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Summit, Cinders, and Other Ashes

by

Douglas Page

My dad always knew where the trains were. He was seduced by the railroad as
a boy and for the rest of his life he was lured to the tracks. When he died we
took him to the trains one last time. We took him to Summit. We used to go
there to watch trains with him. Sometimes we still do.

Summit
Summit is the opera house for railroad recitals in Southern California. The tracks of all three
railroads that serve the area from the east converge from the chaparral through the same notch in
the mountains at the edge of the High Desert near Cajon Pass above San Bernardino. Every 10 or
15 minutes a train bounces through there.
The tracks at Summit parallel a remote, serene stretch of state highway 138, between
Interstate 15 and Silverwood Lake. Here the dimension changes; the city is behind, the desert
ahead and what you notice first is the silence. It is so quiet you look for it. It is as though while
adjusting your ears to the altitude you swallowed all sound.
The eastbound and westbound tracks lie together here, side by side, as straight as a stare,
then disappear down the slope to the west. To the east they bend easily northward, toward
Barstow, and are lost quickly behind ridges. There are no buildings or billboards -- just tracks,
stitched like a seam through the barrens.
The low, umber carpet of brush is uneven on the slopes, dense in some areas, sparse in
the places the earth has worn through. The ground has been baked to a beige. You begin to adjust
to the emptiness around you. You feel yourself expanding into it. There is solitude here and it
wears with pajama comfort.
Then, as subtle as a purr, you hear it in the throat of the canyon to the west. An unseen
train on the grade. It seems hardly to move, yet grows louder, humming an entrancing, pulsing
rhythm, filling the silence in widening waves until the earth seems to move with the murmur.
Finally, the engines break into view, over the crest, moving with the solemn certainty of a tidal
bore, flooding the senses.
It can take 24,000 horses harnessed into eight separate diesel engines to pull a mile long,
5,000 ton freight train up the 3 percent grade from the yards below to the High Desert plateau, an
altitude gain of 3,000 feet in 23 miles. It is this grinding, pounding power that swells at Summit
into a crescendo of energy, the air vibrating with the earth.
It is this vibration that never stops tickling the insides of some people. My dad was one of
them.
The tracks were where his heart was. Trains seemed to elevate his spirit to the upper
floors. Thanks to him there isn't a time in the family memory when trains do not appear. If he
wasn't married to one in his work then he was courting another through the countryside, waiting
with a camera, like a beau with flowers, by a bend or a bridge.
He knew things about trains. He knew where they came from and where they were going.
He knew their names and their numbers. He knew their whistles like a Scout knows Morse Code
and he could duplicate those sounds by blowing through the tube of his rolled up tongue, to the
delight of children, his or their's, that would collect on his lap.
There are nearly as many pictures of locomotives as there are children in the family
albums -- locomotives in winter. Something in the contrast of steam engines and winter
landscapes reassured him. He found magnificence in the sight of a 2-4-4-2 billowing headlong
through the snow banks, undaunted, drawing a nation behind it.

Cinders
The details of his seduction are obscure. No trains came near Urbandale, the Iowa village he
grew up near. He shared few common loves with his father. Perhaps his love of trains was as
simple and as profound as wonder itself. Trains are marvelous contraptions under any
circumstance.
To a child they are positively unreal - great, shimmering, steel creatures that seem almost
alive, fire-breathing monsters with immense, undulating tails, that appear suddenly from
nowhere, shake the earth with their stomping, deafening roar, then disappear just as magically to
mysterious places beyond the horizon.
What you love most you share. The cinder he tasted he shared with me. I have a bit of the
same smoke in my eyes, a shiver from the same awe.
An evening whistle haunts one of my earliest memories. It is cool and I am with him and
the silhouetted forms of box cars move slowly away against the ghostly glare of distant steam,
conveyed through the stillness as if drawn into the light. A whistle pierces the silence from ahead
and seems to linger, muffled by the night. It is other-worldly and it is all around me and I hold my
father's hand, and his bond to the railroad begins to form on me.
I walk the tracks with him. He warns me of careless boys who have lost their legs,
trapped by the foot like a coyote in a closing switch or sucked under the wheels by the force that
chases the serpent down the tracks. With fear and awe I balance on the slick, high rail, seeking
the thrill by testing the fear. Rusty rails are less fun; no trains ever go there.
 When I was five my father and I hitchhiked together from Chattanooga to Des Moines, to
bury my grandfather. I stood on his suitcase with his coat around both of us and we caught rides
in cold trucks and at night, during storms, slept on shiny, slick pews in empty train stations.
He took me once to Ames, where face to face freights had collided somehow, creating a
staggering tangle of metal and mood. I felt repelled by the horrific piles of twisted and mangled
steel, yet at the same time attracted by the sheer magnitude of the mess, compelled by the
confusion of trains without tracks, of serpents now silent, who panted no more. Of trains I was to be always
afraid, and always in awe.
Later, he was hired to work on the railroad. He rode the Rock Island line between Des
Moines and Minneapolis. He didn't work for the railroad, he worked on it, as a postal employee
in the days when U.S. mail was processed by rail. He worked in the mail car, the Railway Post
Office. The RPO he called it. Mail gets sorted at night, therefore he rode trains at night.
Many times we met his night trains when he came home. My mother didn't like it much,
but I'd race for the corner of the darkened station, then stop and round it slowly. There it was,
always bigger than my memory could carry: the Rock Island Rocket, the monster itself, the
dragon reined in somehow, still panting, sweating, impatient to run, its eyes wild and ready, heaving its
breath in blasts through the night, smelling of power and fury, fear and awe.
My dad worked there. He tamed dragons.
It was at times like these, standing close to the pulse, when a train whistle became
something not heard so much as felt, an internal vibration seeking its source.
His job was to have mail ready for each town at the right time, to be slung in a dirty,
canvas bag on a hook at the end of a steel arm, then swung outside, ready to be snagged by a
similar arm reaching out of the darkness as the Rock Island Rocket shot past in the night, chasing
its fire. If he didn't have the arm loaded and ready people in Mason City or Albert Lea would get no mail
that day.
He joked if his timing was bad the arm reaching back from the prairie would grab him
instead of the mail and if it didn't tear his arm off it would snatch him out the door, impaling
him on some hook by a crossing light in Iowa Falls, and there he'd be when the sun came up,
dangling like a slaughtered steer and probably just as dead.
He was happiest then, charging off on the dragon's back into the night, pursuing the heat
of his own fire.

Other Ashes
Then circumstances required the family to move and he left behind the Rock Island Rocket, the
RPO and the steel arms reaching like gallows from the prairie darkness and we found ourselves
in California, where mail is sorted in rooms without wheels.
He became a chaser, a man that diverts a family vacation two days to get a picture of the
Oregon, Pacific & Eastern equipment at Culp Creek; a man that goes to the Grand Canyon
merely to ride the Grand Canyon Railway or visits Death Valley only to see an SW1200 recycled
in Trona Railroad colors.
 On just such an outing, traveling the back roads of the West, he discovered Summit.
From then on his roads got shorter. When his world became cluttered you could find him there,
in his motor home, parked perpendicular to the tracks, the scanner adjusted, his lip packed with
chaw, laces loosened and feet on the dash, watching his mind hop the first freight east.
Too soon after he discovered Summit he got sick on an outing in Canada, complaining of a back
ache, and flew home.
It was June. He had cancer.
As the family gathered in my mother's San Diego kitchen the morning he died, certain
details needed immediate attention. The hospital wanted to know who would be claiming the
body. Then the mortuary wanted to know what to do with it.
We didn't know. Somebody made coffee. Mom stood nearby, distracted. It had all
happened so fast. That summer he had been chasing trains across Canada. Now, before
Thanksgiving, he was dead.
We decided cremation was best. The mortuary said we could pick up his ashes Tuesday,
like a suit that would be back from the dry cleaners. Then what?
My brother Rick laughed a little and said, "Let's take him down to Rose Canyon," the
nearest tracks, where trains slow to a crawl while snaking through the canyon floor into and out
of San Diego.
It was a wonderful idea. Better yet, if we were going to take him to the trains, I thought
we should go all the way and take him to Summit. No one objected.
The following weekend the family clan mustered at Summit to send-off a train lover. We
deposited his ashes, in a place he might have chosen himself, across the eastbound and
westbound railroad tracks between the rise of a road-cut one mile east of the Summit signal.
Now he never misses a train.
We used to go there to watch trains with him. Sometimes we still do.

-end-

"Summit, Cinders and Other Ashes" won First Prize in the 1994 Writer's Digest Writing
Competition, and appeared in the May/June 1995 issue of the late Buzz Potter's Hobo
Times. Contact Douglas Page at douglaspage@earthlink.net.