Going Through the Train Tunnel
Sometimes I find myself distracted by looking for anything to listen to or hear. So I stare. Such was likely the germination for my love of the train tracks that ran down the hill from Curtis’s house. I’d watch Stand By Me a lot when I was a kid, and walking along those tracks felt like immersing myself in the very outskirts of Castle Rock. Having grown up in the woods with little else at my disposal than a pond and a barn, I was prone to get creative with my pastimes, and when my mom moved to her boyfriend’s crib near those tracks I felt like I’d just been given the keys to a fictional world. I just had to go down there and smell out my own stories.
I’d walk along the tracks, listening hard for one of the freight trains to come thundering along. I’d put stuff on the tracks, big sticks and rocks just to watch them explode beneath the ruckus. One time I took a dump on the tracks. That ended up being pretty non-magnificent but I relished imagining the train conductors blaming each other for the newfound waft. I was clearly magnanimous about the girth of my reek.
The end-point to my jaunts was always the tunnel. It had become a threshold’s beacon, in part because my mom always told me, “Go only as far as the tunnel. And never go through the tunnel,” like it was the gates to some foreboding playground. Even at such a young age, and living in modest comfort, the train tracks had come to represent a mysterious brand of freedom. The tracks Beyond the Tunnel might possess anything my imagination could conjure. I still had yet to learn of the historical implications of trains, train-hopping; their representations of travel, escape, imprisonment and beyond. All I knew then was that the sound of those trains as they passed by, down the hill from my mom’s boyfriend’s house, was the sound of something trippy happening somewhere else.
I really dug that tunnel though. Especially after watching another Stephen King offering, Sometimes They Come Back. I had become from an early age pretty much obsessed with horror stories. And that tunnel seemed to conjure something macabre and intriguing. As I’d see it coming down the tracks, it was like looking at a haunted house who was screaming out a history that no one had ears to recognize.
I’d take the slow curve around the hillside, spotted by manzanita and pine trees, and yawning on the horizon would be that tunnel. I could see the other end after I squared up, a small rectangle like a painting of the dry and surly foothills cast against the tunnel’s canvas. Despite all the ghosts who were sure to reside in there, judging by the tunnel’s ambiance, it had often seemed like a cohort, and a safe place to be. My mom had always demanded that when I get to the tunnel, I was never to cross through to the other side. It was long enough to afford a space, about fifteen feet long right in the middle, in which were a train to come along, there was likely not time enough for me to sprint to the clearing at either end. I of course walked through the tunnel every chance I got and I’d just decide not to think about such things as I was in said limbo between openings. Still, I’d cop a peak at the breadth that sat between the tracks themselves and the tunnel wall as I tried to determine, if a train were to come and require me to flatten against it, if there would still be enough space for me to avoid any of my imagination’s glorified tumult. Any desired results were questionable at best. Thankfully I was never given a chance to find out for sure, beyond a few times when I’d have to up my pace and get the hell out into the open as those unmistakable sounds came clamoring from afar.
The insides of the tunnel always had markings of youth: spray paint, condoms, beer cans and the like, and I was always prone to wonder which of these had been the last murmurings of some party of teenagers who had been plowed down briefly thereafter by a Southern Pacific. I’d listen hard for their ghosts to mumble in my ear warnings of doomed foreboding. I sadly never heard any beyond the blistering tremolo of my own imagination.
From the other side of the tunnel I’d climb up to the top and sit above the tracks, just to spit, swing my legs, think about girls who I’d surely bring there one day to make out with, and of course always waiting for the next train. I’d often go rummaging around the hillside to find huge crags of fallen limbs that I’d wait to throw down onto the trains as they passed by below, just to watch the timbers explode or go flying off into the woods. The trains always seemed like some miraculous force, a black hole that could and would devour and destroy anything that stood in its path.
That was a concept I had a deep respect for, and even back at the house I’d listen in awe to its chorus at the bottom of that hill. I remember lying in bed, that small town’s peace blanketing the night until I’d hear it come from beyond to roar by, like a powerful and terrifying song. Whenever the trains were passing, they were all that existed, and I always found safety in them for this. To this day hearing a train go by feels like hearing the voice of an old friend.
And ghosts. Also totally ghosts.
The End.
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