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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
The day was really too hot for a pleasurable stroll, but I smelled iron.
Although it’s really just dumb luck, my friends swear I have a sixth sense for old pieces of iron, steel, or brass, broken things whose purpose and utility are now long since forgotten.
Of course, my discovery of the other day wasn’t that astounding. It’s hard to miss a line of railroad cars.
One of the things I love about this county is that it hasn’t forgotten its railroads. Among the depots at Lake Waccamaw, Fair Bluff, Vineland Station, Chadbourn and the yard in Chadbourn, trains and train history are still there.
They don’t run often, of course, but they aren’t forgotten,
I grew up around trains; one ran just yards from the front door of the Dunn Dispatch, where my parents worked and I raced the 3:30 with my armload of papers. Only one thing in the world was louder than a printing press, and that was the train.
After that paper closed (and that is a column for another day) I remember being worried sick over what Mother and the Old Man would do for work. I was too young to be worrying about such, but little kids know more than we give them credit for, and we tend to forget that when we grow up.
As I slept with my big dog in the back bedroom of our old house, the early-morning train began wailing somewhere a half-dozen miles away. The night was such that I listened to that train seemingly forever, taking comfort from its mournful notes. I don’t remember falling asleep, but Papa got a new job the next day.
Later, we moved to a milltown and the rails ran beside our house. Barricades blocked the end of most of the streets to prevent out-of-towners and drunks from driving across the tracks. Those rough-lumber, fading yellow boards became like church pews for our group of trainwatching faithful.
The darkness of our neighborhood would be lit by the cyclopian light of the locomotive, and the sound of wheels turning on steel rails would slowly invade any conversation.
We would drop everything and dash for the end of the street, jockeying for the best spot on the barricade (at either end, where you could sit on the post).
The conductor – he told us that was his title, even though he counted bins of cotton and rolls of denim, not passengers – would sometimes swing off the train to visit with us.
He always admonished us never to place coins on the track, since trains were so perfectly engineered that even a tiny penny could throw those tons of iron and steel off the tracks.
Then he would wink and hand out train-smashed pennies, dimes, and nickels.
He kept the quarters intact, and would hand those out to us for good grades, completed chores and the like. A perfect report card sometimes resulted in a silver dollar.
We met the trains faithfully; I remember smashing mosquitoes and shivering in a mid-winter freeze, always staring into an ink-black night broken only by low stars that could, in the right conditions, briefly hide the headlight of the train as it came into town.
Trains were always more civilized than airplanes, to me. Airplanes are more efficient, of course, but airplanes marked the end of civilized travel, as far as I’m concerned.
Those cars in Chadbourn looked like the kind that once held folks who looked on travel not as an excuse to be seen in public in pajamas, but as a task that required dressing like a lady or a gentleman.
I’d be willing to bet wearing Sunday clothes to an airport today would mean an unscheduled layover in an interrogation room – not just because of terrorism, but because, in many ways, we’ve become such a rude society.
Trains taught us manners, and how to plan ahead. Woe be it to the paperboy who wasn’t across the tracks in time.
Trains taught us about power and America. Every one of those machines had rolled repeatedly across the entire country, the conductor said, hauling tons of materials that made our country run.
The cargo claim was easily believed, and from the graffiti that mars the sides of every railroad cars I’ve ever seen, I can believe the claim about them traveling across the country.
I didn’t explore the train cars in Chadbourn the other day – I don’t often trespass on other folks property, and even if I had decided to bend the law a little, a light-colored suit isn’t suitable for train-jumping.
But I’m sure those cars have plenty of reminders of when traveling was an adventure, not a drudgery of standing barefoot in a long line of people in sweatsuits and pajamas.
I wish, in a way, we could bring trains back to their original glory. Of course, in our sissy-britches modern world, trains are too impractical, expensive, and dangerous for mere humans to handle.
But trains could bring back some civility in travel, a sense of manners and promptness, and the reassurance that a rail post office carrier could get a first-class letter from Washington D.C. to San Francisco in time to get a reply in four days. Small towns would again be tied together by something far more personable than a stretch of asphalt.
And maybe another young boy could be reassured by the soulful cry of a locomotive in the middle on a sleepless night.
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