I'm awake in the wee hours of the
night listening to the sounds of my community. I hear the passing soft swish of car tires, the ear splitting racket of a motorcycle
(my pet peeve), even faintly the walk light beeping at a nearby intersection.
But it's the low background rumble of a train on the
tracks many blocks away that captures my attention. Sometimes I can hear whack crunch thump as cars are
sorted or rearranged. For whatever atmospheric reason, sometimes it
sounds like the train is rumbling through our back yard. And even, but
rarely, I can hear the train whistle. It's all reassuring. It's the
normal sound of my world.
Then I start thinking back to trains
on the prairies when I was young. The small towns that featured largest
in my life were on a main C.P.R. line. Each small town was announced in huge
letters on the grain elevator as we drove by. If we were going into the town or
even down one of the narrow lanes to a farm house, it would likely involve bumping up
and over the tracks. I don't think there were crossing arms at many of them.
If we were lucky enough to watch a
train roar past, we always waved enthusiastically at the engineer in the
monstrous locomotive and the conductor in the red caboose and they would indulge us
by waving back. The train was a marvellous thing! It was life to the community
just as much as the road was. One set of grandparents arrived by train
and took up a homestead just a stone's throw from the rails.
One small town where several relatives
lived was split in half by the rails and various railway buildings including
the elevators. The business district was on one side and most houses on the
other. One set of my grandparents owned the cafe in town so we kids
walked across the tracks any number of times in a day - getting sharp stones
of the ballast in our shoes every time, seems to me. I say across but
it was more like clambering up the embankment, over the tracks, and
down the other side. I can clearly recall blue skies, shimmering summer
heat, the hot metal of the rails, the huge force that was the train as it
rumbled past, the wail of the whistle, the stiff weeds that poked through, the
smell of treated railway ties... here I must interrupt myself because I found
out only recently that my grandpa hewed such ties to earn the money he needed
to start his homestead farm so he could bring his wife and young children over
from the “old country”!
Don't ask me anything in particular about
those trains! I was a little girl not given to playing at being an
engineer, but the train is inexorably planted in my mind as part of the rhythm
of the community. Everyone kept an ear out for the 11:05 or the 4:15 or such,
which they knew would rattle through town.
What's my point? I’m not sure I
have a point! (I choose to say nothing here such as - my! how things have
changed!)
Sometimes it is just satisfying to
simply take stock of the normal things of life, then and now. And I’ll admit to
a penchant for a bit of dallying in the past, especially in the wee hours of
the morning. Often I give thanks for my heritage before drifting off to
sleep again with the rumble of a train in the background.
There's something about the sound of a train that's very romantic and nostalgic and hopeful.
No comments:
Post a Comment