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1 2 7 My last day on the railroad, a photographer from the Santa Cruz Sentinel showed up to take pictures. My year’s leave of absence was a safety net so that if I couldn’t stand the academic life, I could always return.MyfriendDonnaagreedtodrivewithmeacrossthecountry, while my earthly possessions remained in storage in Santa Cruz. Since she is an art historian and had given me a life-sized poster of John Wayne, by way of commentary on my railroad personality, I thoughtitwouldbefuntophotographuswithJohnatvariouspoints onthejourney.DonnaandIareposingwithJohninanLAboutique, overlooking Palo Duro Canyon, at the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, at my friend Patty’s Mexican restaurant in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the Catfish House in Memphis, and finally on the golf course in Marietta, Georgia. In Georgia, I found the home I had been looking for, a home predicted by the train rug in Gallup that Donna and I saw in a roadside trading post, the kind my family always visited in their long car trips coast to coast. The weaver used the sacred mountains as a horizon and a hogan for the center. Locomotives represented the four directions. Around the hogan clustered sheep, horses, a pickup truck, and corn. The CSX main line ran north and south behind the Victorian cottage I bought in Georgia. Actually, this was the reason I bought the house. My life centered on my home. School was only a ten-minute drive. I was pleased to learn that Atlanta was formerly called Terminus—where the railroad ended. The fifty trains a day over the main line seemed to be coming directly through my house, but eventually I didn’t hear them unless I wanted to. They became dream trains, as I got used to the luxury of sleeping nights. I had no longing to be on any of those trains, but it kept that part of my past alive for me. In the university world, I soon discovered, only words mattered, whereas on the rails, you were judged by actions and every day was a new day. I made the transition to working inside by planting seventy-seven trees and shrubs my first year there, using a Mattock pick to create the planting holes in the Georgia red clay soil. As tired as I used to be from a day on the rails, I would fall into bed and listen to the trains blow the five crossings of the Marietta Square. Only the night local made me want to come near. OnerainySundaynightIheardthecontinuousmotionstop.The engine idled for a few moments, snorting occasionally like a whale, and then, with a big hole release of air it started forward again, slack running out like dominoes. My counterpart, the brakeman, was there in the night, making the cut, climbing aboard the last car, riding to the switch. The night local brought the human presence home, linked the place I lived to the connecting transportation of therunningfreight—themomentsofintenseactivitythatusedtobe my job, until I got back on the engine and rode to the next industry spot, connecting the dots, making another map, another grid on the landscape I lived in. M I D N I G H T T R A I N T O G E O R G I A 18 RailroadNoir.indb 127 12/17/09 2:03 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 1 2 8 They say that whatever you start out doing on the railroad, that’s what you miss. For me, it was working local freight in the Salinas Valley of California. I had that job, really, for about four months when I first hired out, before the winter layoff, and the gradual dismemberment of local freight and even the Watsonville yard itself. I came back to it in beet season every year until even that boom time became too hard to hold for the baby on the whole SP system. Local freight wasn’t only about the open window and the world streaming by or the sensation of inevitable weight in motion. It was about the hidden places in the normal world, the off-the-grid adventures you only have as a child, when you climb fences, crawl through ditches, and seek out vacant lots and ramshackle buildings . The local switching tracks take you behind the façade to loading docks and cavernous paper houses, junkyards treacherous with rusty iron, careless traps laid for the switching crew at night, tractor trailersleftfouloftracks,switchesrunthroughandoftenimpossible to throw, hand brakes bent and rusty, ready to...

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