One might assume that this short story – written in the early 1990s – was inspired by my Riding Freights adventure. But it was not. The idea for it came from a railroad trestle located near Carpinteria State Beach, where my Boy Scout troop would go for a weekend campout once a year. Like the boy characters in the story, we Scouts would play for hours on it.
I’m particularly fond of this story, and think it one of the better things I’ve written. C.B.
Dylan liked to compare them to exotic animals — huge, wondrous creatures whose size and majesty defied belief. Watching one go by, he once said, was like not knowing that elephants existed and then seeing one walking down your street. Looking back on it now, I think they were more like gods, appearing in brief, powerful visions, filling us with awe and rapture, then disappearing as fast as they came, leaving us with a longing for something far beyond our mortal reach. We were worshippers of these gods. And Dylan, my best friend, who loved them more than all of us put together, was our high priest.
It wasn’t a particularly great place to play. The tidewater creek wound through brown wetlands, widening as it approached the Pacific Ocean a quarter mile away. High tide found the water lapping against the reed-choked banks while low tide exposed small, silty beaches that entrapped your feet in gooey muck. The water was flat, stagnant, and smelly. It was perfect for skipping stones, only there were few stones about, and none of the small, flat, smooth variety required for skipping. Sailing driftwood boats was a letdown. After a good push they would soon be floating dead in the current-less water.
We weren’t there for the creek anyway. We were there for the railroad trestle that spanned it, supporting tracks that cut a gravel swath across the wetlands on their way north to San Francisco and south to Los Angeles. The trestle was a gigantic made-to-order backyard play structure, an edifice that could be utilized for any sport a boy could imagine. For World War II games it was the Bridge at Remagen, where evil Nazis planted explosives that heroic Americans disarmed. It was a launching platform for an array of found objects–driftwood logs, bales of hay, shopping carts, dead cats–which would be propelled from mid-bridge, tumbling twenty feet to splash spectacularly in the murky water below.
The best thing about the trestle, however, were the tracks, for upon the tracks came the trains. Four, five, six, sometimes eight a day, gracing us with their roaring, rumbling, omnipotent presence. Their arrival heralded by the clanging of the crossing bell at Grove Street beyond the row of eucalyptus trees to the south, they would thunder through, the short passenger trains with elegant speed, the endless freights with slow, yet unflagging strength. While it was impossible to know when a freight might appear, we could count on passenger trains twice a day, the northbound Coast Daylight, fresh out of L.A., rocketing through at ten every morning with youthful exuberance, the southbound, nearing the end of its long haul from Seattle, cruising along at four in the afternoon with the steady pace of the older and experienced.
We would wave to the engineer, who would always wave back, yell at the passengers, who would rarely acknowledge us, and keep an eye out for that empty boxcar with a hobo sitting brazenly in its open door, whom we saw not as a derelict with grizzled face, tattered clothes and bloodshot eyes, but as an enviable adventurer off to see the world on his private express. One of us would always count the cars. If two counted, there would inevitably be disagreement. Accuracy seemed impossible when the numbers crept towards a hundred.
Of course we put coins on the track, but that grew tired, and expensive, fast. We all had our collections of flattened pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters and, for those of higher financial circumstances, half dollars, the metal crushed into almost paper thinness, the faces of the presidents distorted beyond recognition. Small rocks proved a crushable and far less costly commodity to be laid on the rails. We would use pieces of the chipped gravel that formed the rail bed, lining them up on top of the rails in rows that would reach ten feet in length. I always harbored a secret fear that we would derail the train, even after I saw the engine come and pulverize the stones into a fine white powder which would swirl in the eddies of train-swept air before settling onto the ties. Such an impressive metamorphosis of an object so solid never ceased to leave us in awe, the lesson of the train’s weight and power indelibly etched on our young minds.
And then there was “The Room,” the holy of holies for us train worshippers, a place where only those of complete devotion would commune with the gods. The trestle was supported by two large concrete blocks embedded in the banks of the creek. On the blocks, fifteen feet above the stream, lay the metal girders that formed the span. Upon these girders lay the wooden ties. This design formed a small shelf-like room atop each block between the girders and beneath the ties. On the north block this space was inaccessible; the smooth vertical cement provided no handholds. But the south block inexplicably had a metal rung ladder embedded in it, allowing one to climb up to the room and, if you were brave enough, to sit there, hands tightly clamped over ears, eyes wide, while the train clattered a mere four feet above. It was a rapturously terrifying experience, the ultimate initiation into the brotherhood of the train.
The brotherhood consisted of assorted friends my age, with the occasional younger brother, but never sister, tagging along. Most of us had been born in the small beach town, and all of us lived in the clusters of tract homes between the railroad and the beach. Dylan was relatively new to the group, having come to town two years before when his family moved from Fresno. He had started school in January. We immediately connected; I can’t remember exactly why. But I’ll never forget the day I introduced Dylan to the trestle. Steady rains had turned the wetlands into a swamp, into which we had slogged only a few yards before Dylan slipped and fell backwards into the mud. Laughing, I offered him my hand. He proudly refused it, pulling himself up and, as we continued into the quagmire, expressing his disgust with the “terrific place” I was taking him. But as the trestle and rail bed came into view, he fell silent, remaining so as I led him up the side of the bed to the tracks. There he bent to touch the shiny rails that stretched into eternity, as if to confirm they were actually real. When a train roared over us in the room a half hour later, I thought I saw his eyes water from joy.
It was Dylan who led us to forsake the beach, our primary playground, for the trestle. Dylan was the leader of all train play. Dylan had the greatest number of flattened coins. Dylan had the record for rail pebble laying, a staggering fifteen and a half feet. Dylan was the counter; nobody dared dispute him once he proclaimed the number of cars a freight train contained. It was Dylan who led the race to the room when the Grove Street crossing clanged. It was Dylan who dared to reach up and hold onto a tie as the train passed.
Though he would never admit it, Dylan was fiercely possessive of the trains, as if they were models of his garage train set rather than the gargantuan real-life thing. One time Bobby Beymer, a slightly psychotic kid who enjoyed tormenting dogs and cats, threw a rock at a passenger train. Dylan was so incensed that he hurled himself upon Bobby, knocking him down the bank into the creek, where he threatened to drown him unless he promised to never, ever, hurl anything at a train again. Dylan later confided to me that he was afraid that we might lose our playground, that if a passenger were hurt by rock shattered glass, police would be sent to patrol the trestle and keep us away. But I knew this was a clever lie to mask Dylan’s true concern. He didn’t want a train to be damaged or injured. It was the trains he loved, not the people in them.
It was Jeremy who first mentioned ‘the idea’.
“My cousin told me that if you laid down in the center of the track the train would pass over you and you wouldn’t get hurt.”
Jeremy, a slight boy who had worn glasses since he was four, lived vicariously through his cousin, who in turn lived vicariously through a “friend” who appeared to have survived stunts that would give Evel Knievel pause.
“He’s crazy,” I stated unequivocally. Everyone agreed.
“He’s not.” Jeremy insisted.
“Maybe if it was just the cars, ” Dylan pronounced, “but not the engine. Look at the engines when they pass, they’re really low.”
“Yeah, and the heat from the engine would burn you,” I added. Everyone nodded at this sage, if ungrounded, observation.
“The engineer would see you and stop the train,” Peter Wilcox piped in.
“He’d never be able to stop in time,” I insisted. “The engine would drag your body hundreds of feet and you’d be dead.” The thought of such a gruesome demise left everyone silent.
“If there was space, you wouldn’t have to worry about the engineer, especially if it was foggy,” Dylan contemplated. “You could wear brown clothes and blend right in with the ties.”
“My mom would like that,” Rick Alwood chimed in, “the brown wouldn’t show the blood.”
We decided to go play basketball at Rick’s house and the subject was dropped. But I could tell that Dylan was intrigued. The next time we were at the tracks when a train came by, Dylan stood as close as possible, carefully studying the clearance between the bottom of the cars and the ties. Afterwards he said nothing. And I asked him nothing. I was afraid of what was going on in that mind .
You couldn’t label Dylan a daredevil. While he would pull off feats the rest of us would never consider, he did so only after a cautious and thorough examination of the situation, an evaluation that, in his mind, deemed it perfectly safe. Soon after Dylan had moved to town, a fierce series of winter storms pounded the coast. As one was clearing out, our gang had gone down to the beach to watch ten-foot waves crash against the harbor’s north jetty, blanketing the large granite rocks with stupendous cascades of water. Always eager to think up the most outrageous of dares (dares he would never perform himself), Jeremy dared one of us to run down the jetty’s concrete path and climb onto the channel light platform at the end, a platform that remained dry, and therefore safe, in the face of the waves’ assault. It was a clever challenge. If you timed it right, you stood a more than reasonable chance of making the safety of the light. If you timed it wrong, you’d be washed into the sea. While the rest of us commented on the idiocy of such an action, Dylan, that look in his eye, walked to the tideline, where he carefully began to observe the approach and contact of each wave, timing the seconds between them with his watch, moving up and down the beach to consider their impact from a variety of angles. Realizing what he was thinking, the rest of us observed in silence. We knew we were witnessing the prelude to a potential tragedy. Finally, Dylan was ready. After positioning himself in the path’s last safe dry spot, he waited until several waves hit, then walked, not ran, down the path to the light post platform, climbing up to safety several seconds before the jetty was covered by the next wave. Five minutes later, he climbed down and walked back.
“Jack! Jack!”
Dylan came riding up on his bike, breathless. Despite my protests, my mother had put me to work weeding the front lawn, a job I despised, particularly on a perfect spring Saturday afternoon.
“What?”
“There’s a train stopped on the trestle! It’s just sitting there!”
He didn’t have to say another word. Willing to incur maternal wrath, I threw down the weeder and ran for my bike. We rode as fast as we could, along Grove Street, under the highway, and down Ocean Court to the row of eucalyptus trees near the trestle. We hid our bikes behind a well pump house, then struck out on the footpath towards the tracks. The stiff ocean breeze hit us as we emerged from the shelter of the trees. I don’t know whether the goose bumps on my arms were because of it, or because of the marvelous sight before me.
A long northbound freight had stopped, its rear cars stretching across the wetlands and down the tracks almost to Grove. It was a gift from heaven. No matter the real reason, as far as Dylan and I were concerned, it had stopped for us. Like the devout entering a vast gothic cathedral, we climbed up the rail bed and stepped next to the cars with a mixture of awe and reverence. If trains were magnificent moving, they were sublime standing still. We were struck dumb in the presence of their towering height, the monstrous diameter of their iron wheels, the grip of their mammoth couplings. As we walked along the train towards the trestle, we admired the gleaming steel of the tank cars, the ingenuity of the “piggy-back” trailer carriers, the voluminous space in the empty boxcars. We read out loud the exotic names emblazoned on the side–Burlington Northern, Union Pacific, Santa Fe & Topeka–names that reached deep down inside you to unearth the wanderlust buried within.
I wanted to stop when we came to the trestle. There was only a foot of clearance between the cars and the bridge railing. What if the train started moving again? But Dylan assured me that there was plenty of room and we scampered along the ties. Once across, Dylan suggested we crawl under the train to the other side of the tracks. Still fearful of the train starting, I ducked as quickly as possible under a Southern Pacific refrigerator car, my heart pounding until I made the safety of the other side. An insatiably curious Dylan, however, lingered beneath, examining the underbelly in bliss.
Counting seventy-eight cars from where we had begun, we walked the entire length of the train, out of the wetlands, over the Santa Rosa Street bridge, along the back of the business district, all the way to the abandoned train station in the middle of town. At its head, the three engines stood still, their diesels throbbing at a low idle, hot exhaust distorting the air above, their power evident even in constraint. An engineer peeked out of a window high atop the lead engine. It seemed inconceivable that such a small man could control something so large.
“Hi!” we called up to him.
“Hello,” he returned with a sigh.
“Why are you stopped?” Dylan boldly asked.
“A small landslide on the tracks up the line. We’re stuck here until they clear it.”
We hoped that he would invite us up to look at his cab, but instead he lit a cigarette and disappeared back inside without another word. We walked to the front of the engine, where I pretended to be running down the tracks as the train hurtled towards me at seventy miles per hour. Like any hero, I leapt out of the way in the nick of time. I was not so lucky in my next scenario, in which my foot was caught in a tie and I failed to free it before the train flattened me. While I entertained such morbid fantasies, Dylan crouched low next to the slumbering diesel giant, inspecting it with the same calculation he had exhibited that day on the beach.
He said nothing until we had started home.
“You know what?”
“What?”
“You could do it.”
“Do what?”
“Lay down on the ties and let the train pass over you.” Looking at him in disbelief, I saw the small, blissful smile of someone who has just made a momentous discovery. Seeing that smile, I said nothing; in that instant, I knew that Dylan was capable of the act. And I feared the day he would try.
But he didn’t. In fact, he never mentioned the possibility again. The spring, meanwhile, gave way to summer and our play drifted back to the beach, where, as we caught waves in the warming Pacific, the trains were forgotten. Our days began in early fog-shrouded mornings. We’d walk down the empty beach to the pier, where we’d pull tiny mussels from exposed pilings and hurl them at the sea gulls gathered for their dawn service, the heavy mist swallowing our shouts and the birds’ annoyed shrieks. As the sun burned through, we buried each other in the sand, caught frisbees in the surf, and flew kites so high above the dunes they disappeared. When the train whistles blew, announcing their approach to town, we ignored them. Except for Dylan, who would stop what he was doing, turn and listen until the last horn blast faded into the wind.
It was on July 4th that Dylan learned his family was moving away. His father, a plumber, had an opportunity to become partners with a cousin in a small plumbing and heating business in Grass Valley, an old mining town in the Sierra Nevada. They would move by Labor Day, so Dylan and his two sisters could start at their new school at the beginning of the term.
I learned of this the next day, when, after a tedious morning shopping for shoes with my mother, I rode by Dylan’s to see if he wanted to play. Sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, his mother greeted me with the news, adding that Dylan wasn’t taking it well.
“This is the longest we’ve lived in one place,” she told me with the wistfulness of a mother who knows her child is sad, but is helpless to do anything about it. “Dylan’s grown real attached to his friends. He doesn’t want to go. Not that I want to go that much either.”
I listened without reply while my mind struggled with a vision of the creek, of the trestle, of the trains, without Dylan.
“He’s off moping somewhere. Maybe you can find him and cheer him up.” This possibility appeared to give her hope. “You know,” she declared, standing up with a thin burst of optimism, “you two can always write each other.”
I knew exactly where Dylan was.
As I climbed up the metal rungs to “The Room,” he peered down at me from the top, making sure I wasn’t a hobo. We had found one asleep there once and were so startled had run all the way back to my house.
“Your mom told me.”
“Yeah.”
That was all that was said. A few minutes later, the bells at the Grove Street crossing rang. As the rumbling of the approaching diesel swelled in the distance, we braced ourselves. Soon the train was racing overhead.
I had never gotten used to the noise. I put my hands over my ears and scrunched down against the cool concrete. Dylan, on the other hand, came alive. Sporting a huge grin, he stood up and held the ties, connecting with the god as it flew above, drawing on its power before it disappeared.
The train passed, the growl of its engine and the clacking of its wheels on the rails fading into silence. Dylan’s beam was replaced with a small, melancholy smile.
“Are there any tracks in Grass Valley?” I asked.
“Nah. At least not close to where we’re going to live.”
During the next six weeks I watched Dylan’s family prepare for the big move. With labels such as “Dole’s Pineapple” and “Heinz Ketchup,”boxes culled from local markets were filled, labeled by item (Dishes) or location (Bathroom) and piled high in the living room. One Saturday the parents held a garage sale, Dylan and I awarded the job of stapling notices to strategic telephone poles around town. For a dime I bought a plastic chess set which, I discovered at home, was missing a black pawn. The “Man-In-The-Moon” kite with the tear near the bottom Dylan’s mom insisted I take for free. The next Saturday Dylan couldn’t play because he had to help his mom wax the hardwood floors; his parents, it seemed, were determined to get their cleaning deposit back.
Moving day finally arrived along with movers in the form of Dylan’s portly Uncle Bob, a Hertz rental truck and two surly, but strong sons. The plan was to have the truck loaded by eleven and on the road to Grass Valley by noon.
The fog had come in unusually thick that morning and was still clinging to the ground at ten o’clock, at which time I rode over to say goodbye to Dylan and present his mother with the tin of gingersnaps my mother had baked for the occasion.
Dylan wasn’t there. He had disappeared around nine thirty. His mother was furious.
“I don’t know where he is, but he’s going to catch hell when he gets back.” Having looked bewildered for weeks, Dylan’s mother was now simply exhausted. “Do you have any idea where he is?”
Dylan had been moody the last couple of days. We’d go to the tracks, but he’d refuse to do much but sit and think. Once, after a southbound freight had passed, he laid down on the ties between the rails.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Pretending.”
Now, as Dylan’s mother fretted about her absent son, the bells of the Grove Street crossing began their familiar clanging. It was then that I realized that Dylan hadn’t been pretending. He’d been practicing.
Without a word to Dylan’s mom, I took off on my bike.
“If you see him,” she shouted after me, “tell him to get back here, pronto.”
Pedaling as hard as I could, I hung a right on Simpson, cut across the yard at the corner onto Elm, which dead-ended fifty yards down at a wooden barrier. The way to the trestle from Dylan’s house was the footpath that led from this end of Elm straight to the north shore of the creek. Though the narrow dirt path was full of deep ruts, I rode my bike along it, managing to avoid crashing until I rolled down the steep slope that dropped to the creek bed. There the mud seized the front wheel and stopped it dead, causing the bike to do a frontwards flip that sent me over the handlebars into the muck at the water’s edge.
Scrambling up, I turned towards the trestle sixty feet away. Through long wisps of fog, I could make out the tracks, but no sign of Dylan.
The rumble of the approaching northbound Coast Daylight was getting louder.
“Dylan!”
A head peeked up above the rail. He was lying on the ties just above the room. For a second, our eyes met. Then the train whistle wailed and his head dropped back behind the steel.
“Dylan!”
I didn’t know what I was going to do. All I knew was that I had to get to him. The only way was across the creek; without hesitation, I forged into the water. Having always waded near the shallow shore, I was surprised to find that the stream deepened considerably near the center. The water was soon over my waist and climbing as my shoes sunk deep into the mucky bottom silt. Struggling to free them, I felt panic rise as the mire pulled me further down and the warm, dirty water rose towards my neck. Then the soil firmed and the shallows returned. My heart pounding, I splashed up onto the bank. I knew I didn’t have enough time to climb the railroad bed to the tracks. So, dripping, I ran to the ladder that accessed the room.
My wet, muddy shoes slipped on a rung, but I held on, regained my footing and pulled myself into the space. Looking up I found Dylan, his arms wrapped tightly around a tie, peering down at me. Confidence in his calculations had deserted him; tears of terror coursed down his cheeks. There wasn’t time for me to do anything, to say anything, to tell him he was crazy, to tell him to get off the tracks. I stood up and, without thinking, offered him my hand. He reached out and grasped it, squeezing tight as if it was the last thing he would ever hold. It was clammy, and surprisingly small. I realized I had never held Dylan’s hand before. I closed my eyes.
With a roar that sounded a thousand times louder than ever before, the train rolled overhead. I felt Dylan’s hand jerk, as if it were being pulled away from me. And then the train was gone.
Even though my hand still clenched Dylan’s, I was afraid to open my eyes. When I finally did, I saw that Dylan’s eyes were closed too. Smudged with dirt from the tie, his face was in an odd state of repose.
“Dylan?”
There was no reply.
“Dylan?! Are you alive?!”
After several agonizing seconds, the eyes opened. After a beat, he looked up, as if taking stock. He took a deep, soulful breath. Then a wide grin slowly blossomed on his face.
“Yeah,” he exhaled with great satisfaction. “Yeah.”
We said nothing as we walked back, stopping to pick up my muddy bicycle. There was nothing to say.
As we neared his house, a panting Uncle Bob was closing up the back of the truck.
“Dylan, get over here!” his mother screamed from the empty living room window.
“I gotta go,” Dylan said, acknowledging his mother with a wave. He turned back to me. “Thanks.”
I didn’t know how to reply to that, so I just nodded. Dylan returned the nod, then stepped away.
“See ya.”
“Yeah, see ya.”
And, without looking back, he ran off to the house.
© Christopher Bomba 2023
This content originally appeared on cbstoriesetc.com