Notes from a messy desk:
On a recent afternoon, having driven down the hill on first avenue west in our fair city, I was nearing 16th street when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a bright blue train engine and its attached lineup of cargo. My ears were treated to a long whistle blast, the continuous ding!-ding!-ding! of the crossing alarm, and the clanging, clunking rumble of rail cars on steel. Then there was the visual feast: flashing red crossing lights and a wheeled parade of train cars, from basic black tankers to boxcars splashed with carnival coloured graffiti.
My mind flashed back to years past, when my job was downtown and I lived on “the hill”. I’d learned the train schedule the hard way, by being stuck in traffic more than once at this very crossing, making me late for work. My boss, an old-to-me ex-military man, hadn’t taken kindly to my tardiness. I was already on notice despite having purchased, at his suggestion (okay, direct order), a Big Ben wind-up alarm clock with a bell mechanism on top. Unfortunately it also featured a small lever you could manipulate while half asleep, to stop the infernal racket. Given the circumstances, and being rather attached to my job and its regular paycheck, I found an alternate route to work.
Fast forward to retirement, and things feel different. Unlike the courier whose van was trapped in the halted traffic, I had no deadline to meet. I turned the car radio off and my eyeballs on, to watch with interest as the train rolled by. And kept rolling. For maybe 5 full minutes, although I was too mesmerized to time it.
I thought about my uncle, who had worked on the trains in the roundhouse on 15th street east, which is still an active operation today. I remembered riding “The Skunk”, maybe 3 cars long, to Saskatoon and back one summer holiday. I recalled the Centennial train in 1967, when we school kids single-filed through the boxcars’ historical displays; and years later, the crowds of constituents at the downtown railway station viewing Diefenbaker’s funeral train. Film clips about the “dirty thirties” popped into my mind, featuring unemployed men atop trains and clinging to the side ladders, seeking work down the line.
As the real-life moving picture in front of me kept rolling, a realization struck. There would be no caboose at the end. Its replacement, some little computer camera thingie, evokes no nostalgia or romance whatsoever. I’ve inspected a caboose or two in my time (which totally doesn’t sound the way I meant it) at historical displays – with their cupboards and cots and pot bellied stoves, and just know they held volumes of untold stories.
Before the noise and lights quit and the traffic began inching ahead, I was a child again for a few moments, on a road trip with my parents and little sister. We were stopped at a railway crossing, with endless prairie to the left and right, counting the rail cars. Nobody was in a hurry. The sun had risen that morning and it would set again. Had it really been that long since I’d watched – really watched – a train go by?
Sometimes I put on a CD or YouTube video to take me through a guided meditation, to a place in my mind that feels right and good, a place worth returning to. This time the meditation, in the form of a train, had come to me.
