SURELY OTHER PEOPLE

I can be thinking about something and before completing the thought, something else comes to mind by association, unfolding a sequence of random leaps, one idea to another. At some point you lose track of where the original thought was headed if not losing the thought itself. I do it all the time. When I get out there on the fringe and do in fact, find my way back with a cogent recollection or observation, it’s like money in your pocket that you didn’t know was there. Surely other people do this but I don’t hear anyone admit to it. I’m famous for stopping in the middle of a sentence, leaving listeners on the hook. They want to help me; put words in my mouth as if I had a lapse of vocabulary; that all I need is their prompt. I think there’s a part of my brain that would rather go exploring than follow the bouncing ball. If it takes off without permission, all I can do is wait for it to come back or go with it.

I am fascinated with trains. Before I can decide which particular ‘Train’ experience I want to relive it occurs to me that I can be fascinated by any number of things. So what will it be, trains or fascination? I’m fascinated with birds as well, humming birds in particular. I like woodpeckers too and shore birds; I collect feathers. I have a gull feather I picked up on a Nova Scotia beach. I keep it on the visor of my car. Then I have a Cherokee feather at home with my other treasures, from a storytelling conference a dozen years ago. It is white with a dark gray tip and ribbons braided around the quill end. Tim Tingle gave them to people who attended his workshop. He told a story of how his great-great grandmother died on the Trail of Tears and how they carried her bones with them, in a bag, to be buried at their new home so her descendants could find her. Larry Richard (Ré-chard) is a Choctaw friend of mine from Louisiana. He’s taken me to sweat lodge ceremonies and we’ve danced the Gourd Dance at Pow Wow. He speaks the same kind of language and shares the same rationale I found in Ed Mc Gaa’s books (Eagle Man). I read them several years before I met Larry. They don’t attribute what they don’t know or understand to God. They simply allude to the Mystery. What draws me to that culture is how they focus on finding their place in the grand scheme rather than becoming masters of the universe. Nobody seems to remember Manifest Destiny; the selfrighteous mandate to plunder a continent and it’s indigenous people; no responsibility other than self and greed. First Nation people still remember, long after the Lords of Industry drove their golden spike; long after those silver rails connected East to West. Still, the image of a steam engine chuffing and huffing a long line of boxcars up a grade can mesmerize a kid of 6 or 7. Missouri Pacific tracks ran under a creosote-timber bridge on he road, just a half mile from our house. My brother and I would stand in the middle as those huge, black, steam engines rumbled below, with steam hissing out in front of the driver wheels, belching black, coal smoke up the stack, full of cinders hot enough to raise a blister. We didn’t dare look over the side but we felt its hot breath shoot up through cracks between the timber planks and the earth shook. The engineer blew the whistle for us, a long, resonating pulse that rose in pitch then faded away, and we love it. In the 1990’s, Travis Tritt recorded a song that began; “First thing I remember is the smell of burning cinders and the sound of that old whistle on the wind.” Tritt has come and gone but I remember: “I always wondered where the train was going but I never cared at all where it had been.” The same Missouri Pacific line runs just a couple of blocks from my house now and I am always keen to listen for, to listen to the air horns. They pale in comparison to wailing, moaning steam whistles from the puffer-belly era but it’s all we get. It’s one of the few things that can disturb my sleep and it makes me glad: I wouldn’t want to have missed it. But I’ve always been fascinated with trains.