(299): Nights Spent Living Next to the Train Tracks

Years and years ago, I lived in a college town for a stretch. Part of that time was spent attending college. But at times, the town was much more interesting than any of my subjects. At one point, I lived in a cul-de-sac, in a house once purported to have been Jimmy Buffett’s lodgings (subsequently debunked). It was a 1930’s style clapboard with a screened in porch, abutting a thick, kudzu-draped patch of woods. There were five such houses in a little semicircle. Behind them was a steep rise that led up to train tracks that ran right through the middle of town and on to the next little town.
Every day in the late afternoon, a slow freight train limped past, blocking traffic and bleating out its intermittent honking noise pollution. At some times of the day, that track could be used to travel out of my little depressed courtyard; but now, a stamped metal wall of locomotives and boxcars stood in the way. That’s when I began trainspotting. There was nothing else to do. There were sometimes over a hundred freight cars.
Sometimes the train would come through at night. On my more decadent Friday nights, when I dared to add liquor or wine to the equation (which was often in those days), I climbed unsteadily up the slope and stood maybe 3 feet to the side of the tracks just so I could feel the machine-driven wind as a fast-moving string of freight cars whisked past me. I knew it was dangerous, but it was irresistible and exhilarating.
On other nights when trains were not in the area, I climbed up to the tracks and walked along them to many far-flung neighborhoods in the village. The only traffic I had to worry about were the cars at the railroad crossings, and those were few and far between.
I could see the back windows of the crackerbox student apartments, each one with its little silent story; the dim public park with its swings that swayed by virtue of wind currents or ghosts, and finally the dwindling roadhouses into the true countryside dark, where the real, unadorned hardscrabble life of the Southern peasant held on, unaffected by the idols of higher learning in the small island where the university stood.
That’s what people never understood about colleges that were built in quaint country villages: the tight islands around the school enjoyed this rush of employment and artificially elevated standards of living, while the fringes of the village kept their time-hallowed practices intact. Occasionally, the two unequal populations would meet and clash.
The sheltered students would find themselves facing a raw encounter on the side of a dark county road — real life so scrupulously denied in their so-called “education,” a lesson that might affect the course of their entire life, to the extent that the learning structure that had been so carefully built up tumbles down and a true life calling emerged. Or, in the tumbling down, all illusions were demolished and one found oneself facing truths too awful to acknowledge.
Or sometimes it was just plain ugly and traumatizing. That was the adventure of it, if you want to call it that. That’s when the corner is turned, and those carefree (careless!) moments beforehand become idealized. That’s when old farts like me sit around and type out colorful memories, perhaps tinged by fancy; I hope they’re colorful enough to entertain. ‘Nightie night, y’all!

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