By Rail

By Rail

     by D.O.U. Railmer 

Jordan walked along the railway tracks

marvelling at the loud blackbirds and frogs in the stillness of Wednesday morning, 7 AM. His wife had left the car at home because she was commuting with another member of her carpool and he could have driven if he’d wanted. Recently he had been walking instead of taking the bus or the car. It felt so good to go for miles by foot and feel tired, he said to himself as he began to feel that exhaustion. And that this too would change and soon he would be in good shape. 

     He passed a number of obstacles peculiar to the railway. He wouldn’t have seen them had he gone his usual route. First he’d crossed the railway bridge 100 yards along the way. He’d been surprised at its narrowness, about the way the two steel rails carried themselves down it’s centre, and that beside these there was only 2 feet of space before the drop into the dry riverbed. He was surprised too at the depth of the drop. It left him feeling silly, feeling it’s vertigo. He felt surprised by the length of the bridge once he was on it. From a little distance it had seemed like a one or two minute crossing. Once on it he knew that if the train appeared at the bend behind him he would have a hard time making it across in time. He’d have to run and even then likely it would be too late. Next he noticed the houses with their variety of backyard configurations against the tracks. A few sections had alleys that came down from the street and ended up right next to the railway ditch for maybe 10 houses. The next 10 or 20 houses had a high fence separating them from the track and its dynamics. 

     “If hobos come along there they will be deterred by this fence ,” he could hear the planners of that block thinking. Next came wire fencing for 10 or so houses, then no fences as if a certain group of families wanted to be able to see the trains pass. Then there was a group of houses with trees at the back, and one group with a roll of 12 foot caragana. After that came the perimeter and it’s tunnel of concrete through which the train barrelled. He felt some apprehension in case hobos might be still sleeping there under the trestle but there were none. Only paint-can graffiti met his eyes. The Dancer in glaring silver paint. Holmi and the Jesuits. Fuck Mia. Metal Stomach. Bush Spaz.

     But then he was through that section and into the next field of uncertainties: a Pool grain elevator, a Traza Tex gyprock factory with a huge parking lot cum loading area. Stacks of gyprock sheets, some almost tumbling as if they’d been there a long time waiting for delivery, then maybe getting rained on through their deteriorating plastic coverings.  Blue and white gyprock bundles, red and white ones, green and white. A 3 ton truck with one of its front wheels off pushed against the fencing as if it had once been worked on there, as if it once was still a possibility as a delivery unit until something happened—maybe an upturn in the company’s fortunes—made it unnecessary to fix it and it was left where it was, an obstacle for the yard maintenance guys to mow around and under. After that he came to a long row of high fencing made of planks, 2 x 10, 10 feet high with old fashioned trees behind them of a kind that no one had planted on the prairies for the last 50 years. The fence went on for a quarter-mile or so. Behind it he saw a structure rising quite high, maybe 15 feet, blue brick of a recent fashion, the sort used by contractors on newer buildings instead of the old-fashioned bricks of brown and beige. Trees hid most of this building’s back wall, which seemed to go on too long for his sense of proportion. It was a too-long building. Maybe it was a factory of some sort, he thought. Or a set of offices or a mini mall. But he knew the front of that street and he knew there was no mini mall there. 

     Then he remembered. It was a storage shed where people could drop off their belongings and leave them there as long as they wanted and pay only a small holding fee each month. Sentinel Self Storage he saw then almost immediately in a space where they’d left off planting trees on purpose so that the sign would show up well. But planting trees to show up well to the train going by? They just miscalculated, he thought, in the early stages of the design when they couldn’t imagine all the problems or effects of the blueprint plans. Weird, he thought too, how expensive the façade here at the back. They put out a lot of money to make this weird area of such rich materials. The front, he remembered now was of ordinary stucco with each dozen feet or so another garage door. He’d been inside there once picking up a load of belongings for some friends. The sheds were about 20 x 10 inside, dark, unlit, dozens of them. He’d marveled at the sheer number of stalls stretching out way past the one they were at. What if people deposited their belongings and then died and their children were too wealthy to bother to come for them, or their children were not their children, or some other oddity kept anyone from finding these possessions? What if the stalls were mainly empty and the proprietor was barely making enough to keep the mortgage alive? These thoughts had come to him then and he had liked the Kafka sense of the storage sheds’ improbability as a functional business. As a place where the predictable happened.