Friday, August 18, 2006
Dancing with Trains
I’m about ten miles out of South Bend, westbound on the dirt path next to the Norfolk Southern tracks. I’ve been running steady about two hours, approaching my turnaround point at the IN/Tek steel mill. Its 8am, a humid 75 degrees and rising.
I started slow out my back door, joints creaking like the suspension underneath a Conrail locomotive crawling out of the rail yard blocks away. It’s the lead of three engines, dragging a half mile of coil steel and new cars through the switches. We met up on the railroad bridge at Chapin and Western, the Conrail warmed up, fueled up, engine lights green. I’m warmed up too, legs loose, sweatband on for what lies ahead. I nodded up to the engineer, he nodded back, and we pulled out together.
I love this route. As we leave weedy loading docks for the country I leave other things behind too; problems with a co-worker, the transmission bill, a friend’s new brain tumor. One by one these heavy cars uncouple, diverting energy for the essentials: breathing, heart rate, coordination. If I manage my water and fuel wisely, I can keep this pace four hours. But the heat is tricky: I once lost seven pounds on a humid three hour run, even drinking 2 liters on the way.
A bright pinpoint of light flickers on the horizon. Ten minutes later an eastbound Union Pacific thunders by hauling lumber and grain, just one serving of the nation’s daily rations. The tracks are alive. And tell secrets. Like shortly after 9/11, when I was passed by a dark train, car after car loaded down with desert-tan Abrams tanks, headed east. Mideast.
There are ghosts out here too. In 1918, just east of Hammond, Indiana, the engineer of a Michigan Central troop train fell asleep at the throttle. He missed 2 signals and the brakeman’s flare from a stopped Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train. When the troop train hit the caboose and wooden sleeping cars, the circus train burst into flames. The 86 performers and roustabouts sleep on, in a Forest Park, IL cemetery, called Showman’s Rest.
Just then, grasshoppers start leaping out of the weeds in front of me. Dozens of them. They drop down and spring up again, a cascading wave just off the bow of my knees. Prairie dolphins! I raise my arms, the bugs leap higher and I laugh out loud, ten years old. A couple times, I just started weeping out here. Took me a while to figure out: the breathing, the wildflowers, the heat, the trains, the cottontails…I’m dancing with all of it. Joy. And, eighteen years of hospital work, knowing that every heartbeat, every breath, every bend of my 46-year-old knees without pain is a pure gift, nothing less.
I reach the IN/Tek plant and turn around, the rails shimmering in the heat. Its going to be harder on the return. But this is where the real training begins. Sometimes, during a marathon race when I’m dead tired and every cell is aching to stop, I think about the trains. Throttle wide open, pulsing diesels, cab lights green, pointed to the horizon.
I walk the last few blocks to cool down and pass a young man on a porch. He looks like he just woke up. “You run out there?” he asks, waving a cigarette toward the tracks. I nod. “Well, I wouldn’t,” he says. “Something might happen to you.”
I think about that. “Yeah,” I say. “Things do happen to you.”