, and you kept telling me... Where are you now? Can you hear them wailing in the night where you are like I do? If I run to catch this train, would it take me to you now so late in the game?
