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From a distance.
I love trains. Since I was a kid playing with my first train set in the 50s, I've never lost that little chill that I feel when I see a train. Little did I know as I sat next to my dad on the basement floor screwing track segments onto plywood that loving the real thing could surpass the romantic conjurings of my boyish imagination.
The real trains I saw as a kid were almost all freighters - Burlington Northern trains that ran across Southern Montana. I'd see them from the back seat of my family's two-toned, copper- and cream-colored Rambler Cross Country station wagon.
My two sisters and I got most of our clothes from the old Hart-Albin store in Billings, Montana. So, a couple of times a year we'd get in the car and head north across the sagebrush flats and sweetgrass prairies to Billings. On all those trips, I'd sit in the backseat and stare out the windows or fight with my sisters waiting to see a train. Sitting in the front seat, Mom invented games to keep us occupied. She'd sweep the horizon for deer or antelope which were hard to see for all the sagebrush, juniper, and cottonwood bottoms.
Having seen hundreds of thousands of sagebrush, I can tell you that every one is different. To me, more than anything on Earth, sagebrush signal Wyoming. Sagebrush wood is twisty and scraggle-barked. A young sagebrush looks a thousand years old. From a distance, sagebrush foliage looks a dirty gray-green and kind of ratty, like an old woman's windblown hair. Up close, sagebrush foliage is lacy, delicate, and tender. Once it gets started in a place, sagebrush isn't going anywhere. Its roots claw outward through almost any kind of soil and can grow to a ten-foot radius. Though he tried in Wyoming, God hasn't put a wind on Earth that could uproot a sagebrush. Even sagebrush fires, which spread through the root webs, won't wipe them out. Some things are meant to stay where they grew.
When I'd walk with my mother through sagebrush, she'd always bend over, pull leaves off their bonsai-tortured branches, and then pinch and rub them between her thumb and forefingers. She'd proffer her hand to my nose where I'd inhale the pungent, bittersweet mixed scent of mother and sage and then tell me how much she loved them.
I wondered then - as I wonder now - if my mom knew how much she was like sagebrush; she was tough and tender, twisted in some ways but beautiful and strong in so many others. She was sweet, but she was also bitter. She sent her roots out in the Wyoming soil. After I was born in West Texas, she insisted on going home to Wyoming where she raised me and my siblings in the same house that she grew up in. In her later years, every Christmas she'd put up her own Christmas tree: a sagebrush.
It was this mother who taught me to love trains.
Whenever we'd see a train, she'd challenge me to count the cars - a much harder thing to accomplish than it might seem. The cars go by in a blur and if you don't learn to focus way out to count them, your eye catches on a rusty letter, an open door, or a wheel spark and you lose count. My mother never lost count; if she did, I never knew it.
This morning, I'm on a train. I'm on my way to Philadelphia from Washington. Unlike Wyoming, the railways are strewn with garbage and litter as opposed to coyote and deer carcasses. There is a scruffy, hard-knocks, Grapes-of-Wrath quality to the trees and weeds that line the tracks. Rusty rail segments, rotting ties, and oiled gravel fly by as the train knocks and bobs northward. Right now, I'm in a tunnel under Baltimore. There's a lot more life overhead than there is around me. I'm on the old regional St. Albans train this morning where we are consigned to the old, low-speed tracks where the Acela won't run.
One of the best things about my work is that on almost a weekly basis I'm on a train. I feel connected to something I've loved most of my life. I can't see it, but I know there are tens of tons of diesel muscle that hardly strain to pull us forward. The only things missing are the sagebrush flats and the scent of my mother's hands. But those things I can remember. This train - all the trains - conjure them vividly.
Posted on June 12, 2007 08:10 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Neill, this is beautiful - so powerfully evocative. I can smell the sagebrush, feel the flexing muscle of the train, its rumbling through the earth all the way out here on the coast of California. Lovely. Thanks for a great way to start the morning.
We all have childhood memories of different sorts, but very few of us have the ability to conjure them up as beautifully as you obviously do. Thanks for inspiring us to remember.
Neill,
Thank you for this beautiful memory. I love reading your blog.
Shawn
Neill:
I, too, was fascinated by trains as a kid, and your post reminded me of driving trips to my grandparents' home in upstate New Yorkâand counting the cars on passing trains. Having lived in western Canada and taken long car trips on the prairies, these train sightings were more frequent.
It's great when we can reflect on simpler times like the ones you've commemorated in your post. It clears the head, and fills the heart.
Neill, You have captured the very essence of Wyoming in your writing, but more importantly to me you have captured the essence of Grandma. Thanks for bringing a smile to my heart and a tear to my eye.
-Don