I fumbled with the Nikon, as all new owners are wont to do. Just because it felt good in my hands didn’t necessarily translate to me knowing what the hell I was doing with it.
Mathew was accommodating, if not patient, allowing me to roam around as long as I didn’t step on the railheads or do any of the things that railfans shouldn’t do.
Here, at the end of the world, there weren’t many concerns about the safety guys showing up or some railroad bull chasing me off the property for trespassing.
I didn’t really know what to shoot or what questions to ask, I just pointed the camera at things that I thought looked neat and pressed the shutter.
It was mostly small talk. I tried to stay out of his way and not be a bother.
When I last saw Frederick, about an hour before, he was trundling a pair of old GEs across the wheatfields and into Manter, rolling behind a line of farm implements that had been stored trackside at the condemned-to-10mph crawl on 88lb rail spiked to rotting ties, and dousing himself with bottled water in a feeble attempt to fend off the 104-degree heat of mid-June. The old mills still wore the dull blue paint of former owner CSX, and though their flanks had a liberal application of black rattlecan spray paint to disavow themselves of their past life, the yellow noses and ends still proudly proclaimed in big boxy serif letters that the dividends they once pulled where tallied at 500 Water Street in Jacksonville. In a previous incarnation, they rolled fast freight up on the Conrail.
The old GEs wouldn’t roll into Saunders for a little while still.
The sun burned harsh, casting shadows upon the frontier where Kansas dumps itself seamlessly into Colorado, the grass and dirt of one state being no different from that of the other.
Yet, the scorching wind was somehow different from Texas. The grasses whispered gently, the wheat swaying and swelling like dry staccato waves rolling upon a golden ocean.
Here, it smelled like Kansas.
It was as if the rhythm had filtered me of my southern origins, the mantra of Texas peeling off layer-by-layer the further from it I got.
Here, I was only a man; a dreamer; an insignificance of flesh and bone, regrets harbored in the diastolic shadows of a heart, standing under the hot June expanse of a sky on the longest days of the year, where the curve of the earth was evident and the term “vast” became more than visually defined.
It was emotional.
It was spiritual.
It was poetry in itself---
Without words to detract from the austere grandeur of the scene.
It was the slow death of the day and a horizon as perfect as it was unreachable.
And a sun that seemingly refused to sink below it, hanging in the dusty western sky like some carrot dangling from an imaginary string, daring you to chase it.
It was falling in love, not with a person or a place, but with the ideal of space and infinity; to find the definition of my soul, and put a visual to it.
As if Atticus Finch’s voice whispered on the winds, I stepped into myself and walked around a little bit.
It was as if you could see back in time, or at least grieve for the past.
I came to know the land, and mourn for it---
For all that it has known, and all that it has lost.
Man vacated the wild from it and ripped it open, gashing great scars across it, claiming it for himself with deeds and legalese and strands of barbed wire stretched between crooked wooden posts.
And now, the land was tired and worn---
Yet, still beautiful, like an exhausted mother whose bosom had fed herds and whose womb had shed its bounty for generations, laying there quiet and patient as men spread her open year after year with plows and implements, corrugating her skin and casting her essence to the winds, only to take her offspring from her and leave her fallow of hope.
If it could speak, it would only weep.
I came too late to know its glory, but I came nevertheless---
To a place I’d never been before---
A miniscule being in a vast and lonely universe, ever slipping away towards night, knowing that the longest days of life are far behind.
I came for the trains.
I left with so much more.
---Rick
There are no snowy woods to stop by
No mistress in the mountains
Nor foaming seas that lap upon the shores
A mere speck of dust that rises from the plain
To ride the dry wind
And fall upon unknown places
A weary soul to wander
Throughout immensity
And know the inconsequence of oneself
The final notes of a thousand love songs
Lay hidden beneath the skin
Of the man I’ve become
In them are ghosts
With hollow eyes and broken hearts
The shadows of life cast long
I hear them in the rattle of dry grass
As a scythe through waves of wheat
And the rain that falls like tears
It is the haunting of regret
The shame of arrogance
And the penance of humility
But I am home
Amid the dust and the chaff
The land and the heavens and the wind
I find peace
Yet the sun burns harsh
Only for a moment
Soon to fade into the dark of night
The winds shall wash away my footsteps
And scatter my shadow to the grasses
Leaving little trace that I ever walked the earth
Once upon a dusk
In Kansas
---RAM
Rick Malo©2025
