The end of the day
So, we’ve come to the end of the day, our stinking form smelling of sweat and bug spray, soiled heavy from countless cornfields and ditches and the threat of losing our boots in the deep delta mud as we waded through to get just the right angle.
We’ve been caked in dust as we struggled to breathe it in on the High Plains, and struggled to breathe at all on the high Atacama.
The straps of backpacks cut heavy into the shoulders of the hearty as they slog through the snows and heft their gear hither and yon across the highlands and into the shadows of canyons deep that weave about the ancient peaks.
We’ve raced across the heartland as we chased and paced our quarry, tires slapping joints on old backroad blacktops keeping time with high-horsepower thoroughbreds rolling tonnage up on the high iron, cylinders banging and turbostacks howling to the heavens, shutters clicking along through rolled-down windows as the landscape whizzes by.
But now, in the last light of day, as FRED flashes off into the twilight, the battery indicator on Nikons and Canons and Sonys flashes down to one bar---
And so does ours.
We passed the flagstop of Weary long ago.
There’s a key in our pocket to the Roundhouse Motel, and a hot meal at Judy’s Café along the way.
Somewhere, back over there, back over the horizon, there’s another headlight piercing through the ever-darkening scape, shining off gleaming railheads that fan out in every direction of the compass, and our imaginations.
What will it be?
GEVO?
EMD?
Hotshot intermodal or some lowly coal drag?
One doesn’t know.
But, in the end, it really doesn’t matter, does it?
We come for the show.
We come trackside, a pilgrim on the great retreat seeking salvation, to be washed in the sanctity of hot diesel exhaust, a throbbing baptism of internal combustion amid high decibel levels and a rumbling and quaking of the very grounds we walk on, trumpets punctuating the choir on high, echoing throughout the sanctuary as the hogger pulls the chord for the distant grade crossing, the pounding of a galled wheelset as it fades off on the wind an odd stand-in for the click and clack of the jointed rail in our youth.
We come for that---our youth, the rails and crossties a direct connection to it and our innocence, before all the complications of life fouled the injectors and threw monkey wrenches into the cogs, and we got dirt on our hands and under our nails.
But, Oh! The memories!
We ponder them for a bit, and to them we add the new ones, and fold up our missalette and place it back firm against our breast.
It’s time to go.
Yet, amid our reverence of the here and now, as the crown of the sun seeps below the land, draining all the glorious glow from the heavens and from the earth, that last wonderous light, when we give the day back to night, we’ll smile.
Yep---
You bet we’ll smile.
A pair of Norfolk Southern GEs roll merchandise west through Decatur, Illinois on the old Wabash mainline on the evening of April 10th, 2022.
AC44C6M 4492 highballs Train 256 east down the old Wabash main near Cerro Gordo, Illinois on April 7th, 2022.
Norfolk Southern AC44C6M 4492 hustles train No.256 east down the former Wabash mainline near Cerro Gordo, Illinois at 1:18 pm on April 7th, 2022.
FURX GP38-2 5514 and a companion EMD unit switch the Staley chemical plant in Decatur, IL on the evening of April 10th, 2022.
Corn Belt Morn.
A BNSF GE leads a NS Thoroughbred as they romp fast freight westbound down the old Wabash main near Bement, IL on the morning of April 12th, 2022.
Evening at Bement.
With a clear signal ahead for the double track run to Decatur, westbound NS Thoroughbreds throttle into the setting sun as they leave Bement, Illinois on April 11th, 2022.
The four-stroke music of GE Thoroughbreds reverberates off the old grain elevators as tonnage thunders eastbound out of Bement, Illinois on the old Wabash main at 5:06 pm on April 11th, 2022.
Three BNSF GE units highball eastbound merchandise down the former Wabash mainline near Bement, Illinois on the afternoon of April 7th, 2022.
"Morning Glory."
Early on the morning of April 7th, 2022, a westbound Norfolk Southern freight gets underway at Bement, Illinois on the former Wabash mainline.
By noon it will be snowing lightly.
