The muffled bangs of boxcars
coupling & the half-hour bell tone warn . . .
the day will soon demand you
rise & pay attention to
the bustle & noise of routine.
*
Always there’s more danger in leaving
the path. The road more traveled
more likely leads home.
That is a cutting from a poem titled, “Sweet Dead of Night” which will be on the wall of the lobby of the new condo project built off 4th Street above the old Milwaukee Road train yard on the site of the small brick company houses railroad workers lived in from 1908 till sometime before the trains stopped rolling in 1980.
My dad worked for the Milwaukee. We lived in Alberton right below the tracks. Trains hold a nostalgic place inside me. So when I found myself listening to the Montana Rail Link switch engines working the night shift in the old Northern Pacific train yard while I was lying in bed one night on Helen Avenue, I got up and penned the poem those lines above came from. It's a bit ironic that the words celebrate an industrial, working class past and dread the morning shift, take comfort in returning home, since these words will hang on a wall in a building working class people cannot afford. And while it pays homage to those who do the dirty work of labor at all times in all weather, will those residents who pass by those words daily ever read it or think about the history of this place or those folks who lived and worked here half a century ago? I doubt it. How many of my generation, those workers who lived here before, spent much time thinking about the indigenous people who lived here before us? What does the concept of home mean to any of us?
Most of us gray-hairs who've lived our lives around here are not thrilled with all the changes, but that's life, right? Change is the one constant. Most folks I know resent the power and influence of money. The wealth inequity we have watched grow in our lifetime. So we have a bit of a chip on our shoulder about that. Well, I do anyway. So I felt a bit ashamed selling the wealthy my blue collar words to hang on their wall built over the ghosts of old railroaders like my dad. It's not the first time I saw myself as a prostitute, but it might be the most poignant.
Yep. Feel free to call me the whore I've always been. I certainly did shittier work for the Milwaukee Road for less pay, but I took it and spent it just the same. In '77 I worked on the Milwaukee track crew out of Alberton till I got laid off and “hooked” a carpenter's helper job for the winter. I drove dog-catch crews, too, transferring a fresh group of trainmen to a “dead” train that ran out of time and had to replace and return train crews. This happened because of the deteriorating roadbed due to lack of maintenance (that previous job I got laid off from) the slowed trains that used to make a 100 mile run in less than two hours, now couldn't make it in 12. Or sometimes it was because of a derailment, one of the hundreds that happened in the last few years till they finally called it quits in 1980.
J.A. McDonnell
The day after St. Patrick's Day that last year, I hopped the second to the last freight heading back east to call the western (transcontinental) line quits. I got on in Alberton and off in Missoula. Seriously hungover, I wanted to photograph from the train for the last time the world I'd known, grown up in. I wanted to hold onto, capture something that died that day in my mind and on film. I have strong emotional ties to that time and place, to that story and railroads, but like so many others I worked for the bastards, took their money, and I've done a lot of work simply for money. So when someone offered to pay me for a few words I'd written, some excerpted lines from a poem, I was happy to take the check. Those old railroad houses they removed remind me of the life I knew, the shack I grew up in. I also feel sorry for the folks who lived in them who were forced to move. So many of us are in the same boat. I was forced out of the house I'd lived in for over twenty years, the place I used to listen to the trains switching at night, the house my sons came of age in, where I composed my life longer than in any other place, where I thought of as “home.”
I do know I can't hold back the march of time, progress, the future becoming yesterday. And as my old pal, the poet Ed Lahey, used to say, “we're stuff for the garbage chute.” I’ve fed that chute a fair amount in the last year. We’ve landed on our feet in a sweet spot, and we have many people to thank for that. Not least of all ourselves. I do believe “the boys,” that “the love you take is equal to the love you make.” So make love! Anywhere, anytime you can! The long and short of it, for this old prostitute, is: when I can grab some beer money, I will. That is and always has been my reality. And if I'm lucky, a couple of hobo poems will drop off in the bum jungle of my gandy dancin' mind and take me home to my comfort zone, the nostalgic laze of reflection, my cozy dream of awe and hopefully as much love as I can stand.
All the Livelong Days The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific had nothin’ and everything to lose that summer in Missoula. Our job – the Catlin Street crossing replacement – four men, water and tools: spike malls and pullers, shovels and picks, rail jacks, tie tongs and wrenches. Shirtless under August sun, we dug and pried at broken ties exposed below the rails, weathered in creosote, sand and cinders. We scanned for tacks to tell us the date a tie was spiked and tamped. Like fingerprints or DNA, those tags were metal proof. Drenched in sweat, we baptized the roadbed – Track pranksters burned black as tunnels. Our hands blistered and bled and cramped. Back on our feet, bent at the knees, we begged for Christ or the lions to be merciful if tongs didn’t bite. Our spines burned till tail bones went numb. Half-done and lightheaded, we broke for a drink. No one ever had to pee. An old gandy dancer shuffled up in suspenders, leaned on his cane. “You boys’re lucky! When I was your age... didn’t have no goddamn machines! That was back in 1929. Those days you earned your pay! Snaked those ties out full length! An’ guys standin’ in line to do it!” Eyes down, we dug for Copenhagen cans and wondered, “Was the old bastard blind?” “You got the wrong railroad,” Billy said, stuck a scoop under the Old Timer’s nose, “they ain’t bought a new shovel since the day you quit! Next year we’re goin’ back to steam!” He squinted and glared, spit in the dirt, stared us down one by one. We went back to cussin’ hardwood and steel, didn’t watch when he limped away. I felt beaten and sore as this wounded railroad, hoardin’ tie tacks cached in my pocket– one, a 1929, would have made that old guy’s day. Mark Gibbons Connemara Moonshine (2002)
Sweet Dead of Night Long after the house is quiet and everyone is sleeping, you stare at the ceiling, count the bell chimes from the campus clock tower a few blocks away. At three in the morning, switch engines chug & moan in the rail yard down by the river. There’s something lonely about this place, the familiar dark of your youth, when these sounds first haunted like a fever dream, turning in your own widening gyre. Consider the woman you truly believe you love, warm & lying beside you. She breathes deeply & twitches like the cat (who naps afternoons in your lap) engaged on a landscape you cannot fathom. Insomnia can be comforting sometimes, when you’re enthralled with the voice in your head, but tonight you can’t escape the silence, the feeling you’re alone, that time is slipping away. It’s not so strange that you like it here in the sweet dead of night – where shadows charm panic into assent. You wait for an inkling as to why you breathe & wonder, age & die. The muffled bangs of boxcars coupling & the half-hour bell tone warn . . . the day will soon demand you rise & pay attention to the bustle & noise of routine. Always there’s more danger in leaving the path. The road more traveled more likely leads home. You know, forward & back, the trail lies inside you – when you listen to the words you whisper into her hair. Mark Gibbons Connemara Moonshine (2002)