Hear that whistle blow
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
I'd already written my column for Another Day in the Country last week, when I found out that Tooltime Tim had hit the train! Now that was a country phenomena worth mentioning! Scared us to death!
Hitting trains was not something that happened often in California. Although, there is a train called The Wine Train that traverses sections of the Napa Valley. And when an entrepreneur got the bright idea to make an old train line into a restaurant on rails, the residents of the Napa Valley wanted to hit it! They didn't like the idea at all — and some still don't. Trains did NOT spell nostalgia for them.
Hearing the whistle of a train DOES spell nostalgia for me — at least it DID, until Tooltime Tim hit the train the other morning. It was early, before dawn. It was foggy. The engine of the train, pulling 90-some cars, was long past the crossing on 360th and having to slow down at the next crossing so they could even read their own signal lights to see whether they could proceed, when Tim hit one of the last cars.
"It was a gray car," he said, "I couldn't see it until it was right smack in front of me!" And he hit it. Rattling along in the old truck on his way to work, he slammed on his brakes and hit that train!
Tim's a survivor, like a cat that lands on its feet, he was out of that truck in nothing flat. "I didn't know how long it would drag me," he said afterward. Turns out it didn't drag the truck far — in fact, the train hardly knew it had been accosted.
"So I hear you tried to derail the train," our contractor John said to TTT last night. "Not quite," Tim said modestly, and then grinned, "but I tried."
Yes, the sound of the train whistle calling its presence into the wind has always been a nostalgic, slightly romantic sound for me. We'd hear that sound sometimes in Sacramento, of all things, in the still of the night. Jessica had an apartment in a quaint section of town where train tracks ran through an unpopulated area. We'd hear the whistle and say, "Doesn't this remind you of Ramona?" And we'd long for Kansas and the wide open expanses of prairie.
Well, here we are in Ramona and I'm listening to the train. I hear it call in the middle of the day and hope it's traveling through, not stopping on the crossing. I hear it in the middle of the night and know it's midnight. I've always loved that haunting sound of the old trains and I just snuggle deeper under the covers and go to sleep.
Then Tim hit the train and the sound changed. Now, the whistle sounds more like the warning it's intended to be. Not that I hadn't been scared by trains out here before — the train on that very same line lost me a year's growth when we first came to the country. I was driving down a dirt road, looked right and left as I came to the crossing and drove on up the embankment where the tracks were when I saw a train coming toward me past a stand of scrub trees along the tracks. Couldn't see the train before because of those trees. The train was going slow and suddenly I was going faster and made it across the tracks in good time but my heart was beating lickety-split.
Too many loved ones have been killed and injured by the trains. I think I've told you about my great-grandfather who was killed at the Ramona crossing when his third wife pulled on the emergency brake when she saw the train coming down the tracks and he didn't. Trouble was they were ON the tracks by the time she pulled the brake. She lived to tell the tale, Great-Grandpa didn't. We've had uncles killed by the train and cousins once removed nearly killed. And now that train had nearly derailed our buddy Tooltime Tim — that's too close for comfort.
"There ought to be a rule," I told TTT, "lights at every crossing."
"Do you know how many roads those tracks cross?" he countered, "It will never happen!"
Ah well, it's another day in the country and we're mighty thankful that while Tim's truck was totaled, he wasn't! He just got a twisted ankle and a couple of scratches.
Tim often comes up with an idea for my column, so I asked him last night, "Any ideas?"
"Nope, can't think of a thing," he said.
