Trains
I'm a Missouri correctional officer, and today, I'm assigned to tower #8, which sits on the wall in the Northeast corner of the old Missouri State Prison. The Missouri-Pacific Railroad sits behind me and to my right. I begin to think of the many associations I have with trains, some of which are connected to profound changes in my life, some not. My first train ride was when I was four, during WWII. My father quit his job of twenty years with the Burlington railroad and moved to Columbus, Ohio, to work for Curtis-Wright, producing fighter planes for the war effort. My mother and I followed after a couple of months on the Zephyr which was a thing of beauty and elligance. We ate in the dining car, searved by white coated waiters. At the end of the meal, a small silver bowl was placed in front of me. "What's that?" I asked. Mother replied, "A finger bowl." I dipped in my fingers and licked them, much to her mortification. My father met us at the train. He had grown a mustache. It lasted until we got home to our new apartment. Columbus was a happy time in my life.A train ran about a mile from our apartment. At night as I lay warm and curled up in my covers, the lonesome shreak of the locomotive's whistle sent shivers down my spine. I lay there wondering to what strange and exciting place it was going, and wished I were on it. I would have made a great hobo.
In second grade, my best friend, Jimmy Cox, and I looked at a pocket sized book
that my father had given me, of exotic railroad cars. We planed to build our own car and go out West to be cowboys. We studied the book sureptuously under the desk, since Mrs Moore, our teacher, had a penchant for cracking knuckles with her ruler. We never built our machine. We never went out West. The war ended and my parents and I moved to Hammond, Indiana. My father wanted
to get into the restaurant business and my mother wanted to be near her parents, her sister and husband and their two daughters, aka, "The Folks." I think it was a trade off, now that I'm older and think about it. Hammond was built around railroad tracks. In the begining, they gave life to the down
town area, and eventually helped kill it. Railroad crossings were everywhere. If you were within half a block of the giant steam locomotives when they passed, you were inundated by a cloud of coal smoke, sometimes containing a live cinder or two. The years passed and steam was replaced by diesel engines. Train sounds still gave me the shivers, but the blair of the diesel horn was not the beautiful steam whistle of my childhood.
My Mom and I took occasional trips into Chicago aboard the Chicago, South Shore,
and South Bend Railroad to be amaized by the Christmas displays in the windows of nMarshall Fields department store. They are still great, even to this day. The "South Shore", as it was called, was electric and painted orange.
While in high school I took a train to Colorado to go to a summer camp. All I
remember from the trip is that it was long, tireing and bumpy. I did see a dust devel, one of those minature tornados, that rose to around seventy-five feet. Colorado was beautiful. Back in Hammond, Arlene, the girl next door, was driving in town with her father. They were stopped in traffic on the tracks, when the warning bells began ringing and the gates came down.They exited the car and ran, but she stopped and looked back. The train hit the car and the car hit Arlene, killing her. She was fifteen. High school. Tim Skaggs and I cut our afternoon classes to go down town to Parron's and shoot some pool. We walk. As we near town, we see a train aproaching. We run to beat it. Tim catches a utility pole guy wire across the throat and goes down sliding feet first onto the track, unconcious. He is lots bigger than I am, but I pull him off. He is ok, other than for a nasty welt across his throat. As I sit with my dieing grandmother in her bedroom, I find a Northwestern Railroad magazine dated 1860. In it I read of a fatal train accident including this witness testimony: "Olie and I was walking down the tracks and I heard a train comming, so I got off the tracks. The train went by and I got back on the tracks, but I didn't see Olie.
Pretty soon, I saw a leg laying there. Then, I saw an arm and then, I saw Olie's head, and I says to myself, "Good God! Something must have happened to Olie!"' I married in my freshman year of College at Indiana University. My wife and I moved back to Hammond and worked in my father's restaurant to earn more money, so we could go back to school. We had an apartment with one set of tracks behind it and another set of tracks a block away. When the trains passed, our coffeepot would vibrate off the stove and hit the floor. I often wondered why she didn't keep it elsewhere. At night, I would lie in bed and watch through the window as the signals changed from red, to yellow, to green, and wait for the crash of the coffeepot as the train went by. Train crews from the South Shore were regular customers in the restaurant. One crewman brought us a gallon of uncut Muscatel wine. Wonder where he got that? In the winter we contracted to feed crews that kept the switches open during the bitter
cold. The place always smelled of karoscene after they left. Back in Bloomington, during my senior year, my wife, one month pregnant, informed me she didn't love me anymore. She said she was in love with the man that I thought was my best friend. I quit school; couldn't concintrate. Before I went back home, I sicked the Army on her boyfriend. The Army was putting him through school, and
frowned on that sort of stuff. He went to Korea. My wife went to Tom's River, New Jersey, where she came from. About a month after the baby was born, I took the Amtrack to see my new son. His
little head came to a point.(Tight squeeze at birth.) Told my wife that had to have come from her side of the family. His head soon returned to normal. I did my best to get my wife and I back together. I still loved her. I tried until I boarded the train home
in Newark, with no luck. The train was packed. I had to stand in the aisle clear to Philly. I was close to suicidal. Rebound! Six months later, I eloped to Chicago aboard the South Shore. Jamacia. My second wife and I, with our youngest girl, are boarding "The Diesel", going from Montego Bay to Kingston. I have forgotten my wallet. Our guide and driver, Lester Buttle, presses a wad of cash into my hand, and we are off! For hours we wind through the jungle and pass bauxite mines, and stop at little towns with names like Belaclava.I have no Jamacian change and the little boy selling bannanas through the passenger car window won't take American. A nice oriental lady with a British accent,
pays for our bannanas.My daughter, Sharon, takes her first unassisted steps on this train ride.We arive in Kingston eleven and a half hours later. We fly back.
I'm in my father's restaurant. The phone rings. It is the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad.
"Buster", a switchman and the son of our cook, Essie, has been killed by a train. I have to tell her. A different wife, a different time. A block from our house, the South Shore has hit a pickup truck. I go look. The truck is in two pieces. A fireman hoses down the burning cab, occasionally lifting a tarp and spraying the smoldering body that lies beneath. I didn't realize it yet, but this marrage is as dead as the guy under the tarp. In the restaurant, my fourth (and I hope last!) wife and I hear that the boy who always came in to play "Donkey Kong" has been killed.He stood too close to a passing South Shore and was struck in the head by a small, projecting bar. Another dead child.
My wife, Cherryll, is driving. We are in Gary, In, one city over from Hammond. We argue about something inconciquential. I hop out of the car at a stop light and she keeps going. A friend works a couple of blocks away, so I head there. Bobby is a sweetheart. He does "drag" on week ends. My wife says she learned to act feminine watching him. He hasen't seen her, so I hike a little further and take a South Shore to Hammond. I get home after another walk of six blocks and she is there, already. Says she looked for me, but then realized what I would do, so she went on home. I hate psychic women! They never worry about you!
Way too late to save the business down town, Hammond has built overpasses. The
stores that didn't fold moved to outlieing shopping centers. I drove a taxi for a while after getting out of the restaurant business. If you were "10-28", you were stuck by a train. We were "10-28" a lot. Our cab company contracted with the railroads to transport train crews to motels when they "went dead" and back again to the trains. Once in South Holland, Illinois, at a pick up point we called "the hill", a driver goofed and the cab landed in a tree top.
I listened as one crewman told his buddies about scorpion fights in the dessert during the Gulf War. It seems the black ones are the biggest and toughest.
Another crewman told me about one of our "lady" van drivers. Ahead, there had been a fatal traffic accident and the police were directing a long line of cars around the site. She didn't want to wait, so she went around the other side and ran over a dead body. When the crew protested, she asked, "What's the matter? He was already dead, wasn't he?" I have worked with some lovely people.
We moved to Missouri to get away from the pollution, the high crime rate, and, yes, the trains.Now, where I live, there is one railroad crossing in town. It's a Burlington. The same company that my dad worked for. I don't miss the trains of Northern Indiana. Should I ever feel nostalgic, I'm assigned to the back towers by the tracks often enough that I can just wave to a passing Amtrack. The distant blare of a train in the night can still give me shivers, but the
wanderlust of my childhood has ebbed greatly. Could the cliche, "There's no place like home" be true? Perhaps I am mearly growing old. No, I don't think I'll ever be old in my mind, but should I ever think it is happening, I'll just hop a train!
"What goes better with scrambled eggs than champagne."
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