Damage Control

This morning I raced a train to work, catching glimpses of three brawny engines and an endless string of double-stacked red “K-line” cars between the buildings on the north side of Front Street as I traveled eastward. When I climbed the hill and turned southeast onto City View, I glanced in the rearview mirror of the Cadillac and saw the tail of the train snake around the bend, along the river and out of sight.

I have always had great affection for trains. I’ve always lived close to them, in communities dependent on industries that have a necessary and simple symbiosis with them, mines and various varieties of agriculture and manufacture. I love their sounds and the scents that surround them: diesel exhaust, hot iron and steel, and the acrid tang of creosote. I love the symmetry and order of the tracks that crisscross my world, the steel bridges spanning rivers like spiderlace, and tufts of white smoke disappearing into tunnels blasted and hacked through solid rock.

I love the storied history of trains, particularly the way they shaped the American West. Growing up I collected rusty spikes and pennies set on the tracks for the 135-ton locomotives to instantly pulverize into paper-thin copper ovals and fling into the brush. On summer afternoons in Kemmerer, Wyoming, I would sit in the weedy shade of the cottonwood trees behind the butter-yellow metal building where my mother was the director of a senior citizens’ center. I would memorize the engine numbers of the coal trains that passed by and watch the loading and unloading of freight- coal, lumber, machinery and mail. I understood early on that the network of tracks across this country is our economic circulatory system.

Trains are potentially deadly if people are careless, and diesel engines pollute the air with a concentration of carcinogenic compounds. The French-born Dr. Rudolf Diesel, who originally patented the diesel engine, disappeared from a ship en route to London in 1913. (His body was found in the English Channel days later. His death was ruled a suicide due to the cross penned as his journal entry the day of his disappearance, but another theory holds that the Germans- who were manufacturing diesel-powered submarines- wanted to ensure that the British would never obtain the diesel engine design.) I suppose one might say that trains have an ominous stigma of danger and power.

I don’t think of these things when I see trains. I think of progress, history, and tracks across the starched brown prairie or perilously strung along the windswept crags of sheer granite cliffs. I think of the pure bliss I felt one midnight in December of 1986, seated on a plush red seat next to my sister and mother (who was dozing in the dim orange glow). We rocked gently side-to-side while the wheels audibly ground the fresh snow on the steel rails, and as much as I wanted to see Dad (who was waiting for us at the other end of the tracks), I fervently wished the journey would never end. I wouldn’t have minded rumbling on forever, with the bitter black night outside the window of our Amtrak passenger car.

I can’t recall the very first time I saw a train, but I am certain I loved them instantly, and I know that for me they will always symbolize adventure, freedom- that which never comes without a price- and the solitude I seem to thrive on.