Train of Thought by Hawkeye Pete Egan B.
I had been to a meeting way out somewhere in West Virginia, where some of us would go to keep operations going if a calamity struck the DC area, and we were able to get out before it struck. They call it COOP. Our scenario was a major hurricane hitting DC, and we had just enough advance warning to boogie out of town ahead of the winds, and reconvene in West Virginia, out of harm’s way.
If we didn’t make it out before the calamity, and we all got toasted or vaporized, then the exercise would be devolution. Someone else, somewhere else, would have to pick up the pieces and try to keep operations going. We don’t have to practice that exercise — someone else gets to do that.
At the end of the exercise, I was heading back east, back home, where it was just another typically hot and humid late summer day in D.C. Glad to be going home. As I was turning onto the main road, the lights flashed, the bells rang, the gates descended, and the train whistle blew — at first, I thought it was the guy behind me honking real loud and I got a bit irked at him, then I saw the train a-coming. “Oops — sorry about that, man.”
I don’t get to see trains that often where I live. What used to be the train tracks down behind my house is now the bike trail. I’ve ridden on it many a time. The trains rode the rails down there long before we moved here. I’ve imagined those trains, as I rode the trail, imagined it back in Civil War days, when my great grandfather roamed this land, marching and drumming with his band of soldiers.
As I sat there, watching the train go by, I remembered when it used to be a romantic notion of mine to hop a train like this, and let it take me off to see the world.
I remembered when we used to wait for the trains at the cottage on Pymatuming Lake, in Western Pennsylvania, to watch them go by, counting the cars on the train, maybe waiting to see what the train did to the pennies we carefully placed on the rails as it lumbered over them.
Now, it just holds me up from getting to where I want to go. There was no romantic notion — no desire at all to hop one of these to go see exotic places.
Long ago, traveling all over on my own, not hopping trains but hitchhiking, going wherever my thumb would take me, the romantic notion of the freedom of the road was dispelled for me. It was interesting, for sure, and left me with a ton of memories, which when I can remember them, give me interesting things to write about. But, it definitely dispelled any ideas I had about the romance of the road.
I learned that if I’m scared inside, or scarred inside, and running from something, or searching for something, all of which I have been — the road doesn’t cure that condition for you. It just makes the ache a little harder, the pain a little more acute, the loneliness infinite. I remembered all of that from my “wild, free” days on the road.
Then, the last car passed by, the gates went up, and I was on my way home. I was happy to be going home.
