riding the rails (full story)

Many things never to be seen again have passed by these windows, shaking in the shadows cast by box cars, passenger cars, the links on the train speeding past the back of the building. This is the room beloved by small boys and avoided by responsible grown-ups, a room which is one step away from running away and joining the circus or hopping the next train out of town and exploring the unknown secret paths and worlds linked by the railway.

Unmapped from village to village, it speeds indifferently past swamp and forest, subdivision and slum, city and field. Die-hard enthusiasts chart times and locations in their little black notebooks, waiting expectantly for the 10.39 southbound from Chicago or the 2.23 west to Phoenix.

Today's rumor holds that the trains will be stopping, no longer serving the mysterious depots linked by these very tracks beyond the building. Soon it will be deconstructed into a bike trail, with only the memory of the concept of train, the mysterious smokiness of a midnight escape into a parallel world. Soon there will be no more fantasies about forbidden worlds; there will only remain the well-lit perambulations of the mothers with prams.

What will this world resemble, the day time world bleached of the mystery of the midnight rattling train? Where do the people in that other universe of mottled greys sleep, eat, shop; where are their friends, families; what are their entertainments? Is it too late now to learn how to ride the boxcars, hitch a ride with an indeterminate destination and an ever-changing route? To find the rhythms of the unseen never-nine-to-five?

This is the life that has been pitched as sordid, dark, dirty. The hobos always slightly hungry and completely drunk, at least in those times when they aren't slightly drunk and completely hungry. Hot water showers, feather pillows, regular laundry service are the sacrifices from the daytime world to ... to ... to ... a land from where only the most subjective stories escape.

A world of tramps, beggars, prostitutes, drugs, alcohol, disease, theft. A world of communal brotherly love free from middle class consumption expectations; a world of secret meaning and unspoken codes, Boy Scouts who never returned from a camping trip, but loaded the pup tents and propane stoves into the badge encrusted backpacks and took their skills with flint to a new land of opportunity. A world of half-crazy social rejects who should be in institutions, but wandered off the sanatorium grounds or were discharged when insurance ran out or escaped from family arrangements to disappear into a netherworld, a place that may or may not make more daily logical sense than the outward tokens of the civilized world.

Into this sea of shadows and half-recognized personalities and fragments of lives left behind or lives unlived, the sorrow of broken dreams, the anguish of broken families, the misery of broken hearts. The decay of dirty laundry, dirty skin, dirty rails, dirty boxcars, dirty camps. The freedom from news stories, stock reports, traffic jams, florescent lighting, cubicles, mundane repetitions, alarm clocks, insurance claims. The freedom from studying maps and analyzing outlooks and making deadlines and of creating a sense of urgent importance.

This is why small boys sit in this room and wave to conductors, eagerly wait, quietly, for the roar and shake of the train passing by, Union Pacific or Santa Fe or Northern or even Amtrak echoing down a secret hallway. The boys recognize their futures proscribed in the schoolroom, a future of straight lines and rows of uncomfortable chairs and too small desks set at the wrong angle; a future of twenty minute lunches in sanitized cafeterias that smell of grease and Clorox; a future of badly fitting business casual and early male pattern baldness; and these boys know that is not for them.

For them are the day long escapes into neighborhood-wide hide and seek, the forts behind abandoned houses or in the trees behind cemeteries, the gangs of roving youths with handshakes and coded language to separate friend from foe. The boys are enthralled not with the love of being irresponsible -- they are not Peter Pans shirking duty -- rather, they are in love with the grey areas, the figures moving in the shadows cast by the trees, the half-seen, half-heard, half-fabled world that they can almost grasp: but when the hold is too tight, the shadows slip between the cracks of the fingers, and are lost to the demands of sharpened number two pencils and math homework and mowing the lawn and younger brothers who refuse to go back where they came from, because the shattering noises of the tag-along scares away the shadows.

Always carry a pocket knife. Always waterproof matches. Know how to knot, how to signal with a mirror, how to bind a broken bone or build a tourniquet. Know how to absolve responsibility and how to avoid entrapment. Know how to escape a fight and how to break a nose. Know how to shoot to kill, how to shoot to maim, how to skin a squirrel.

These boys no longer have career days at school that allow for the occupations of Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett; the grand colonial explorations and exploitations of the empire have ended; space is not the final frontier, it is a box of gravity-free tedium, and bad food and bladder issues. The only modern route for an explorer is to disappear into the cracks of the uncharted lands of civilization, to fall between the rails. To follow in the footsteps of thieves, bandits, petty criminals, murderers, the criminally insane, the physically unusual, and disappear into the smoke and mirrors beyond dry cleaned shirts and fortnightly spreadsheets.

The boys wear their blue-striped hats and their overalls, and in the dirt behind the shed they practice hobo signs. These might not be the hobo signs in use by that transient mass, but they practice scratching, hiding, recognizing, discovering, honing attention for the days when attention is crucial. Not for the seven times table or the correct spelling of scissors -- but for the express or the local, the northern or southern, the friendly conductor or the aggressive enforcer. They would have built ships, carved canoes, discovered canyons and dinosaurs and the secret unseen lives of the others, but all they hope for now is to disappear.

Now, though, the rail line is scheduled to disappear, a diminishing demand for freight, a lack of maintenance of the infrastructure, new engines too expensive and old cars too worn. Safety standards too strenuous, trade routes too altered, and everything automated for delivery tomorrow. Delivery yesterday.

So this train line will lie quiet at the end of the month, an exploratory team is already in negotiations to erase the link with the secret unseen world of the tracks and replace it with the sanitized acceptabilities of jogging bankers and cycling schoolteachers. The boys will no longer come to this room, paralyzed by the count of engines, box cars, coal cars, flat cars, caboose, struck dumb by the peek into a society they almost belong to. Once they could access the hidden potential of a full life straining at the bit to be grasped, to be experienced, but now the secret code is slipping away.

Without the trains, without the small boys, this room will lie empty and forsaken, until the building is renovated and this becomes the conference room, with patterned chairs in shades of mauve, and a stifling view of the daytime multiuse trail, a reminder during meetings that even leisure is productive. Where will the boys go? Where will the doors crack open into the secret society of unexplored options, the beckoning call of the might have been, the might become?

written Oct. 2, 08
dedicated to MJG

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index of occasional thoughts

the meter was out of order

the meter was out of order ($1,326.50)

parking violations, towing receipts

recovered from a borrowed car

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index of occasional thoughts

the snow-storm

The Snow-Storm / by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

The 2014/2015 holiday edition:

 

earlier in the month, I bought a treasure trove of vintage paper

from a local stationer who is only open about 4 hours per week

my local post office ran out of the stamps of Emerson's contemporaries, the Hudson River School painters,  so I had them shipped from the USPS underground bunker in Kansas City

 

So I love this paper. It's crinkly and crackly and has gorgeous red lines. I bought all the stock of it.

500 sheets.

Also two reams of the same paper without the red lines.

 

The part of me that really wants to be able to embrace simplicity almost left them at that.

 

The bigger part of me that thinks simplicity is over-rated had opinions about doing nothing.

 

In an ideal world, this would have been the appearance of all the broadsides in this year's edition.

However, I didn't think through what "Corrasable Bond" really meant. What it means is that when you do lots of things to the surface of the paper, the text disappears.

That would be great for an art project. That is much less great for a poem.

So the majority of the broadsides were treated more simply; splattered rather than manipulated.

 

Into my personal archive of Japanese airmail stationary for wrappers.

 

The Big Dipper was chosen because it's one of the few constellations that I recognize,

and the 'random snowflake' punching would have taken forever.

However, after mailing the cards, I looked up the symbolism of the dipper, which relates to stability through the changing seasons, a wrap to the year.

sister of embers

need a refresher on the source text? click here.

It started with the birds descending. They had an evil intent, if by evil, one means they were harming a human, and by intent, one means they acted of their own free will and volition. This ignores any actions the humans may have done, intentionally or unintentionally, in the past, that may have affected the birds or the god who controls them. This also presupposes a defined starting point: did everything, the universe, the big bang, the sudden materializing of a god, begin at the same moment the birds turned evil, or was there some passage of time beforehand, and the starting point becomes arbitrary narrative framework?

The birds seem to be complicating the story, but I can’t very well leave them out, any more than I can leave out the evil stepsisters and the glass slipper and the methods of household management employed by bourgeois families of the unspecified but pre-Industrial past, and I can’t include all of these aspects without inserting some type of warning against a hasty marriage with someone you’ve only danced with, on an evening where everyone was all dressed up and the champagne flowed freely and magic was in the air. I’ve had plenty of those evenings, but, had I actually been able to whisper the proverbial word of wisdom, I might have ventured that a spot of premarital counseling, or, at the least, a third date, would have been a not inappropriate consideration before trading an inarguably uncomfortable domestic arrangement for one that, quite possibly, could be much, much worse. Fairy godmothers are powerful beings, but not compared to royal executioners or divorce lawyers.

This is why choosing where to begin the story is so perilous. This isn’t really even about that interlude, anyway, seeing as how it lasted no more than a month, and nothing about that month was otherwise remarkable in any particular way. Let’s go back.

It started with the birds descending. They had an evil intent, the strong, sharp beaks and talons of raptors; they were larger and blacker than any falcon; there were two of them, and they swooped down onto the wedding party just as the cake was being cut and they blinded the sisters of the bride, then disappeared back into the heavens. Everything happened so quickly that many of the guests were unaware of anything at all, and there were two screaming girls, just barely teenagers, blood streaming down their faces. They quickly were led away from the festivities; the band took up a catchy dance tune; the moment was forgotten by the crowd and the party continued.

The girls were taken to the infirmary, staffed by a midwife who had developed a taste for distilled spirits, and one of them succumbed to an infection that spread from the eye through the bloodstream and into the brain, and the other one survived. She had lost her sight, of course, and had been hobbled as a child by stunted growth in her right foot, and thus knew she had no future position at court. She also knew she had no where else to go. By the time her wounds healed and she had learned how to navigate her dark world, she was still only sixteen, with a dead father, a dead step-father, a dead sister, a disinterested mother, and a stepsister with whom she had never been close and who was now negotiating the difficulties of an ill-advised hasty marriage. She was blind and had a club foot and no particular means of survival, and she did not have any desire to be alive.

It was November and the first snows had fallen; frost glazed the windows, the wolves were not yet desperate in the forests. One afternoon, as she say by the fire in the infirmary with the drunken midwife, she decided she had had enough. She could not knit, she could not sew, she could not clean, she could neither teach nor read, and so she wrapped her cloak around herself, and left.

It did not take her long to consider the folly of leaving without food or a sense of destination in the early winter, and she might have tried calling out for help, except she could not bring herself to care. Perhaps a poacher would inadvertently shoot her, or a band of ruffians attack her, or she could fall into a chilly swift river and drown in a haze of hypothermia. It was all much the same to her. Even if the devil himself had appeared and offered a bargain, she would not have been in any state to even know what to ask for. And she did not believe in the devil, although she believed in poachers and ruffians and rivers, and, if pressed, would have admitted that the birds that took her sight and her sister’s life were evil. She was too exhausted to care much else about philosophical details of god and the devil, and had never thought much about such esoteric drivel, anyway.

She walked slowly, and very quickly lost any sense of where she was and where she might be going, and she collided with trees and walls and quite a few immobile objects she could not identify. As the day grew colder she stopped and sat, just where she was, with no sense of whether she was twenty feet or two miles from where she had started; if she was in the middle of a road or on the edge of a cliff. If she had been injured and nursed in the land where she had grown up, the shape of the landscape would have imprinted itself into her mind, but her family had moved to this region when her mother had remarried, then she had been moved to the castle infirmary after her injury. Even if she had been in full possession of her senses, she knew nothing of the geography of this place. The people spoke a dialect that was thickly accented, so as to be almost foreign, and, outside court, she couldn’t understand a word of the locals’ speech.

As she sat in the cold, she tried to remember what she could of her childhood. There were very few good moments to latch onto; neither her mother nor her sister had even been willing to talk about the past. What she remembered was the deep warm heat of the underbelly of the chickens as she collected the eggs in the morning, and how there was one black hen that had imprinted upon her when it was just a chick, and would follow her throughout the day. She could barely remember her father, he had disappeared before she was old enough to learn her letters, and she never knew for certain if he had really died or something else, maybe something even worse. He had been a giant to her, with a huge shaggy red beard and a leather vest that always had a bit of string in the pockets, and if he wasn’t at home very much, when he was there, he would pick her up and swing her around in circles and she would scream in disoriented delight.

Her mother must have been quite young, barely past girlhood herself, and she remembered summer days when her mother would uncoil her hair and wash it and let it dry in the sun, and it was the same color as the grains growing in the fields, shiny and yellow. When her father was at home, her mother would sing and knit and make jams with the berries from the garden, but when her father wasn’t there, her mother had to chop wood and start the fires and she even must have learnt to shoot game. They never went hungry, but when her father wasn’t there, they didn’t have jam, and her mother didn’t sing.

There, on the corner of her memory, is a thought — had there been a baby brother? She hasn’t remembered him in years and years. He must have disappeared around the same time her father did, but she isn’t sure, she may have never known. There was a time she doesn’t remember at all, and then the flurry of activity with the move, the new stepfather, the new stepsister.

It is very cold out, now; it must be fully night. She lays down on the ground, curls inside her cloak to stay warm. She is hungry and cold, and in the back of her mind she still hears the echoing cries of the birds as they swooped down from the heavens towards her. Her sleep at night is always fitful and prone to terrors; she hears the heavy flapping of the birds’ wings in her dreams. It is very cold; she sleeps, but does not dream. There are no poachers, no ruffians, not even any hungry wolves that accost her as she sleeps.

The sun rises, but she does not wake up. It is a clear morning, and frost has traced her features, left her shape outlined upon the ground where she slept. A small boy is the first person to notice her, and he tugs at his mother’s apron to get her attention. He does not cry: he did not know the girl, he does not recognize death. She had not travelled so very far from the infirmary, but she had managed to leave the castle grounds, and cross a fallow field to the edge of a small village of share croppers. No one recognizes her as being from the court, for her clothes are not fine, and she is buried in the small churchyard, in the corner by itinerants and unknowns. Her story ends.

Tohu and Tikun

Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the pressure of knowledge. Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the air of expectation. Under the tree that knew everything, I felt the fog of emotion. I was too curious to care for knowledge, too rebellious to care for expectation, too confused to recognize emotion. Instead, I lay under the great spreading branches, my head pillowed by a tree root, and I watched what life existed above.

Item, one squirrel. Item, a second squirrel. The squirrels barked at me, then catapulted into an adjacent tree and disappeared. Item, a bird. It may have been a mockingbird, or it may have been a crow, or it may have been a bluejay. My ignorance of this particular is inexcusable, but I was distracted. Between hearing the flurry of beating wings and the rustling of disturbed leaves, I looked up into the heart of the canopy and was surprised to realize that the light was a different color than underneath any of the other trees, or, for that matter, than when standing out in open ground. It wasn’t a delicate filtered green like underneath willows or the ruddy shadows of a maple; it wasn’t a pure blue of day light or the deep velvet of twilight. I forgot about the birds completely.

Something about the air filtered by this tree turned it into a pearlescent glow, like the full moon on the ocean or a puddle slicked by oil after a summer storm, depending on whether one is at the shore or in the city. The air didn’t smell any different, and the sounds were the sounds of the afternoon: the barking squirrels, the rustling birds; somewhere near but not too near, the swish of tires in a hum of traffic.

This was the tree that knew everything, but it was not, as our mayor and our minister and our school teacher and my mother pointed out all too often, this was not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I wasn’t quite sure why they made such a fuss about all that. I knew it was important that it was the tree that knew everything, because it was the tree that everyone told secrets to and studied for tests under and went to when things were confused. I figured if it was the tree that knew everything, it really must also be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because, if it wasn’t, well, then, it couldn’t know everything.

I asked my mother. “Mom, what’s the big deal about the knowledge of good and evil?”

She got all flustered, and said it had something to do with beautiful gardens and falling in love and having babies.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all. What’s evil about gardens or love or babies?”

She stammered incoherently and sent me outside to play.

When I asked my school teacher, she said it was all just a silly story that the mayor made up so that we could have a landmark featured in the tourist brochure. Well, I had sent letters to the tourism offices of all 50 states and I had a great pile of color brochures and maps covered in squiggly lines, and most towns seemed to put up statues of funny-looking men rather than have famous trees.

When I asked the mayor to explain it all to me, he gave me a little lapel pin with the state flag inside the outline of the tree that knows everything, and then had his secretary give me a commemorative poster from the dedication of the tree. I put the pin on my overcoat and hung the poster on my bedroom wall, but none of this answered my question.

After church on Sunday, I went up to the minister, who had just taken a big bite of jelly doughnut, and asked him. “Why’s it the tree that knows everything, but not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?” Right at that moment, some of the jelly filling plopped onto his shirtfront and he ran off to get a napkin.

No one would or could explain it to me, and so I had taken to sitting under the tree at all hours, thinking that maybe the tree would tell me. I mean, I know that trees can’t talk, or write, or anything, but no one else had much to say, so there was nothing to lose by trying. I figured that I probably wouldn’t learn much, but it was summer, and the air was warm and the days lasted forever, and I sat and napped and daydreamed and watched the squirrels and sometimes other people would stop by and I’d take their picture for them, under the tree.

This was the first time I had noticed the air under the tree being different from the air other places. I don’t know if I just hadn’t been looking right before, or if the time of day or the weather were different. I’d seen the air change color when tornadoes were coming in, everything turning a yellowy green gray and then lots of lightning and I knew, absolutely knew, that I had to run somewhere safe and duck and cover. We did lots of duck and cover drills at school, so that felt okay. But this wasn’t scary-tornado-storm colored under the tree. Like I said, it was pearlescent, it was one of the prettiest things I had ever seen, like a rainbow but without any color.

I decided to climb the tree and see what was going on, which seemed like a fine idea until I realized that it would be kind of hard to climb, since there weren’t any good branches for footholds. Then I remembered the squirrels, and how they would jump from tree to tree, and that made a lot of sense. I looked around. There was a good oak not too far away that I could get into by climbing onto the cemetery fence, so I did. The oak tree was built like a staircase, or a ladder, and I went up and up and around until I was on the right side to scoot over to the tree that knew everything. The squirrels started barking at me again, but as long as they didn’t start throwing acorns, I felt safe.

When I was looking over at the tree, I realized the entire tree seemed to have a cloud, or maybe a fog, of this different air. Or maybe the tree was glowing, or radiating something. We had studied nuclear bombs a little bit at school, but I wasn’t sure if nuclear meant glowy or if that was something else. Maybe when we do chemistry I’ll learn that. And I don’t think there’s any way to tell if something is nuclear, anyway, not without special scientist stuff. It isn’t like nuclear things are maybe warmer or smell different or get magnetic. Or maybe they do. But the tree that knew everything wasn’t warmer than everywhere else and smelled the same as all the other trees, and I didn’t have a paperclip to check and see if it was magnetic. I felt that it probably wasn’t going to nucleate me, and it didn’t seem ashy like fire smoke, so I crawled out on the limb of the oak tree to get closer to it.

I didn’t look down. I knew it would be a bad idea to look down, so I slithered on my stomach and held on tight and watched to make sure I didn’t get caught on any branches. The trees were further apart than they looked from the ground, but I could see how different the air was inside the tree that knew everything. I wanted so badly to know why it was different, and so even though I knew Tarzan was only make-believe, I started looking around for a rope or something to swing myself over. We didn’t have any kudzu, not like they do in some places, and even though I know I’m not supposed to like kudzu because although it looks like a fur coat it makes it hard for the trees to breathe, even still, if I had kudzu, I could have braided it into a rope to swing to the other tree. But I was just out on a branch on my stomach, and that wasn’t getting me anywhere.

There had been a movie about how monkeys move through trees, swinging from their arms, and I decided that might work. I wrapped my arms around the tree branch, like I was giving it a hug, and dropped upside down so that my legs were swinging free underneath. I swung my legs back and forth and back and forth to get momentum to move forward, and the oak tree’s bark scratched up my arms and my shoulders felt like they were going to break off and my hands were so sweaty I was afraid that I would lose my grip and fall, and that would probably hurt. A lot. So I kept swinging my legs and scootching forward and I didn’t look down or think about my arms bleeding. Then I was close enough that if I swung really, really hard I could get my leg onto one of the branches of the tree that knew everything. And I swung and looped my knee into the other tree, but was still holding onto the oak tree with my arms. I got my other knee up to cross over the branch, and I let go.

I was hanging upside down in the tree that knew everything, and I was tired, and my arms hurt and I was kind of absolutely terrified, but I realized I could feel the air was different. It was a little bit thicker, and a little bit warmer, and smelled a little bit like cinnamon. The only thing I can compare it to is the dandelion feathers that go poof into the air when you make a wish. It was like being surrounded by the tickly-air feeling of dandelion. I reached my arms up to meet my knees on the branch, and collapsed onto my stomach. Everything seemed happy, even my blood felt bubbly, like cola, or fish tank bubbles. I scootched closer to the trunk, and sat, resting my back against it. The trunk was warm, not like a stovetop, but like socks off the radiator, and all around me, the air hummed, like bees, except there were no bees. I could feel how much the tree was trying to tell me, and even though I couldn’t understand any of it, I was happier than I had ever been.

the year to be

regular size edition of 50

A client brought in a copy of Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack for 1788 for restoration, which provided the inspiration for this year's holiday edition: an almanac for the forthcoming year.

holiday ephemera edition of 50

Not for 2014. That would be far too practical.

Quercus Press: page layout for offset printing.

Page layout for digital printing -- pagination + glass of wine = much troubleshooting

According to wikipedia, 1714 starts on the same day of the week as 2014.

According to google books, there aren't any almanacs (or almanacks) from 1714.

each pamphlet = 2x 11x17 pages

fold, fold, cut, sew

Also, there was a calendar system change in there.

Time's Telescope, appropriated from 1817 to 1814

advertisement matter

range of papers, reflecting current studio stocks, reminiscent of publisher's bindings

However, 1814 was right in the midst of the flourishing almanac system. We had longitude! And latitude! And a new calendar system! Also, it was still considered essential information to include the transits of the moons of Jupiter as a separate page for each month in an almanac published as "The Nautical Almanac" by the London "Order of Commissioners of Longitude." Also, as referenced herein recently, there was a literal Big Cheese.

What cinched the entire project, though, was finding an almanac from 1817 where the owner had written the weather and current events ("bought first lobsters") for every month of the year. And google had scanned this almanac. The project had to happen.

pamphlet for 1814 = stamps for War of 1812

What more could one want?

also, studio-made stickers. why not?

Happy New Year!

holiday edition

To say that I am behind schedule would be, perhaps, an understatement. That notwithstanding, work on this year's holiday edition has begun, in that I've started thinking about what the item will be and how it will be made. Here's a sample for the purposes of general cheer and inspiration.