The Train Rolls On
Lukas A. Bryson
I am crouching, huddled against a slab of cold, rusty iron. The wind tears its way past me like a hurricane, nearly taking my clothes with it. The steel grate beneath me shakes violently, numbing my body. I have to stay against this wall or I might die, but I can’t feel my muscles anymore. As my body withstands this self-inflicted torture, I squint to the wind and witness a monstrous machine rocketing past, not five feet in front of my face. The churning wheels of each railcar charge across the bridge as if fevered with rage, oblivious to the two young boys hiding nearby. The train thunders past for a seeming eternity.
There are things in life that become cultural standards. Every town has children who tend to get bored and look for things to do. Every town has a place the youth can escape to for solace, recklessness, and expression. In my hometown, one place sufficed for all three.
On the southeast edge of Weiser, Idaho, a train bridge built of rusting iron sat, painted a fading apricot color and plastered with graffiti. Every few months the city workers came through to paint over the graffiti, but local youths never failed to spray it again with new slogans. The bridge crossed the Weiser River, which was surrounded by small woods for a few hundred feet on both sides. The unsightly old bridge amid the evergreens created a dramatic blend of beauty and ugliness. Piles of rock led up to the ends of the bridge to support the tracks, but the rest of the shore was soft dirt. The whole area was hidden behind a complex of grain silos and crate stacks, down a winding dirt road that made time obsolete.
My friends and I went to the bridge after school sometimes, just to relax and explore, and for some of us, to avoid going home. On the weekends, weather permitting, we would camp out in the woods and stay up all night entertaining ourselves. We’d play hide and seek in the forest, tell ghost stories by the fire, complain about our parents, and boast about feats of deviance. In the midst of summer, we would run to the bridge on the hottest afternoons to hurl ourselves off, splash into the cool water from fifteen feet above, and forget about the heat. Sometimes we hauled along a video camera and made films about the forest. Battling natives would win back their land, or thieves would ravage the peasant camps. We even once filmed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; however, in our version he was resurrected on the cross, and he jumped down and "beat the crap" out of his persecutors. Throughout all of the adventures, one thing permeates my memories: Every few hours a train would thunder by, and we would all stop to watch and listen. Those were the days I now consider my early youth. As my friends and I grew older, however, our reasons for going there became less and less innocent.
We had always been rebels, but in high school we became defiant When we were children, we rebelled against the banality of our parents, but in adolescence, we rebelled against conformity. This, I suppose, is the course life is intended to take. Youth are instilled with a natural tendency to question the rules set for them by their elders. If they didn’t, I doubt societies would ever grow or change. So we rebelled. Unfortunately, our rebellion went against no noble cause. We simply set out to explore the temptations that life had to offer. We began camping at the bridge, accompanied by older friends with alcohol. The bright forest of my childhood became a perfect place to hide out, get drunk, and forget the shallow tribulations that depressed our lives. Most of us took up smoking. We began to invite girls to the campouts, and inevitable fights ensued. Hearts and friendships were broken as often as beer bottles.
We began to learn that life could deal back as much pain as one took from it in pleasure. At one point, a friend of mine was fighting with his girlfriend; he discovered that she had fooled around with another guy. He became enraged and had no place to vent it, so he went to the train bridge and jumped off. No one was around, and it was February. The river was only thinly iced over, and most had melted already, so he made it out of the water and only ended up with moderate hypothermia. I tried to console him, but neither he nor I knew how to deal with this kind of pain. We were opening our eyes to the world and realizing our limits. We were growing up. The angst of adolescence overtook us, and an ironic slogan appeared on the side of the bridge: If I should die before I wake, fuck it. We never knew who wrote it. As time passed, the train bridge became more a reminder of the pains of life than of the happiness it had once held. But still, we spent more restless nights there, drinking and cheering every time the familiar train rumbled by.
Time passed, and I moved on to college, leaving behind the tribulations of childhood. I visited home on the holidays but never thought to visit the bridge again until this spring when, once again, I turned down that bumpy road past the silos, past the crate stacks. As I went, my thoughts likened to E.B. White’s on returning to a lake from his childhood: "I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated" (183). I stepped out of the car, and the dusty air smelled the same as I remembered. I walked down the sidetracks up to the bridge and paused to survey. The river was dark and high, and it flowed faster than I remembered. City workers had torn up some concrete around the bridge, so kids couldn’t climb up, but only managed to make it more dangerous. The graffiti had changed, but the things written there were the same. "Alberto + Alejandra 4Ever," "Westside," and various profane Spanish words were sprayed across the length of the bridge. Only the artists had changed. The trees in the forest were the same ones I had hidden behind as a child. There were piles of empty beer cans on the ground, left there by people I didn’t know. While I was away, I had graduated to bigger bridges and made the world my forest. This place was the same, but I had moved on.
A train came through, and I suddenly remembered the only time my best friend and I had stayed and hidden on the bridge as it roared passed, fearing that some misplaced shard of metal might tear us in half. I was flashed back, and I was there again, pressed against the iron corner as the monster rushed by. I saw my friend through the blinking spaces between the railcars, the same friend who had nearly frozen to death here just a few months before, and he was contorting his face just as I was. The train thundered past us for what seemed like hours, but at some point, my friend became enthralled and began to yell. He released a yell that only adrenaline can produce, and it roared from his young heart to the heavens. I inhaled more air than my lungs could hold, and I joined him. When we ran out of air, we inhaled and yelled again. Our voices grew until they matched the monster’s thunder; we became polyphony, a trinity. Atop the train bridge roared two young men and a monster, or perhaps three monsters, all releasing pressures placed against them: for the train, gravity; but for us, life.
Years have passed since that day, and I have become more placid in accepting the idiosyncrasies of life, but that memory reminds me of who I was and what made me who I am. The train is inside me, like the train in all of us, rocketing forward and thundering through with blistering speed, past the happiness and sadness, past the changes, and past the pressures we all endure.
Works Cited
White, E. B. "Once More to the Lake." Writing Exploratory Essays. Ed. Steven M. Strang. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 183-189.