Traintracks.

 

I loved railroad tracks as a boy.

Their limitless horizon pulled me along them with a hidden hunger, a promise of total happiness at the end of the line. In some huge railroad depot mansion where my longings were met and my fears unloaded and buried like clinkers.

Railroad tracks were also an unending source of material for boyish construction and collection.

Descending to specifics, I remember my first train ride. My mother took us children to the Milwaukee Road station in downtown Minneapolis to take the local to Red Wing for a look-see at pottery. That would be me, Sue Ellen, and Linda. She bought a glazed crock for making sauerkraut, but only ever used it as an umbrella stand or to put cattails in during the fall. She considered sauerkraut declasse. 

Those Milwaukee Road tracks reeked of creosote and the constant kiss of hot metal. I stared down at them mesmerized, almost ready to leap down and wallow in the oily granite chips that buoyed up the wooden ties.

A firm yank from my mother pulled me back from an untimely grave. But from that moment on I was hooked on railroad tracks; what ran on them, how they smelled, what they produced in the way of loot, and the flora and fauna that flourished along their side.

There was a rail yard near our house on 19th Avenue SE in Minneapolis. Only two blocks away. The moan of diesel engine whistles was as common as birdsong. That railyard was overshadowed by monumental cement grain elevators that brooded in the sunlight like trolls, a halo of pigeons endlessly circling each one. Old rickety wooden warehouses lined some of the tracks; they seemed permanently boarded up – inviting incipient pilferers such as my friends and I to break inside. Tear away the cobwebs and discover abandoned crates of sardine tins or Ming vases packed in excelsior.

But our larcenous instincts were still held in check by our mothers’ constant admonitions to ‘keep your nose clean,’ with the implied threat that ignoring their counsel would inevitably lead to hair brushes and/or belt straps being applied to tender young bottoms with unexampled vigor.

So we walked along the tracks on deep summer days, collecting various items of interest. Rusty and bent railroad spikes. I kept my collection of these useless articles in the garage, up on a ledge where the wooden wall met the roof. They remained sacrosanct, then forgotten, until years later when a new garage door was installed; the vibrations of the various tools used in the operation dislodged the rusty spikes, which came raining down on the workmen like blunt spears. It took a good bit of sweet talking on my mother’s part to get the workmen to finish the job. And the look she gave me afterwards would have curdled the Milky Way.

We laid pennies on the track when a train approached. The copper coins (and they WERE copper back then) flattened out nicely into thin ovals.

In the fall the cattails and the milkweed pods ripened along the train tracks. That called for an all-out cattail war or milkweed pummeling contest. When we finished we looked like the inside of a mattress. 

And the half-consumed sulfur flares! These were manna from heaven to a pyromaniac like me. I gathered up a dozen or more to take over to Jimmy Antone’s garage, where we gouged out the sulfur and stuffed it into a pipe capped at one end. Then lit it. The resulting brimstone rocket thrust would last for fifteen minutes or more. How we managed to never burn down the Antone garage is beyond me.    

Frogs, salamanders, and turtles, luxuriated in the sun where the railroad tracks rose above swampy ground. Grown fat and careless with easy pickings, they were easy prey for our Twins baseball caps. Like a cat bringing a dead bird into the house, I often brought my damp hatful of dazed amphibians into the kitchen to dump in the sink. This was not received well by the kitchen slavey – aka my mother. I was summarily ordered to remove said slimy things into the backyard PDQ. Where I let them slither and slide away to their dehydrated fate. 

When I joined Ringling Brothers as a First of May I got my own room on the circus train. That meant untold hours living with and on railroad tracks. Such an existence never grew stale or tiresome to me.

In fact on sleepless nights (you get a lot of those after you turn 70 – or at least I do) I still like to imagine myself on a set of tracks, with semaphore signals clanging in the distance, looking up at a water tower, or a gantry winking away. Someday soon, I guess, I’ll be taking that long last walk down the tracks of the Celestial Railroad, to find that everlasting Depot.