Circling Back: Chronicle of a Texas River Valley

11. John Henry and the Iron Horse

11 John Henry and the Iron Horse Once I built a railroad, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? E. Y. Harburg, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Abandoned roadbeds the grown-ups called trams stretched through the woodlands ofmy youth. We followed them like safety lines to help us venture into unknown places. On the flatter ground they made little dent upon the land, and you had to pay attention or you would lose them, but in steeper country you could follow them more easily - they cut gashes across hilltops, made thin benches along hillsides , and rode berms into ravines. The trams once had carried steam-driven logging trains on rails. People cutting timber in the early twentieth century had pushed into the woods on the trains in a single glorious raid on trees. Then they had retreated, taking with them trains, rails, and furious activity and leaving straight and quiet travelways through younger stands oftimber. A tram ran past our house. Massive beeches, oaks, maples, and hickories shaded it; the loggers responsible for building it had taken even bigger trees, I suppose, half a century before I used it as a trail. go John Henry and the Iron Horse The tramway shot across our fifty acres, into the adjacent tract of forest owned by Corbett's brother, Ragan, and across a swale before climbing up into Ragan's twenty-acre field on the hill beyond. Once I dug into a mound ofleaves between the ends ofthe earthen levees that jutted toward each other across the swale and uncovered remnants of the timbers that had bridged the gap. In the late 1940S Daddy had made that final corn-growing venture in Ragan's field. He had built a road between our place and Ragan's field by clearing offthe briars and brush that had crept onto the tramway following the loggers' exit. In the spring and summer he would travel daily back and forth to work the field with horse and plow. In the fall he harvested the corn, and the horse pulled it home in the wagon. A lot of people in those days used abandoned trams for travel by wagon and auto, calling them tramroads. One particular tramroad slashed from west to east across the southern part of the Angelina countryside I knew. Everybody called it the Old Kirby Main Line Road. We walked and drove along it and used it as a reference line in mental maps ofthat country. For me, the Kirby Main Line started at Delaney Spring, where it sliced through our arrowhead place. Though it continued far beyond to the west, no road followed it in that direction, and I had only a vague notion where it went. Eastward, about a mile from the spring, it dropped offto cross Indian Creek. Just before the incline to the creek, in a swale on the left-hand side, a gash of gray showed where Pa and other homesteaders had mined clay to build their fireplace chimneys. The creek water made a perfectly clear pool just above the crossing, and here Jack and I would sometimes ride with Corbett in his pickup, with barrels in the back, to load on water for the cows. Beyond Indian Creek, the Main Line road went flat and almost straight for the several miles to the highway that led north out of Jasper. A mile or two short of that so-called North Highway, an abandoned road turned left offthe Main Line, climbed a hill, and ended in an open flat where two towering cedar trees marked the place where once a house had stood. "William Hiram Truett, your great-great-grandfather on your daddy's side, lived here," my mother said on our first visit there. The things that impressed me most about the Hi Truett place were the sharp drop of land at the north end of the old field and the vista beyond. It made my heart thump when I walked up to the brink. It set me to thinking about what a mountaintop might be like. "Here's the best kind of spot to call a turkey," Corbett once said as we stood there looking out to the horizon, not a house, road, or any other man-made sign to interrupt the view. "In April on a still morning you would be sure to hear them gobblin'." Of course, he referred...