9/27/22 As Hurricane Ian approaches from the west I am looking inward. The boat is fast in her slip, we are safe and tomorrow is a long time.
Something about my brakeman days has come back to haunt me this year. A story I’ve told before took on a new meaning. A clue was always lurking there between the lines, invisible to me until now.
We’ll fast forward to the action sequence leading into the thrilling finale. Let’s call it an epilogue.
Before sundown on Aug 7, 1974 our Omaha local pulled off the mainline onto the Kasota siding for the hot northbound Viking fruit express roaring in from the Central Valley of California. I waited on the caboose rear platform puffing on a cigarette of uncertain origin blasting Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” on the boom box, watching the sunset when an enormous explosion lit up the dusk; boom! The grain elevator at the crossing blew up even as the last few boxcars of California Central Valley fruit express roared by us.
Seems the Viking locomotive had thrown a burning cinder toward the grain silo West of the mainline. We stood watching, dumbfounded as the mainline rail heated to a red hot glow, bowing out of alignment as the sun slipped out of view. We were taxied to the Boston Hotel at St. James, Minnesota. Across the village square was a trolley car bar where we sat sipping Christian Brothers brandy as Nixon resigned on the bar tv again and again, until we crawled away from the wreckage of that moment in time.
Full stop. It’s 1974 and there we were at a bar drinking together on the heels of a contentious truckers union strike and Patty Hearst’s bank robber moment. We were Americans; one engineer, a conductor and two brakemen of various ages and political persuasions. Republicans and Democrats together hoisted a toast to a President beloved by some of us, reviled by others. Was there an argument? Fisticuffs? Gunplay?
Suffice it to say, in 1974, none of the above occurred. Civility held sway in every corner of a nation torn by strife and economic uncertainty. We were citizens first and foremost, believers in the American dream.
Things have changed. I hear the rumble of thunder now, getting closer. The rain patters on the roof. As the wind picks up I wonder, who are we now?