AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Berkshire hills hometown

Farmland is nothing
tractor-trailer or
highway and all the
slowpokes on it
— here's the train!


Chapter 4


So what is the first memory of the railroad? Tracks that bump the car with baby in mother's lap, railroad crossing gate slowly lowered down as bright important lights red wigwag-signal flashing midtown kids on bicycles waiting all morning or knowing when to show as the local freight train rolls through; always the friendly striped bib-overall worker on the tail end of the barn red caboose teaching us how to wave, how to look, how to look forward. It happened everyday, that train whistle call, like the noon whistle from the fire station, and even in school we would be jogged out over high windows third storey schoolroom, walls painted like the pale milky green laxative tablet seen in the top drawer of the teachers desk mixed with unsharpened pencils and how the mint-flavor scent over our schoolwork when she big breasted old leaned over our desks. Wasn't that the train whistle? — hey pay attention, but I am already gone...gone into the lumberyard family business find Slim the yard-boss who will show me a rake and where to go at the backlot of the stockyard planks from the west piled up in the neatest stacks I will ever see again in any lumberyard. The boss wanted to walk out and run his palm over the butt ends of the boards and feel nothing out of place, not one board into the dirt, stick them if need be to separate the widths under a vast shed, two stories high with a ramp to walk along in the upper tier this walking on planks to get to planks. A boy with a rake spends all morning here clearing up steel bands busted off lumber deliveries, just ten years old and maybe a stray cat to talk to, pigeons flying in short bursts out of the coal business tower next door beyond the chain link fence, over ramshackle landscape, nothing but the boy and lumber and the rest of the business so far away but many clever short-cuts to get back into, and absolutely unfindable hiding places — smooth cheek resting a moment on a full twelve inches of pine board — and upstairs a little more special cedar and redwood oh so long. How'd the cedar and redwood get here? — why, the railroad! Tracks spurred off from the main rail where the freight trains could be seen all summer working here watch them pass, sharp blue engine lines, heavy guttural getting the job done railway. Now and then down our own special track that drove into the lumberyard and ended in the lumberyard did we receive boxcars fresh oven hot lumber, planks stashed in there having to be unloaded by a boy like me with another boy, sticky resin hot can't breath when we are in there, give us a moment to gulp fresh air and watch our filthy t-shirts don't touch the blazing iron roof. We have three days of work to empty the car, fool around all you want but it better be ready; the boss has a slip on his desk that charges extra each day we hold a car. Unload the boards out of the boxcar and of course stack every stick neat for the boss's hand. On the third day, if we are ready, and the dream the first day is we will be sitting in the open boxcar door on that third day swinging our legs, lumber happy, as the railroad crew is seen hiking up the tracks from beyond the fence, two or three men in overalls and caps, roomy work gloves that look gallant because the men aren't wearing shirts, and like them we have done our work as we watch them approach, walking like bears sweeping the gate apart and ring-ding, ring-ding the backward descent of the mighty locomotive nearing to round up one or two fledgling boxcars back into the flock. We thought the lumberyard was big; the boxcar is something special, as on the second day of work in it and goofy at lunch we would climb the tall rusted ladders bolted to the sides and play like squirrels on the catwalk top, and of course thinking: if the boxcar was moving, we could still do this. We stand back from the dominant locomotive, dark visitor, and watch the bears coupling the two train parts together as it slowly eases out, and we are left to run down and close the gate lifting over the rails and stumbling boots in gravel ballast while wrapping thick chain and padlock around the posts still hearing, feeling this side of the whole town move this always present memory.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo © bob arnold

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Dakotas —
stitched earth
planted



The train traveled that night
through upper North Dakota, parallel to the
border of Canada and through some of the coldest
areas in all America. Towns like Minot and Rugby,
and Rugby just happens to be the geographical center
of North America but we are not awake for it. I
remember how we hurled through this part of the
country long ago from the other direction and we saw
it all in the daylight of morning and part of the
afternoon. Back then the train had a "dome car"
which was a coach with a second level where people
could sit and look out, and if I'm not mistaken all the
sides and roof were rounded in glass. At least I have
this memory of sitting up there late one night
watching the stars peeking in and out as the train
smoked through tall forests of the Cascades. The day
we traveled through North Dakota in the dome car,
Susan and I might have sat up there all day, or we
might have divided our time between there and a
Dutch doorway where we would linger to enjoy the breeze.
But I do remember sitting up in the dome car while a young
Amish couple, sweet and trim in suspenders and short hair,
a full skirt for the young lady, made out passionately.
It was a wonderful way to go, as pronghorn antelope
startled on the prairie at the chase of the train.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo © bob arnold

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Neal Cassady & Ann Murphy in '39 Pontiac
(Allen Ginsberg & Charles Plymell in the back seat)

rollin'
tumblin'
ridin'
sleepin'
over the
wheel

Neal Cassady. Some writers and even former Presidents have had close calls on trains. John Quincy Adams escaped injury aboard the Camden & Amboy in 1853; a derailment killing one and harming a number of others. The philosopher Lin Yutang was involved in a wreck in the 1940s — once again, a derailment, and just as the train was picking up speed leaving its North Philadelphia station. Eye witnesses couldn't shake the memory of seeing one coach being pitched vertically in the air only to be busted in half by an overhead signal bridge. This was the same train Henry C. Mencken rode regularly from Baltimore to New York.

As towns grew, the cut-through railroad tracks had to be crossed by streets spreading out to new neighborhoods. Train depots were situated right in the center of town or at the outskirts, it all depended. Located in the center of town established travelers and cargo, businesses and citizens all together. Some towns hated to see the railroad and its watertowers, worker shanties, rail-yards, etc., other towns made a show of it.

Today, no passenger train passes through Santa Fe, New Mexi­co; while trains skirt the edge of town in Whitefish, Montana — right at the end of the main street, a big Burlington Northern yard — and how many times have we awakened in the early morning just in time to see Hutchinson, Kansas fly on by...looking up its lonely opening daylight street running at a right angle to the railroad tracks.

One writer who worked for the railroad and literally died beside the tracks; no longer with the face of a boy born on the road with parents enroute to California, this birth taking place in Salt Lake City which is a jump on the map away from his upbringing in Denver which is another jump to his death in Mexico so many years later, so many stolen cars later and the go, go, go that went into the railroad work and the railroad work went into the driven cars as he crossed America at the drop of a hat taking any­one who would come along with him was the nature of his writing. Welcome to Neal Cassady. His best writing tabulated in first person speed letters, whole-hearted vividly confessional pages written to Jack Kerouac, which lit the lamp for serious book writer "John Kerouac" — as his name was printed on his first novel — to never be the same writer again. Stumped by writer's block after the first book, with experiences of road and sea travel and not sure exactly how to let it all go, it was the letters from Cassady that poured forth Kerouac's next book On the Road. It is no sur­prise that Neal Cassady, as "Dean Moriarity," was the central figure in the book; a book written and now as legend on a long paper-roll during three weeks of feverish remembrance. It all came out as a brilliant letter to a friend.

Dead along the tracks in Mexico after wandering away from a wedding party and barely dressed, rain slapping down, his body fueled on alco­hol and barbiturates, Neal Cassady wasn't too far away from Kerouac who wouldn't believe the news his old friend was dead, and then Kerouac was gone the year after. Neither made it to age fifty. Their road and sea and trains had by then all changed. By the time they died their living and celebrations in books of that liv­ing was becoming a big business, a catalyst that pin-wheeled thousands of other writers, but really these two of all the mess struck like iron one hundred years later and by far the best those early visions of America sung as songs to the open road by Whitman. All the other writers were oriented from a European, Far East, or intellectually dressing down to a common.

Cassady would know, without ever having to read the twentieth century's great long poem of America — Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes" — published when Cassady was ten years old; poem of wide flood gates glory, from the people not just about the people, sprawled and dangling and music voice ridden long before anything beat or beatnik, and Cassady and Kerouac knew enough to tip their hats to a Whitman or Sandburg butter-rich in their mouths, big as pas­tures these folksongs, and often coolly angular as a nonstop jazz. The folk opened their shirts and beat their chests, but jazz would later skip flight and im­provise their lines.

Drugs did something too, spangled to the next generation as just the key to get "some­where;" in hands of the travelers it stimulated the drive, wrote more books, perhaps matched the energy of what was experienced to somehow getting it all down on paper. But without a doubt the car, the road, sweethearts, and stars above the railroad yard were more important. But how to make it all work? On tape today the speed-rap Neal Cassady is obviously a drug induced in the limelight young girls by the side trav­eler. It's heart-breaking to know the performance was egged on by a merriment that was going nowhere for him, by a counter-culture self-possessed yet search­ing, though in no way raised and belonging to daily work habits and customs as Cassady knew in the post World War II years and his job on the railroad along the coast of California aboard the Southern Pacific. He would work here as a young man, and he would work here as an older man. No matter if color blind he started at the bottom of railroad work and earned his way up as boomer, switchman, passenger brake-man — moving on the trains that pushed produce out of Salinas and Santa Clara Valley truck-farms — these workers still bend and chop and freight trains carry it along today.

Cassady was a family man, a married man when scheduled to the railroad. A pho­tograph taken in 1949 out in the bright California sunshine shows Neal Cassady standing beside two of his co-workers — older men, all in uniforms like Cassady's: ties and vests — and Cassady looking the tenderfoot and not at all the later champ of Beat legion; hands behind his back, pants pressed, hat cocked, railroad pins like his colleagues on both lapels of his jacket. How lovely. He doesn't appear to be wearing the official pocket watch nor retractable key chain for switch keys, but the shoes are steel-toed and there might be a future for this kid of twenty-three. Neal Cassady, dead at forty-two, faraway from any railroad but somehow walking the town tracks in San Miguel de Allende, always the railroad man.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters (Coyote Books, 1995)

photos:
allen ginsberg
worldhum.com

dedicated to friend & beat scholar joy walsh (1935-2011)

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