DID WE BEAT IT?
The wind is fast and dry and ceaseless in our ears and we have to shout to be heard. This is Pia’s second try at asking her question; her first attempt simply vanished into the roar.
“Think so,” I yell back. We walk a little ways from the service road until the trampled grass beneath us turns to a fawn-yellow hardpack dirt trail. Ahead of us lies the railroad. I look westward down its line, mistaking heat shimmers for diesel-electrics. I’m almost sure we beat it out here, but I didn’t think we’d beat it by this much. It’s been at least five minutes already since we got here.
“Do you see it?” Pia hollers. I shake my head. Not yet.
The plan was always to come here—the coordinates were on our itinerary—but our urgency is new. An hour ago I spotted a train keeping easy pace alongside us, both doing eighty-some miles per hour into the darkening afternoon. I’d set the cruise a bit higher, hoping to beat the train out here, maybe snag a photo of it passing by. About a dozen miles back we’d lost sight of the train as freeway and railroad diverged. All we can do right now is wait and keep looking west, pray that we beat it here.
About fifty yards beyond the tracks lies the tortured and sunken twistings of the Humboldt River, carrying snowmelt westward from its cold headwaters in the high mountain ranges by Elko. The river offers the only real, survivable path through this part of the Great Basin from Elko to its terminus near Lovelock. Overland caravans of California hopefuls kept the river at their flank in the 1840s as they rattled west, and its waters fed the ten-thousand-gallon tanks of the steam locomotives that came to range beside it. Now it glitters in its shallow canyon, its waters destined only for the alfalfa fields by Lovelock.
I walk closer to the tracks until I’m standing on the ballast, maybe five feet from the rails. I look left, right, left. Even though I can see clear down the tracks for miles and miles I’m oddly nervous about being any closer. Pia’s twenty yards behind me, setting up a tripod. The wind doesn’t stop. I take another small step yet closer to the rails, glancing left and right. I’m surprised at my paranoia; it’s unreasonable to fear being ambushed by a ten-thousand-ton train you can see coming from a mile away. And yet I’m still cautious, anxious. Perhaps, I think to myself, I ought to get on my hands and knees and press my ear to the rails, listening for the train like a saboteur in one of those old Westerns. That way I’d know if a train is really coming. And if I hear nothing, then I know it’s safe to be closer to the tracks. For a moment I’m almost tempted, but then I think about railroad pennies, how flat and glossy and smooth, Abe Lincoln’s minted face smeared into copper oblivion. I take a few quick steps backwards, look left and right again. Nothing.
At last I see it: yellow livery, a mile of cars behind it, another canary-yellow pusher locomotive keeping up the rear. Only it’s not coming down these tracks, it’s cutting east along a parallel line about a mile north of us, of the Humboldt. I zoom in as far as I can and take a picture: sky, range, train, river, and rail. A stack of east-west lines tracing across the frame.
Before I turn to get back in the car I walk up to the tracks again, this time fully prepared to step up onto the grade and stand between the rails. I don’t make it any closer than I had earlier. There’s something about railroads that makes them different from avenues and parkways and even interstates, something that jabs at my lizard brain and holds my amygdala to the fire. Even the lightest, smallest trains will plow through an eighteen-wheeler marooned on a level crossing without blinking; a mile-long freighter with full brakes applied takes a full mile to stop, likely more. I think what railroads embody is speed, ultrapure and dangerous. It’s a purity of velocity that an interstate can only ever approximate—this absolute, gut understanding that keeps me from stepping up onto the rails, an understanding that along its length things are eternally in motion, lethally unstoppable.
A body in motion seeks bodies at rest.