Train

Winter made the months
the same, the stinging cold and night
and rumbling diesel chugging long
its tell-tale wail to see-saw pitch
swallowed up by dark
and distance like the wind
10-09-95 (Unpublished)

Submitted by Blane Després, PhD

We lived, like everyone else in Paradise, not too far from the railway tracks. And in the winter, you could always tell when it was very, very cold outside by the tone of the train blast at the crossing on the outskirts of the village towards Bridgetown. We’re talking biting cold, so cold that the windows would “frost-up” with a layer of icy, filigree designs on the inside of the glass panes. I used to count trains to go to sleep…except on those frosty nights when I would stay in bed.

There was something mesmerizing about the heavy rumble of both the engine pulling railcars and the wheels on the parallel steel lines. It would wake me up. I would lay there in my bed and listen to the mournful blaring of the horn as it approached the sharp-angled crossing by the Bent’s house and the little brook that ran by their place, about a kilometre from my bedroom, as the train wail flies. You could literally tell if it was polar-freezing outside by the pitch of that horn. It would sound and then split, like a train going through puberty. It was fascinating physics in real time.

On some summer days, some of us boys would walk the rails. It gave us something else to do on the many days when we found ourselves with lack of imagination: an adventure without the stress, expense, or reality of actually going anywhere. Ahh, Paradise. Such excitement. Once, I stacked a pile of pennies on one of the rails so a passing train could pancake them into one, flat mass. I think there were about 5 or so making a little tower. It was probably my poor sister’s (Tina) money, ransomed from her as she lay screaming on the tracks because I’d tied her to them, just like I had seen in an old, black and white movie. It was such a tough decision back then for a young entrepreneur like me: leave her to the wiles of a monster train or honour my word to release her for the small fortune I then squandered on a gamble.

It dawned on me later that perhaps I could’ve derailed that train! With the pennies, not my sister. Just for the record, I never tied her to the tracks. I did cause a stack of lumber to fall on her, though, when she was about two. Oops. But it was much later in life when I learned about trains jumping tracks and, as my brain would do, I figured it was because another bored boy with pennies built a tower that was simply too tall and too much for the train, tipping it over like a western movie scene. Fortunately, the train that came by to repurpose my pennies (we stayed there watching gleefully, although I suspect my sister was suspiciously eyeing me) did a little skip and horrendous thump. The engineer wasn’t happy, I think, as it likely made him spill coffee on his lap. The train stayed upright and, after it had passed, my sister and I scurried over to locate the new copper creation. Of course, safety prevailed, having had it drilled into us at Paradise School (Elmer the Safety Elephant triumphed again) as we looked both ways before stepping up to the rails. We only found three pieces, flattened and spread like a badly stretched pizza. I was delighted. Tina thought I was nuts, but that was normal.

Off we went to see Alan Bishop at the Esso. I wanted to buy something there. Gas? Then again, three cents worth of gas probably would’ve got us to Annapolis! We didn’t have a car. But Alan had some candies. Why there instead of Parkinson’s store is beyond me. Bear in mind, this is the same mind that thought trying to upend a train with pennies might be a good idea, too. Neither worked. Alan chuckled (or openly mocked me. I may have repressed that part of the memory) and informed me that even though the pressed-out pennies still showed some semblance of the queen’s face, though in a hideous, stretched, circus freakish fashion, they were now worthless. I was dumbfounded. I was saddened. My sister rolled her eyes and left, like Lucy in a Charlie Brown special. I packed up my oval copper keepsakes and left. I’m sure I could hear Alan still laughing behind the closed garage door even as I reached my house. Somewhere, in the back field behind that house, someone will dig up those bits of coin and most likely declare them vestiges of some poor Acadian’s life savings, place them in the church at Grand Pré, and no one will ever know. Until now.

On another day, Kerry Balcom, Reggie Pearle and I were walking along the siding not far from where the former Paradise train station sat, though by then it had become an ignominious egg-sorting station for Ronnie Brinton’s business. You may recall Kerry and Reggie in other Paradise tales of go-cart building, racing, and collapsing (mine) on the go-cart hill behind Pearle’s farm across the river. (I suppose I should insert a notice that names of people or places bearing any resemblance to persons past and/or present are sheer coincidence, surely embellished, and used with the utmost respect. Their recollection of events may differ, especially if they don’t remember) I’ll cover that historical go-kart development in a future saga. Needless to say, none of us went on to engineering degrees for racecar design.

Anyway, the three of us were walking along the tracks. It was summer. We were bored. There was a train parked there. There was also a train engine with its massive motor idling. Then, it revved that diesel and the railcars lurched forward in a snail-pace crawl with a succession of metal-on-metal clunks loud enough to startle us. Suddenly, I had the brilliant idea to run behind the train and jump on the caboose! With that, the three of us sprinted after that caboose as it began to pick up speed. For some, sane reason, Kerry and Reggie stopped running. I, however, was undeterred and, like another character out of the cinema world, caught up to the caboose, lunged and grabbed onto the long, vertical handle before me and landed on the lower step. I was going to faraway places, to exotic places, to Casablanca, to Halifax! I was going…to get into a heap of trouble if anyone ever found out about this. Reality set in and I jumped, landing on my feet with a quick running to a stop before it reached the wood slats for the little road going to a pasture on the other side of the tracks (the cows that lived over there were much poorer than other cows around). I was exhilarated, scared, laughing, and the three of us hollered at the excitement it gave us. And we were never seen again.

Until now, when we finally came back to tell the story, never to relive it, and free to publish it now that the train and tracks and pennies have gone. But there is a sadness that comes with the nostalgia of recollecting trains, tracks, crazy (stupid, idiotic), death-defying feats, passing time, walking those tracks in a staccato way to fishing holes or to the school ball field, or simply to check them out with the hopes that a train would go by, rumbling its disgruntled remembrance of pennies past and doomed future.

I must have become conditioned by that lingering, engine tone that carried the basic beat: ronronronronron, and wheels playing along at measured intervals: thump-thump, thump-thump on each of the rail joints. If trains could talk, it was a call in the dark, hauntingly coaxing me from the warmth of my bed and the dust-laden memory of a rail era past.

From 1960-1973