Driving south on Arlington Avenue one day, I paused before the lowered arms and flashing lights north of Massachusetts Avenue. A train was passing and we drivers had to stand and wait. I’ve written before of the emergence of my Mr. Hyde personality when in my car, but I have been making a conscious effort to be a better person while in that rolling cage. On this day, I had just recovered something valuable to me that I thought had been lost, and when I came to a stop before that train, a feeling of relief surged through me. Trains are peaceful signs for me.
In my broken and blasted childhood there was often pain from the beatings my father inflicted on his wife and children. His victims would sometimes escape to Baltimore, Maryland, where my grandmother — my mother’s mother — lived. My two siblings and I would stand at trackside with our mother at Penn Station in Pittsburgh, and wait for the train. It was likely “The Daylight Speedliner,” a named passenger train of the Baltimore and Ohio train network, that would chuff, smoking, into the red brick station. We would board, and ca-lacka-ta-lak, down the tracks to Baltimore. The sound of the rails and the rocking of the cars — and the advent of peace — began my store of mellow memories of trains.
When I lived in Clarksville, Indiana, I would take my daughter to school while on my way to work. If we mistimed our departure, we would have to stop as a passing train dissected the street. My daughter and I would sit in the car, idling in front of the lowered crossing arm and listening to the clamor of the warning bells. I would note the date of manufacture printed on the side of the passing boxcars, details which I did not share with my child, for even though she had made me aware of the her burgeoning personality at a young age, I had yet to become a good idle conversationalist. When I recently asked Lisa what she remembered of those times in front of the train, she told me that she did not remember it as a negative event. It was merely a pause in a “precise and coordinated routine” which was our weekly trip to school and work. “There was no sense of panic or insecurity,” she said.
The neighborhood association whose social networking page I monitor has a lot of people who get angry when stopped by a passing train and CSX’s announcement that there may be more trains crossing the streets of Irvington had everyone up in arms. The irritations of life are many, including blocks to our passages from one place to another. And there are always reasons to be on the other side of where we are; we all have to be somewhere else, at some time. But on some nights, I can hear the muted thunder of boxcars coupling and in the day, the low howl of a train’s warning horn, and those things do not disturb me. Perhaps, if I lived closer to the tracks or the train yard, I might feel differently, but I do not, and the sounds in the distance are soothing. As Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) sang, “‘Cause I’m on the edge of darkness/There ride the Peace Train/Oh, Peace Train take this country/Come take me home again.”
Relief whispers over the walls of despair of the recovery of something valuable, the escape from pain, that precious time with your child, in the low, sweet moan of the passing Peace Train.