I had written and entire story to go with this image. Night dark and thick I wanted words to capture the sense and feel of a late summer evening in Michigan. After I was done drafting but before I had saved the computer involved felt the need to update some weird and little used piece of software. Without my consent it restarted. I am not sure if the tale was lost. Back I went to drafting. Thus here a truncated, I need to get something up, version.
Summer of 1978 was an old time Michigan summer. It was hot in parts, muggy in parts but the evenings were usually bearable. August on the other hand was a real scorcher and the nights brought little relief. The air after dark stayed humid, stayed steamy. At one o’ clock in the a.m. the air looked was thick, pregnant with moisture but not ready to give it up and let go a good rain. You could feel the air as you took each breath. Back then my lungs worked so it was just annoying. Now air like that would hurt me.
During that August I was finishing up my second real job. In the third week of August I would be headed off to law school. Thus I would need to be ending my work because the school was 90 miles away. I was something akin to an assistant manager at a convenience/liquor store.
In the Lansing Michigan area there is a chain of stores called Quality Dairy. When I worked there these were the things that were most important in our inventory, cigarettes (for most of our customers), cheap hard liquor and I mean stuff like Schenley’s for the M.S.U. physical plant workers on night shift lunch, for the passing train crews (yeah, really), coffee for the cops, pornography (for the college students), milk packaged in half gallon bags for families and donuts for everyone. Most of our business was repeat and most of customers came in on a set schedule.
We had one guy that looked like John Lennon (under our breaths we even called him John Lennon) who came in every single night and bought two quarts of Budweiser and a pack of Zig Zag rolling papers. He was the maintenance guy at one of the local malls. He would get to the store about 10:30 p.m. and his whole visit would take up a minute and forty five seconds, he always had exact change. Physical plant guys were the same way. The only lingerers were the cops and they wanted to talk to the female clerks, especially if they were cute at all or were of ample bosom.
On normal weekday nights we would have a crew of three on until about 11 p.m. Sometimes you would let the third person go at 10:30 if the night was really light. The only mandatory deal for that poor apron clad counter rat to go was that he or she had to let the other two minimum wage slaves go have a cigarette before departing. It was the rule.
The store where I worked sat at what was then the end of Trowbridge Road, on the south side of the street. Behind the store were two railroad tracks. One of which belonged the Grand Trunk line (the American face of Canadian National). The other belonged to the Chessie system. The back of the store was separated from the tracks by a macadam drive that was one and ¼ car width wide and by a pile of abandoned railroad ties. When you went out for that cigarette (and at the time I smoked Newport in case you wondered) you leaned against the building with one foot propping you up or you sat on the dead railroad ties. Sometimes after a shift you would take a six pack and sit on the ties and finish them off with you co-working clerk. This had to be done cautiously though because East Lansing frowned on open intoxicants. Falstaff beer had small bottles which were easily hidden among the abandoned railroads ties if an ELPD squad car swept by on a security check.
No matter where you stood sucking on that cancer stick if a train came by the world changed. You quit talking in mid-sentence and you just waiting for the train to pass before you starting up the conversation again at exactly the word where you left off. When a freight passed by the light changed. There was a flat roofed one story utilitarian Amtrak station on the other side of the tracks. When those 100 cars long conveys of auto carriers went by the light from the passenger station flickered between the cars, giving the effect of an old time movie. The air was sucked from space all around. As I have said it was very, very muggly and cigarette smoke would normally just hang there in a cloud around you. But when a train came back there was a vacuum formed breeze and the smoke went lighting fast in the same direction the train did.
One night as I stood there with my cohort Chris smoking cigarettes and talking about porn and pussy, hey we were college students and our topics were limited. Okay we might have been talking about what a useless President Gerald Ford was but it was unlikely. On one night and one night only Chris began talking about growing up in a house that backed up to the Grand Trunk line that rolled through Royal Oak on its way to Pontiac. He talked about how he and his buddies we put shit on the tracks to watch it get smashed. Light bulbs, eggs, what ever small pieces of trash that they could find, they all got placed there to be run over by hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and freight. It was clear that they didn’t do anything that would derail a train but the crush, crush, crushing of debris was stupid stuff bored kids did. Hell as he told me this I could hear Bob Seger singing Beautiful Loser in the back of my head.
That night Chris suggested, as we heard a fairly high speed freight approaching, that we put a penny on the track. Ah what the hell I thought a penny could cause any damage. I pulled an old Lincoln out of my jeans and ran over and laid it on the track. Down the track the train was clearly visible. The train blew its whistle long as it roared toward the Harrison Road crossing coming from the west. Chris and I stood erect at the very edge of the macadam maybe ten feet from where the train was passing. At that closeness you body could viscerally feel the tug of the wind that was being sucked in to fill the space the train was emptying of all air. The train roared and clanged and pounded in a rhythm that was one with the rhythm of Americas industrial might of the time. This train and the 20 or more trains like it meant we were making stuff back in the day.
And then the noise was done and the sounds faded into the distance. Our cigarette break was over a good four minutes earlier but Chris and I didn’t care. Let that poor bastard at the counter tap his watch, we would get there when we got there. Quickly after the train was gone we scrambled around the ties and scoured the tracks looking for Mr. Lincoln. And there he was flatter than a pancake lying on a tie a couple down from where I had placed him. He was kinda shinned up too by the pounding he had taking.
Does it get more Americana than this? At the time it meant nothing to me but that night standing by the tracks I was painting my own Edward Hopper painting of an America that is no more. I will carry that mental canvas with me to the grave.
