Train Tracks (Essay)

I spent many dusky warmed evenings in childhood sitting on a section of railroad track located on the Upper Sacramento River with a fishing pole and a tackle box nearby. But with an Olympus 35 MM camera in my pouch, or a sketch pad for art class, the only action that fishing pole ever saw was as a subject for my pen or camera.

I often fantasized as trains grumbled by about where they might be going. Where they had come from. And how far they might be able to take me from the roar of the river, the smell of pine, and the croaking of frogs at sundown.

The bed in which the tracks lay narrowed at the spot where I usually sat along a cutout piece of mountain, leading onto a trestle and across the river. The tracks were often warm, heated either by the settling sun or with the leftover energy of a recently passing train. If you stretched out on them the tracks they protected against the approaching cool of the night air.

On the narrow spot where I often sat, I would watch my brother just down the bank where he and his fishing buddies angled for the last remaining chances at catching a crappy or trout. There was a twist, a switching stick, and a slow rise in the track. It was a place where trains could choose to go one way or another.

I took many photographs of this section of track. Some pictures had a tackle box and fishing pole artfully posed. Others had a book I was reading propped against a railroad tie. All of this accomplished before the quiet whoosh of wind in the trees, the hiss of the river, and the metallic sounds of trucks passing by on the Interstate high above were muted by the scream of a freight train shaking earth and making it clear to whom the track belonged.

Often, as I would rush to collect my belongings and move them from the harm's path, I would pump my arm to the passing conductor. Being so all alone in the middle of nowhere he would answer back with a blast loud enough to cause the railroad nails to back up out of the ties they were fastened to.

A human connection to somewhere else.