Railroads are supposed to be magical. There’s a set of tracks just out back of my dingy apartment I share with Wall–Mart — spit–spit– — shopping flat mates that got the cops called over to our place once for domestic disturbance, but everything has been quiet now for months so it’s ok. I cross the tracks every day to get to work and cross them again to get home and sometimes I cross them again to go out to the one cool coffee shop in town where I hang out endlessly because there is nothing else to do and no where else to go, but not if I head out to the freeway in my car — that’s in the other direction up Junction avenue which used to be the Lincoln highway connecting (for the first time) the West Coast to the East Coast so commerce and troops could flow unimpeded by car across our great land. I can hear the trains go by (usually carrying commerce) as I fall asleep, or not fall asleep as is often the case since I seem unable to get to bed before 1 or 2 in the morning so when I wake up at 8, so I can be at work again at 8:30, I’m all bleary eyed and stumbly and never have time for breakfast. The trains don’t keep me up at night or make me think of where they’re going or where they’ve come from but it’s nice and comforting to know that they keep passing by as a not-so-silent reminder that the world is still out there and still chugging along the same old route (though the tracks are actually not on their original path but a couple of feet north of it) no matter what silly meditative tangent I get stuck on.
I walk along the tracks from time to time (and I’ve taken the commuter train once). I tried walking on the track like on a balance beam like in the movies (I have yet to put my ear to the track to listen for an oncoming train though) but it’s easier to just trudge through the gravel or hop(e) from one plank to the next even though they are too close together to walk normally and if you try to step on every-other they are way too far apart. They pass right through the middle of town, not along the outskirts, so it’s not really a getaway, more of a shortcut from my place to the thrift store where you can get free bread and donuts that have been donated by Safeway (saves time dumpstering, but I still go to TJ’s’ dumpster for other stuff). Although they’re in the middle of town it sort of is a getaway because there are no cars or much of anything or anybody really (except for the occasional train, of course, still, they aren’t part of the town but part of something else). The funny thing is, walking along the tracks is technically trespassing because it’s owned by the Union Pacific Railroad. They can keep their gritty wasteland.
Jules walked to school. Jules walked back from school. Everyday the same. Everyday the wall. Jules knew little about the wall, except that it was tall and gray and that he passed it everyday. Sometimes he wondered what was on the other side; sometimes he did not. As far as he knew there was no way to get there — though he did vaguely remember once seeing a door. But he did not remember where — and on the few occasions that he had tried, no matter how hard he had looked, he had failed to find it. And so it went. Everyday Jules walked to school. Everyday Jules walked back from school. Everyday he passed the wall.
I like the rail cars with graffiti on them; it’s usually way better than the mundane messy tags on the back walls of the warehouse and random buildings that face the tracks, and only back walls face the tracks because they are behind everything or maybe always outside, an outside of town that is inside like some sort of Klein bottle phenomenon.
Jules was often with his friends. They cared little for the wall They preferred to pass shops or homes — those had windows to look in on. They had little use for the wall. But Jules liked the wall. He thought of it as ’my wall’ — as a special friend. He never told the others this; they would much rather speak of other things. So Jules began to speak to the wall instead. Every time he passed he said, Hello, and, Goodbye, as well as many other things that children are apt to say to their friends. The wall never replied — or at least Jules never heard it.
I’m not even sitting out by the tracks or anything; I’m inside sitting in front of a fan blasting away on high to fight off the heat and yet I’m thinking about the forgotten, lost, oddly industrial for our small, seemingly rural, town (which is only a ’seemingly’ anyway, because the bomb building lab [sic.] is the real flesh of this place), strip of dusty gravel, lined with trash and other discards, but almost no plants or other cool counter-culture life affirming symbolism crossed back and forth as a shortcut, usually with heavy bags, by those too poor to own a car, who incidentally are often those living on the other side of the tracks, that frames the two sets of tracks that may or may not be magical behind my dingy apartment where I sleep without any blankets at night because it’s hot and I don’t have air-conditioning so I just leave the window open which is why I can hear the sound of the trains at night so clearly, that and they’re freakin’ loud.
A lot of people find the sound of the trains really intrusive; they think of that strip of land as far away and far away things are not supposed to intrude. which is funny because even if they have nothing to do with the train it still dictates how they live, beyond the obvious that it determines when K St. is North K and when it’s South K (same goes for all the other letter streets and even Livermore street itself) but there are only certain places where you can cross the tracks (by car, that is; on foot you just walk across) like K St. or Livermore St. but not I St., it dead ends on either side of the tracks. Unconsciously, folks go around, the way people don’t bump into ghosts (even though they can’t see them and don’t even know they’re there folks manage not to walk through ghosts — or the way Settlers avoid Arab villages with bypass roads which can probably be universalized to all occupier/occupied pairs.) So I guess the railroad is magical, a unique magical world that’s only there if you stand in just the right spot and look at it just right.
At school Jules learned many things: about the plants and animals, about the earth and the sky, about numbers and books, about people. What Jules never learned was that behind that wall lies an empty field. Still, he looks for that lost door.
Lately, though, I have been looking up at the sky a lot. It’s so awe jaw-dropping pretty. The clouds and the stars and the light and everything.
Sometimes when I look up I think of Oscar Wilde’s comment that life imitates art (I learned that in aesthetics, which was my second philosophy class in college — logic was my first — except that I wasn’t really in college but still in high school and I’m still not sure whether the whole accelerated learning thing was a good idea or the prelude to disaster), and it sort of bothers me but mostly, I just enjoy the sky.
Sometimes I want to go around grabbing and shaking people and yell at them to look the fuck up. I want them to notice that there’s this huge sky right above them.
Mostly I can’t really think about the sky because it’s just too far away.
Funny thing is I don’t live in that apartment by the tracks anymore. Before I lived there I lived in Santa Barbara. I didn’t like it there that much but it did have the beach, though it’s not really the beach I liked but the ocean, — the idea of the ocean really. Whenever I was feeling out of sorts I would go to some cliff and stare out at the sea for a while, never for very long because it’s actually quite boring since it’s just water with oil rigs in the distance and beyond that the islands which makes staring at the ocean in Santa Barbara kinda weird, because you don’t actually see endless water, but still you know that beyond those islands with colonial Spanish names of saints is more water. I don’t think it actually calmed me or centered me or anything like that but I told myself that it did and that helped and it helped to know that there was this huge chunk of land that wasn’t land at all and couldn’t be used for anything but staring at from cliffs.
My new place is further away from the railroad tracks but I still go back and visit. I feel like one of those children that visited fairyland when they were young and keep trying to get back now that they are all grown up and of course they can’t but fairyland is still out there somewhere just behind the mirror and hidden in that shadow and sprawled under some rock. I don’t actually believe in magic; I definitely don’t believe the railroads are magical even if that is what they say. But I can still walk along the rails (just takes a bit of trespassing).
When I was little I had a tree-house in the backyard. It was a birthday gift from my parents. My father built it for me. On the first day of construction he nearly sawed off his thumb. I had to wait till it healed to get my tree-house. There was a rope ladder you could pull up after yourself. It was really nice. When I was home-schooled I would go there to do my work, or at least I would go there with my books. I can’t remember whether or not I did much work. But it wasn’t my favorite tree. There was a tree next to it that was just a bit taller. I loved climbing that tree. Every time I went a few branches higher. I was completely alone up there. There wasn’t much of a view. You could only climb up the central trunk and all the other branches sort of cocooned around you. The one problem was all the sap that got in your hair. I don’t think my mother ever understood how I managed to get so much sap in my hair. I felt kind of bad that the tree house wasn’t my favorite place, especially since I had wanted it so badly and had asked for it so much, at least I imagine I asked for it, or more likely just talked about it a lot, that’s more my style, and my father had worked so hard on it and even nearly lost his thumb.
I’m not really sure what I did in that other tree, the tall one with all the sap. I guess I just sat there and listened. You could hear the cars on the road that ran along our back fence, the road you had to cross to get the JCC where we went swimming in the summer. It wasn’t a small residential road but one of those bigger ones. I don’t think I was listening to the cars; but, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because I’m not sure what else there was to listen to up there. Or maybe I just sat and stared at the branches, just like when I sat in my room and stared at the wall for hours, not thinking, not doing my school work (of course that was much later, after we moved away from the house with the tree). I preferred the tree.
I’m sitting inside now. Not at my new place though. I haven’t really settled into my new place, I don’t know all the nooks and corners yet. Actually, I don’t even know my own room; I’ve been sleeping in the spare room because I still have to paint the room that will be mine a soft vintage orange, so the floor is covered in plastic and I can’t move my things in. I’ve made a spectacular mess of the room I’m using in the meantime (which I feel bad about towards the landlady-house-mate who tries very hard not to be too motherly); nothing has a place so it ends up strewn all over the floor and I’m not really sure where to begin cleaning it all up so it stays and gets worse. Once I move into my real room it’ll be easier because I’ll arrange everything just so.
So now I’m biding my time at the one cool coffee shop I mentioned before. It’s Saturday night so there’s live music and they’re not bad at all. I don’t know anyone here so I’m just sipping my tea (even though it really is a hot-chocolate night I got tea because the barista said everyone is getting hot-chocolate tonight; that’s a silly reason to get tea but I’m glad I did) and listening to the music while writing this. Before the music started this place was super full because there was a holiday parade of some sorts downtown (put on by the bourgie elements of town such as the ’chamber of commerce’ and ’friends of downtown’) but now the music seems to have pushed all the people away like a sonic bubble and it’s much nicer. I’m really glad the loud folks at the table behind me who talked about cars and racing left, the sounds of their conversation made the room sound hollow. Once in a while folks from outside wander into our bubble here in the back of the one cool coffee shop in town and you can immediately tell that they don’t belong because they’re not actually listening to the music and haven’t really entered the bubble but are still in their same old world and are just trying to figure out how this music relates to them and most of them realize it doesn’t and some pretend that it does which is painful to watch because the illusion looks like the sound of nails on a chalkboard (and that last bit is nearly illegible because I put on gloves because it’s cold here and it all came at once because it made me kinda mad so I had to write it quickly and my handwriting isn’t that great to begin with).
Breathe,
in, and then out.
When I began this it was summer and now it’s winter with the romantic rain that doesn’t fit in any one place but colors outside the lines and keeps falling everywhere without regard for regulations, getting everything thoroughly sopping wet and muddy.
de Vries 2007