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Trains The Beginning of a Lifelong Quest for Understanding All through my first years of memory in the little hamlet of Millport, Alabama , where I was born, there were trains. Chuffing, blaring, clacking trains. Great black trains with billowing smoke and noise to wake the dead. Days and nights they ran through my head as I waited for them, timing by the sun if I timed at all—I knew when they were coming. I felt them before I heard, felt the earth tremble or the house, the faint shimmer of windows that nobody else seemed to notice, felt something as real as the drumming of my blood begin and swell, and then I could see the column of gray-black smoke by day, sometimes laid almost flat by speed and the wind, or from my bed see the slash of the headlight split the dark. And then the noise, the wonderful noise of that massive engine and its string of colorful cars. I knew when it was going to stop in Millport and when it was blasting on through. I knew from the urgency of the tremor, from the sound of the engine as it drew closer to town, from the way the engineer blew his horn. Nights I didn’t care whether it stopped or not, because once I was in bed there was no leaving the house, but days I tore toward the tracks the instant I knew it was coming. My grandparents’ house was two blocks south of the tracks, on the proper side—there was a planing mill on the other side—and three blocks west, along the street that ran parallel to the railroad, was the Cities Service station that my grandfather operated: a white building with green trim, two gas pumps, a grease ramp, and a rack of tires. My earliest recollections of Millport come from the service station: the smell of old tires and gasoline and oil, the clanging of tools, and the incredible food my grandfather cooked there. For years they lived in that building before the moved into the house. But no matter what was happening at the station, when the train was due to arrive, night or day, my grandfather would roll away the tire he was 138 Growing Up in Mississippi working on or lay down his wrench, leave a car’s sump half filled with oil, and turn off the stove. The train was more important. Across the street from the service station was the depot, the only name I ever knew it by, where passengers loaded and disembarked and cargo and mail were exchanged. My grandfather delivered the mail from the depot to the post office, a couple of blocks away. He knew by heart the schedules, and rain or shine he was there with his two-wheeled wooden cart waiting when the locomotive panted up and the brakes squealed it to a stop in a cloud of steam, the cars gently bumping each other in a little game of tag all the way back to the red caboose, tiny in the distance. A man in a dark uniform tossed the gray canvas bags down to Mr. Shade, as my grandfather was called, and he stashed them in his cart and trotted out of sight. The trains then were fired with coal, not much of an evolution from the horridly noisy, nasty woodburning engines of a decade or so before, perhaps not as clunky looking, but just as sooty, a universe removed from the sleek, bright diesels that came a few years later. The engine was enormous, built for power, black and practical, with nothing adorning it except for the bell, usually made of brass, and a copper whistle, always polished. Its components seemed to me to be the fashionings of giants. Surely mortal men could never manage such enormous riveted plates, ponderous rails, and bars and piping, vast steel wheels tall as the boy who studied them. Even sitting still the engine throbbed with energy, straining to be on the way again, like some great black beast happy with its lot, glad to pull for the men who fed it. Once I sat in an engine that had been sidetracked for minor repairs, and a great sadness came over me in that cold cab with its monstrous levers and gauges, the door of hell itself cool to the touch. A light wind blew through and moaned around the window openings. A bird sailed...

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