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1 3 3 Be the current against us, what matters it? Be it in our favor, we are carried hence, to what place or for what purpose? Our plan of the whole voyage is so insignificant that it matters little, maybe whither we go, for the “grace of a day” is the same! Is it not a recognition of this which makes the old sailor happy, though in the storm; and hopeful even on a plank out in mid-ocean? Surely it is this! For the spiritual beauty of the sea, absorbing man’s soul, permits of no infidels on its boundless expanse. Joshua Slocum, Voyage of the Liberdade JoshuaSlocum,thecaptainandboatbuilderwhosailedalonearound theworld,writesaboutthe“spiritualbeauty”ofbeingatthemercyof the ocean. Slocum built a perfectly balanced sloop that would hold its course with no one at the helm. He knew how to navigate, using only a dollar alarm clock, and made every one of his landfalls. He even renounced killing fish, not wanting to harm another creature, eating only the flying fish that brained themselves on his mast. He repelled boarders using only carpet tacks. He welcomed accident, seeinginitapartnerforhisownreadiness.Railroadinghasasimilar beauty, since you never know what any day will bring or how you will react to it. Old railroad songs warn wives not to quarrel with their husbands , for the wives don’t know if they will ever see their husbands again. Holding on to the grab irons doing the brakeman’s work is the furthest extension of this vulnerability, since it only takes a lost hold to fall beneath the wheels. As I write these words, I remember Tom Mace, who lost his hold untying a high brake on the Lompoc job. He was rolling by a track when he heard a brake. By the rules, he should have stopped the motion, located the brake, and untied it. But nobody works that way. He heard the brake, swung aboard, and untied it. Then he lost his hold. Nobody wanted to talk about that night. The wreck of the Old 382 might have claimed Casey Jones, but a normal everyday error can take the life of a brakeman. Reading through the Federal Railroad Administration’s yearly accident reportonetime ,Isawthatnomatterhowmuchexperienceatrainman had, it was easy to fall off or get hit by moving equipment unawares. If you know any day such a fate might happen to you, riding on the side of a boxcar inches from the wheels, you experience life differently than those who believe themselves safe. Only other rails understood this. Railroad life was outside the ken of just about every middle-class person, the group I used to belong to. The spiritual beauty of the railroad was exiting the freeway on which I assumed things were going to be a certain way, or where I had the luxury of testing limits, onto another road, where long heavy objects were in motion from Maine to California, all day and all night, their trajectory running through every location and T H E S P I R I T U A L B E A U T Y O F T H E R A I L S 19 RailroadNoir.indb 133 12/17/09 2:03 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 1 3 4 enterprise the daytime world engaged in. From the train, I saw Saturday night couples drinking wine. I saw their suburbs empty on Monday afternoons, their long lines of gridlock, and at other times, freeways empty enough to skateboard on. The train uncovered, attracted even, the secret economy of migrant workers, living beside the tracks, and the addicted and homeless in their makeshift shelters .WedodgedwinosandjunkiesandyuppiesinLycrabikingsuits, office workers running for a commute, those who despaired and took their own lives in front of our train and those who just stupidly did so, wearing Walkmans while jogging between the rails. I knew a thin permeable membrane separated the predictable world from the chaotic one; I crossed it nightly and returned home thankful that home was there. The spiritual beauty of the rails required that I accept this, that I was the wino with her head on the rails, but not tonight. When I first hired out, my grandmother, bless her heart, really encouraged me. She wanted me to get the job. When I did actually get the job and had to go through the ninety days, she took me to get work boots and my watch. She told me after ninety days that my great-grandfather...

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