These railroad tracks lie within walking distance from my house. And my house isn't out in the countryside or even in a small town ~ it's in the very middle of Austin, Texas, just north of The University of Texas. Yet here are these train tracks just a hop, skip, and a jump away from my front door, running in a long narrow pathway between trees.
I can hear the train's whistle from inside my home, and when I do, it stops me in my tracks. Or maybe it stops me in its tracks. For there is no lonesomer sound, is there, than the long, mournful cry of a train on its way from here to there.
And I wonder if this particular lonesome train song isn't a mysterious variation of the old woman under the hill who lives there still if she is not gone:
If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone,
you can hear that whistle blow one hundred miles . . .
Peter, Paul, and Mary sang this, but I don't know if they wrote it, or if it goes way back to the time when the first trains began their westward-bound journeys.
But here there are only the train tracks and the trees.
When I was 24 years old, I took a train from Texas to California. I went alone, leaving from my parents' home with one brown-woven suitcase and one large blue bag with long straps that I carried over my shoulder. I didn't set out to live a vagabond life, but it would be ten long years before I finally found a way to stay in one place again.
Was it that train ride, I wonder now, that set all the rest of my wanderings in motion?
"You can hear that lonesome whistle blow one hundred miles."
.
