Rusted

I’ve never crawled up into a rail car before. I’ve seen them, touched them, and experienced their rusted-out hulks in various ways but never climbed up and became a part of their cargo. That I was afforded a chance to do so because of my insatiable curiosity is what’s at hand today.

Rail cars are boxes of various shapes and sizes on wheels. It seems elementary, but each box type has its use. Each box represents a work in progress, a potential seeking fulfillment in action, from hauling coal to cars, wood to washed gravel.

The five rail cars I encountered in Millers Falls were full of water, and the recent rains exacted furious cargo that belied the other principal uses of the car. In the volumetrically smaller cars, you saw old, rusted cans and barrels clinging to life amongst the wooden detritus of trestles and small saplings. The coal cars (or what I approximated to be such) were full of air and liquid, each drop falling from the various undercarriage doors used to drop their cargo into the fuel pits at their final destination. Here, all that was seen were rain-slicked ties, soaked and heady smelling from the continuous drops falling from the overlapping chute doors above.

You’d generally be hard-pressed to find the beauty in such industrial ugliness. For every welded seam of rusted steel, there were ladder rungs worn smooth by time and the hands and feet of the workers who traversed their grips. For every shiny wheel surface worn by the thousands of miles traveled, metal worn by the weight of friction and momentum, there’s another rusted-out hulk on a side channel, waiting to understand ‘ere it should be used again. These are relics of a slowly dying industry and motion here in America, and I fear we’ll lose our understanding of their usefulness long before we’re rid of their tired bodies.

This is Americana, in a sense. It’s endemic to a culture that progresses too fast for its good and begs the people in and around it to keep up. It’s an ideology of “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks,” a populism tied to polity and economics, dictating our policies, both foreign and domestic. It’s analogous to our state of being rusted and worn most days, searching for purpose in a society that values the individual, not the group. These five cars are linked by line and line, and they’re much more than the sum of their parts but separate; they’re easily dispensed with.

Ah, but one can hope they’ll find their redemption story and return to reality. A going-over with a sandblaster, a new coat of paint, patch welds in the corners that see a bit too much daylight, and a good lubrication of the bearings connecting wheels to rails and I’d argue you’d find them fit for the purpose intended. Perhaps they’re just meant to languish, unused and forgotten, on a spur of the rail system. But then again, who knows what, where, or how their arc will develop, how they’ll be brought to their eventual conclusion.

Sometimes, you’ve got to gamble on the what-ifs of life. You need to venture down to the rusted hulks of hobbies and experiences, things you’ve let languish in the environment of your memory and mind and free them to become what they should. Not everything requires exacting perfection; sometimes, our memories need to get hauled to the dump for what they contain. Regardless, there are still valuable moments, even with the rust and the damp, for us to come to grips with.

As you head into your weekend, perhaps it’s time to explore more. Drive the roads of memory and mist and discover what has been left unattended for a while. Maybe, in the midst of it all, you’ll find new joys in old places, realms of excitement and intention for the days ahead.

May it ever be so.