The Force of a Thousand Trains

One evening in March on my walk home, I was stopped by a moving train, crossing the road just before the parking lot of my apartment. It was the sunniest 5:30PM this town had seen in months. As the train moved along the tracks, the setting sun on the horizon shone through the breaks in the box cars. Sometimes, on my walks through the city, I get an idea for a sentence or an entire story and I rush home, repeating the idea over and over in my head so I don’t forget it before I can write it down. On this day I had no ideas to hurry home for, just an empty stomach that made me anxious to get past the train.

A train is just a train until you’re up close. It was just a road block keeping me from my dinner and something loud that occasionally woke me up at night until that sunny 5:30PM. This particular level crossing has no black and white railings that drop to signal a train is coming, only red flashing lights and a loud ringing bell. I got so close, that if I stuck out my arm, my hand would have been taken clean off by one of the box cars. There was no one around, just me and the train, and it created a wind only I could feel. The wheels sounded like a washing machine processing a heavy load. The box cars had come together to create a steady rhythm, and this train that passes my apartment every day transformed into something that not only demands to be heard, but demands to be written about. The train was no longer a train and standing up close to it made me feel powerful even though, when compared with the train, I’m hardly anything at all. After the wind of the last car released its grip on my flowing hair, the familiar dark took over, as if the train had taken the sun with it. A lamp post flickered to life and its dim light made me think about things I didn’t like to think about. Once I reached my apartment, I hurried inside and wrote about the train.

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I was never one to be sheltered from alcohol. Beer was just something my Dad drank while he watched the Green Bay Packers and wine was just something we touched to our lips at church and the thing my Mom ordered at restaurants. One day, the sun was hot in the sky and I had been running my tiny tan legs all over our neighborhood, kicking up grass as I went. My mom sat in the driveway with an icy blue drink in a flower printed glass. I ran up and touching my knees to hers, I begged her for a sip, grabbing for the glass mindlessly, knowing she would never deny her thirsty daughter a cold drink on a hot day. But she pulled back and shook her head. “This is a grown up drink. I’ll get you some water.” In my six year old mind, I was a grown up. I was older than my four year old sister, who was a child, so why couldn’t I have the yummy blue drink? It occurred to me that even though I felt grown, I was not officially grown up.

Alcohol continued to reincarnate in my mind during boring drives to school with my mom and sister. I started really listening to the words in the songs on the radio and when I spent the night at friends houses, we watched movies we weren’t supposed to watch. I heard Ke$ha say she brushed her teeth with a bottle of “Jack” and I saw kids jumping off high porches into pools during Seth Rogan movies. Alcohol had now morphed into something of a forbidden fruit that, only when I was truly ready, I would be able to bite into.

When I finally bit the fruit, it was not an apple but a peach. The schnapps burnt my lips and throat as I finally indulged in what was now, in my mind, bigger and more forceful than a train. I remember the feeling that came when I realized I was drunk. The things I had heard on the radio and seen in the movies that I had previously felt detached from, was now something I was a part of. Alcohol had become so forbidden because of the way it was talked about it in health class and because of the lock my parents put on the door of the liquor cabinet. Now, I knew what it could do and swallowing the burning liquid made me feel invincible. There were many nights after the first that were facilitated by the forbidden fruit and the fact that it was forbidden, made these nights seem like the best of my life.

In college, I saw people bite into the fruit too hard or too many times. There were nights that I carried friends home, their arms draped over my shoulders and their feet dragging behind them. I held back hair and served my fair share of water and aspirin to my inebriated friends. Other times, it was me that needed help getting home or I was the one crouched on the bathroom floor, my face hovering over the toilet. Alcohol became a balancing act that teetered back and forth on a very thin wire.

One evening, during a break between semesters in college, I sat with my mom on our front porch. The day’s humidity lingered in the air and the condensation on her wine glass sank to the side table like the sun on the horizon. She asked me about school and if I had had a good first year of college. She raised the dripping wine glass to her mouth several times before offering me a sip. With only slight hesitation, I took the glass from her outstretched hand. After retrieving her glass from me, she offered me my own. We had several glasses of wine together that evening. Our conversation consisted of me telling her about certain academic successes interweaved with drunken stories that I had accumulated over the year. Almost instantly, the feeling that I had had for so long, this image of the forbidden fruit, went away. Wine was just something I was sipping on while I talked with my mom, who I hadn’t seen for some time. The forbidden fruit was just fruit. It no longer carried the force of a thousand trains. A substance with the ability to make people change, fall in love, or forget what they want so desperately to forget, suddenly became much less complicated, at least for a little while.

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I grew up living next door to a Cubs fan. He flew the W flag in his front yard, and every time we drove past his house, my Dad, a Brewer’s fan, gripped the steering wheel a little harder. Bob Ueker blared in our backyard all summer and I was raised on the idea that the Brewers were better than the Cubs simply because they are. That’s why, when Chicago went to the World Series in 2016, I was at the library instead of the bustling bars of down town Iowa City. Everything I’ve ever known conditioned me to ignore the happenings on the day of game seven and to treat it just like any other Wednesday. But, I still find myself unable to forget November 2, 2016.

I don’t know who was pitching for the Cubs that game or who scored the final run. I wouldn’t even be able to tell someone the final score if they asked me to. I could, however, sing the song that all the Cubs fans were singing that night. I remember the way the drunken voices rang through the streets, that song carrying a meaning for them, it never had before. Once, I had begun hearing the screams and cheers coming from the city, I left the library to watch the celebrations unfolding outside the bars and restaurants. I wanted to witness them from a removed, daughter-of-a-diehard-Brewers-fan’s prospective. Glass shattered around elated voices. Strangers hugged and cried, as the streets filled with more and more people exiting the bars.

It felt as though I had stepped out of the library onto the set of a movie. Standing frozen, unable to deter my gaze from the exuberant scene, I began laughing at a drunk man trying to shimmy his way up a lamp post. He jumped and immediately slid down, giving up after the second try. I shook my head and continued to breath in the chaos. All I could do was watch when another person started to climb the lamp post. He was smaller than the first man and his slender figure made its way up the post with ease. He was a boy, not a man, and he swung from the top of the pole, like a flag blowing in the wind. He moved his hands to the white, plastic orb that held the light inside. When the orb snapped in half, he fell ten feet to the brick laid ground.

The crowd thinned, and sound left my perception. I felt like I was the only sober person in the entire world. His blood trickled towards my shoes, and I couldn’t look away. All I’d been doing was watching, and that’s all I knew how to do. The red and blue lights finally began flashing against the brick as I watched his friend try to put his split head back together. They pressed down hard on his chest. His ribs stuck out the sides of him and the front of his chest met his back.

I turned away from the scene and I began to run. My legs had no feeling but I was able to hear my heartbeat drumming in my ears, almost blocking out the song. “Go Cubs Go.” Every corner I turned, every new stretch of street I faced, the song restarted and followed me all the way home. There was no train that night to keep me from crossing the street. I made a running jump over the tracks that made my ankles ache after I landed. My palms hit my knees and vomit hit the pavement beneath my feet.

I waited for the email from the school, even though I knew he was dead. It took weeks to come and some people reassured me that maybe he had lived, but the images in my head from that night told me otherwise. The train’s heavy cars and blaring whistle no longer woke me up in the early hours of the morning; it was his chest compressing into himself and the way his body hit the ground that turned my dreams into nightmares. I had again seen what the forbidden fruit could do to someone, and it became even less of a temptation for me. The fruit had gone rotten.

Maybe the lamp post was his train. I wonder how many times he passed it while walking down town, never once feeling the urge to climb to the top of it. Why would anyone stick their arm out while standing two feet away from a moving train? I wonder if he felt powerful standing next to the lamp post that night but alcohol had complicated things and made him think that he could climb to the top of it without falling. Or maybe he never thought about the lamp post at all. It could have just been the adrenaline of game seven that drove him to climb the post, or the alcohol in his blood that later, would become a river that flowed through the cracks between the bricks on the street. I wonder why it was him that fell while I stood on the ground and watched. Since that night, I often consider how easily the worlds could have been reversed. What if alcohol complicated things for me and made me think that I could get just a bit closer to the train but in reality, I would be too close.

When I stood next to the moving train on the sunny 5:30 PM day, I felt death moving in front of me as the heavy box cars passed, all I had to do was take a step and

I would meet it face to face. The power I felt came from my ability to stand that close to death, my own death, and continue living.

When I stood that close to death that was not my own, I felt weak, weaker than I had ever felt in my life. When I hear “Go Cubs, Go,” I feel small and powerless like I did that night when all I could do was watch. After I saw what I saw, I did not rush home to write about the lamp post or the boy that fell from the top of it. Neither became a force that compelled me to put pen to paper, until now.

A train was just a train until I got up close; a lamp post was just a lamp post, until I watched someone fall from the top of one. Now, every time I pass the lamp post, standing tall down town with its new plastic orb to protect its bulb, I think about the boy who no longer stands anywhere. And every time I’m stopped by the train, I get up close, as close as I can get and I feel that wind. The wind that only I am able to feel and I have come to know this train and all its power and I understand. I close my eyes and I imagine myself as someone capable of carrying the force of a thousand trains, steam rolling through towns with people who will feel like they might be taken off their feet when I go by. I see myself as something that demands to be heard and written about. As of now, I am just a normal someone, but I have seen things change from being just, to becoming so much more.