The Image of the Railroad

I'm riding the bus through the switchyards south of Downtown Seattle, in the industrial zone along the Duwamish River. On one side are the reedy woods on the west slope of Beacon Hill where homeless people camp and on the other is the looming concrete hulk of the Harbor Island Bridge.

Mostly these are intermodal yards. Brightly painted shipping containers stand in stacks, decorated with the names of Chinese and Swedish shipping firms. Where the port and the switchyards meet, the gantry cranes that hang over the harbor move the containers around like Legos.

Off to one side, I can see a few hopper cars sitting on a siding, seemingly stranded, surrounded by freeways and vast empty lots. I glance up from my book. Emblazoned on the sides are names I'd long since forgotten: Cotton Belt, Golden West Service, Wisconsin Central.

My earliest memories are populated by freight trains. Across the street from my childhood home, an old branch line ran towards somewhere north, I never knew where. Minnesota perhaps, maybe all the way to Canada. I imagined that the engine I saw in the morning would soon pass through great pine forests and slow down as it neared yawning open pit mines on the frozen tundra.

The sounds of the railroad were omnipresent: the horn of the engine, the bell at the street crossing, the grinding noise of metal on metal. Lying in bed, I would hear the dull rumble of an approaching train, and the light of the headlamp would cast across the wall of my room, briefly illuminating my books and my Kansas City Royals pennant.

As I got older, I read the history of the railroads. i jotted down the numbers of the battered diesel engines. I wrote down the faded names on the sides of boxcars, names that seemed to encode an old industrial America I would never see: Saint Maries River, Seattle & North Coast, Frisco Line. Buildings were renovated, cars were crushed and recycled. But these boxcars were purely utilitarian and therefore unmodified. They were fragments that seemed as lovely and mysterious as Inca pottery.

During my teenage years, this raw fascination began to turn into a more conscious fantasy. In my room I listened to Simon and Garfunkel and read On the Road. Late at night, I walked around town, down towards the old Chicago Northwestern depot. Standing on what had once been a bustling platform, I watched the cold lights of the chain stores flicker between freight cars. I was surrounded by the logos of contemporary Middle American life: Target, Long John Silver's, KFC, Joann Fabrics. But it seemed as if all I would have to have done was ran, jumped onto the ladder at either end of that boxcar, and I would have been on my way to the Mississippi Delta or the deserts of Chihuahua. The flashing red light at the tail of the train retreated into the night. I almost believed that if I chased it I would arrive in a land of wild mountain streams, of apple harvests in the British Columbian autumn, of illicit kisses with tragically beautiful waitresses whose breath tasted of Lucky Strikes, of visionary sunrises in the High Sierra.

This is all terribly adolescent. As you grow older, the romantic visions of your high school years, whatever those might be, inevitably fade or mature into more adult goals and plans. The world when you're 18 years old could not be more open, and as you age, you come to realize how many potential lives you could have lived that will never come to fruition.

And yet I doubt those teenage hopes will ever truly die. I find them catching up to me at dull moments when I'm walking around the city, chopping onions for soup, waiting in line at the post office.

I cross the Jackson Street Bridge. On the tracks below, the express is ready to disembark for Portland. I can't help but wish I was on board as it puffs creosote smoke into the icy early evening.