There were tracks about a mile away from the house I grew up in. We lived pretty far out in the country. Sometimes, after the midnight train went past, you could hear the baby coyotes yipping and howling at the train as it roared off into the night.

I would walk the tracks for hours, falling into a trance watching the ties repeat beneath me. I ceased to see what I was looking at. It was an interesting state of mind. Once I stepped on an empty turtle shell and didn't see it until it had exploded into dust and pieces under my foot.

I was on a train traveling from West Berlin to West Germany, before the fall of the Berlin wall. The train was stopped at the border of West Berlin and East Germany, and East German engines were attached to the cars. Three East German soldiers, with guns drawn, boarded each car. Two of the soldiers stood at each end of the car with their rifles upright across their chests. Another soldier went through the car, asking each rider for their papers. While this was going on inside, outside, other East German soldiers, with guns were standing alongside the train while other soldiers went up and down the train with German Shepherd dogs, and still other soldiers with dinner-plate sized mirrors on long poles passed the mirrors under each car, looking for stowaways. All of this was accomplished in silence. It was pretty damn frightening.

---

ailie's story reminds me of another train story:

I was traveling in Europe, going north from Germany, through Denmark and on to Norway. I was awakened in the middle of the night because my train seemed to be going forward a short distance, bumping into something and clanking, and then backing up, repeatedly. We were in Gotland or some such place and the train was being boarded upon a ship, in its belly. The train would go forward, deposit 3 cars, then back up, and repeat. When my car was still, I got up to check things out. Automobiles were on the floor above us, and then people on the floors above that. Being a south Texas denizen, I found this mode of transportation completely weird.

It was December 28, 1997, BaronCarlos, the hero, was with his female friend at the time, since we ALL know that Baron Carlos is terminally single, on the A-Train from Harlem, on their way to Penn Station and then on to Queens.

Of course, BaronCarlos is never one to NOT cause trouble, and seeing that Carlos was in his standard black trench coat, (minus the Black Fedora Hat), and looking quite intimidating, standing at six feet, four inches short. (see Pictures of Everythingians for a photo.)

His female associate, we will call her Yung-Pei, was a 5 foot something Asian Female, in her leather jacket.

At this hour of the night, it was a lonely subway car, where Carlos and his friend were seated. Eventually, an unknowing victim entered the car. He was caucasian, lower middle class, and an average joe of a New Yorker, he could have even been a downtrodden tourist.

Baron Carlos decided to have some fun with him.

After several stops of utter silence, Carlos spoke up, "Pei, please don't go berzerk in this car, like the last time."

Pei, just looks at Carlos, wondering, "What the hell is this geek doing?", since she had no idea what Carlos was doing. Carlos continued, "The last time we were in the subway car, you pulled out your gun and held ten people hostage."

At this point, Pei is red in the face.

Carlos continued, "This time, I am NOT going to clean up you mess. You are on your own!"

At this point, the passenger, quickly escapes to the ajoining car.

Pei then sternly rebuked Baron Carlos for being such an ass, and almost getting the two of them killed.

I was camping in the Columbia gorge, where the sky is so dark that the summer stars seem to cast hard shadows on the pine-needle covered dirt and asphalt. There, train tracks run along the scenic highway, which twists and turns along the narrow flats between the cliffs of the gorge and the river. We went (my companions and I) and lay on a blanket by one of the bends in the track, inside the protective fence, and looked at the stars. We chatted and talked until we felt the train approaching, and then we sat and faced it until it came.

I don't even remember how the train felt as it approached: the first thing I remember is the blinding white of the train's headlight. From a distance, the light reduced objects to two dimensions; the trees to the side of the highway became inverse silhouettes, light and dark, the world reduced to yin and yang. My night vision eliminated any chance of grey.

The wind, thunder, sparks, a flying piece of metal, the ground shaking as I sat still, my hair whipping about my face -- I only have images, stills which capture but are not captured by the motion of the train. Its mass overwhelming me, everything around me -- I felt as small as I do beneath the stars.

But most vividly (my only memory of motion), I remember the shadows rotating as the train passed. Suddenly, the world, projected into 2D, gained depth, like a cube would if, as it suddenly rotated, you realized it to be a hypercube. The cross-sections of tree trunks revealed themselves to be cylinders; the knife-sharp fence shadows swept out volume in the dust in the air.

Once upon a time, when I was an actor and my group travelled the civilized world, we spent a night in a small town in eastern Oregon.

Because we left our sleeping bags elsewhere, we had to sleep on the floor with blankets. It was uncomfortable and cold and not relaxing.

Later that night, two trains went through town, a mile or so away. They crossed very close to each other. I could hear their horns and the Doppler Effect mixed them together in a hauntingly beautiful cacophony.

It is one of the most lovely sounds I have ever heard.

The end of the block. Tracks paralleling closer as we ran. Each time just enough advance, the whistle preceding, jumpup bolting out the door. Pennies, nickles, carefully placed during the rumbling advance of steel. Vaguely menacing in its forcefull momentum. Do they mind? Pounded 5 minutes flat, cars rolling, colors and rust melding. Burlington northern green and white. Searching between ties rocks and rails, warm metal discs, flattened thin. The process more important than the result, treasured and lost shortly after.

These stories are not my own, they are from a friend of mine named Gubby (Gabriel).

1. The brakes failed on the train that Gubby was taking to go surfing. When I say he took the train, I mean to say he purchased a ticket for it. Somewhat surprisingly, the train took longer to reach its destination than if it had full function of its brakes...


2. The train was travelling at high speed, as some trains do, when a group of youths hurled some missiles at the train. Half-bricks as usual. One of them made its way through the window of the train and struck poor Gubby! He did not put in a claim against Translink/Northern Ireland Railways.

Gubby never has any luck with trains. I may go so far as to say that Gubby often has bad luck, and I have hypothesised that the reason for this is that many Americans patted him on the head and took all his good luck, thinking that he was a leprechaun whilst he was in Some-place-in-the-USA.

I met an holocaust survivor, who was a distant uncle of a friend. He was travelling from Poland to Switzerland, at the beginning of WWII. Two German soldiers checked his passport, which had a "Juden" mark. He was lucky, for some reason, they didn't arrest him. He overheard one saying to the other "you should never trust Jews". Later, after much travel through Europe, he and his father got caught and put in a transit camp in occupied France. The French policemen who guarded it told them "we're not watching; the gate is open". The father didn't want to escape, as he still believed in justice: "I've never done anything bad! I'm innocent! I'm not going to run like a criminal!" He died a few months later in a concentration camp.

The son died shortly after telling us his story. He had never told anybody about it before. He had tried all his life to forget it, to no avail.

I stand on the overpass above Delawanna Ave. This is the NJ Transit Delawanna Station. You won't find Delawanna on a map, it's an anonymous suburban neighborhood of a middle-class suburban municipality, the southernmost tip of an anonymous suburban county, basking in the shadowy aura of the Emerald City of Manhattan, and this line is a forgotten spur of the Yellow Brick Road. I squeeze off two snapshots of the signs: to the left, "Port Jervis", and I don't know where that is; to the right, "Hoboken". That's Manhattan-ward, direction enough for me. When I was 7, I lived in the corner house two blocks away by taxicab geometry, but since the tracks were verboten, and we never had cause to take a train, this spot is new to me today. Clear golden afternoon sun bathes rusty rouge-y cinder, rotting ties, trash that will blow away before anyone picks it up. This guy with one eye stands by the plexiglass shelter - it's a stop, not what I would consider a "real" station. He says he comes here for the quiet. What line runs through here? Oh, there won't be a train through here today, not on a Sunday. He's drinking a can of beer, the skin of his thirtysomething face tells a murky and verbose tale of alcohol, but for this moment he is lucid enough to say a little about trains and quiet and Petey's Woods that were half a mile down the tracks (in the Port Jervis direction) before they built the condos there... There, but for the grace of God, go I. I'm not sure which eye to look at - the open one, blue-gray and lively, or the one he keeps closed, like a Moorcock hero between doom-laden adventures. I compromise and address the bridge of his nose. That welcome early spring sunshine casts interesting shadows from fences and stone stairs and railings. This is what I am here for, I bid my friend a good day and stride two ties at a time, on down the line, taking pictures as I go.
Click. Rotted ties fade into dirt and cinder on an abandoned spur.
Click. Givaudan-Roure office building presides over the toxic waste site.
Click. A row of forsythia blooms like fountains of sparks.
Click. Steel rails disappear into the distance, leaving a study in perspective in their passing.
Click. One crazy old telephone pole leans out of line in its eternal march beside the tracks.
Click. Click. Click.
I offer a silent prayer of thanksgiving for new eyes today, for a vision uncorrupted by the dull contempt of familiarity.

There is an old, wooden bridge outside of Jonesboro, Arkansas that runs directly over some train tracks. Some say that people used to be hung from that bridge, upside-down, so that when the train came, it would decapitate them. With this in mind, my friends and I headed out there. We got out of the car, and settled down to smoke a joint. We had just finished, when we heard the sound of an approaching train. We sat on the edge, with our feet dangling over haphazardly, as the train grew closer. I wasn't nervous. I knew that I was having a life-altering experience. I wasn't worried. I stared into the blinding light, and smiled, and laughed, and felt...

joyously

alive.

I once took a train from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand. I went third class overnight.

The cool thing about trains in Thailand is that the walkway between cars isn't enclosed, like they do in the wimpier western countries. Oh, no; they just have open air. Exhilirating.

So I got to watch the sunrise in the south-east asian mist over rice paddies and rainforest, with the wind keeping my cigarrette burning fast.

Some buddhist monks came out to have a cigarette with me.

My cousin and I once drove into the woods on the outskirts of our family farm in the Appalachian mountains.

We built a campfire and stayed there for hours talking and watching stars, shooting bottle-rockets into the sky.

I remember it went quiet and suddenly I was in a concrete tunnel. It was very cold. I could feel the water snaking down my back as it dripped from the ceiling. A train appeared, heading directly for me, its wheels shrieking and sparking.

I stood frozen in its headlights like a stunned deer.

Just as I thought I would certainly be flattened, my eyes came into focus. I realized I was staring at the reflection of the firelight on my cousin's pick-up truck.

Recently, someone suggested that subconsciously I might have been trying to remember my birth.

Freedom is the way you think when you're tired

Like a passing thought, a train pierces the cold midnight around me and is gone

In a world where you can't undo, unsay, or unfeel, I am unrestricted.

Setting: The Red Line of the MBTA in Boston.

When I ride it, I often notice how differently men and women take up space in the train.

Women tend to use constrict themselves as much as possible, minimizing the amount of space they use. Two women riding together tend to stand or sit close to each other.

Men tend to spread out - spreading their legs apart and sometimes taking up more than one seat. If two men are riding together, they sit or stand far apart, even if it means that they must shout to carry on their conversation.

What does this tell us about body images and territoriality? I often try to come to a conclusion while riding the train, but I haven't succeeded yet.

I took a train from Beijing to Xi'an through the interior of China. It was a night train and the intercom played weird Chinese pop music all night, like maybe the conductor forgot to turn off the mike when he first gave the train stops.

We went through hundreds of miles of rice paddies in the interior of China during harvest season, which was amazingly interesting. But the most interesting part was when I went to claim my bunk in my coach, It had been squated by a mother and her child.

I let them sleep and sat by the window watching the people go by.

My mom and dad and I are driving the 1954 Chevy Bel-Aire back from somewhere late at night. We're quite a ways from home; perhaps we've been to visit grandmother. I think I'm around 4 or 5 years old. The road we're on has a stretch where the train runs parallel and is just a few yards away. My mom is driving (is my dad drinking?) and a passenger train pulls up right along beside us. My dad turns around to me in the back seat and says, "You've never been on a train, have you?"

I say, "No."

He tells my mom to speed up and find the next place the road crosses the tracks. She looks at him like he's crazy, but she speeds up. (Obviously, he's not only drinking, but he's drunk.)

About 10 minutes later, she has stopped the car at a RR crossing and my dad is out waving a white handkerchief at the train. It stops, and he does some talking to someone on the train. (He was a salesman). The next thing I know, he and I are on the train and the next stop is our home town, about an hour away.

He said I'd go to sleep good on a train. I did.

Back in the day, we'd make frequent trips with the family from our home in Austin to our grandmother's house in Lubbock. One time, we were greeted with a blast from the horn from every train that passed us.

Years later, we kids realized that, by blind chance, every train we passed was approaching a railroad crossing at the time, and they were required to sound their horn when they were coming up to a crossing. But when we were young, it seemed obvious that all the engineers recognized our car and were blowing the horn to say hello to us.

It was very exciting to know that all the engineers and conductors were so friendly.

Three stories about trains.

First

In January of 1998 I was strapped for cash and took a job thirty miles away in the city of Annapolis. The only way to get there without a car was a 2.5 hour public transit ride each way, starting with half an hour on the train. To make the timing work I had to catch the 5:30 train. But by the time I finished work and went home it would be dark again; the only sunlight I saw that winter was a little before getting into my (windowless) office.

After about two months of this routine I fell asleep on the train one night. I woke up twenty minutes later and looked out the window and saw--nothing. I didn't know what time or day it was. All I could see clearly was the inside of the car lit in sharp fluorescent light. And the most confusing part was that I didn't know if I was going to work or coming back.

Second

It was April 15, 2000. I was having a little adventure with a railroad police officer--or rather trying to avoid having one. While I clung to a fence like I meant to dance slowly with it and slowly inched my way along I heard a rumble. Slowly I turned my head and shoulders and saw on the freight line I'd departed a train roll by at a slow and stately pace. I watched it go and almost forgot about my fatigue and dirt and sweat.

Third

Not too long ago I was in the buddha garden and the rain came up in the first of the big summer thunderstorms. And as I leaned back and accepted a soaking I heard--again--a rumble and hurried down the hill to watch the train from close up. It was all intermodal shipping containers, marked with the logos of freight lines in England,