Watching Trains Rumble By While Sitting on a Bike

In which Gene Copeland sits on his bike and watches a massive train rumble by.

The racket was intense and he stepped off the pedals and the seat of the bike to straddle it, to lean on the handlebars and just watch the steel behemoth roll by; a steel segmented worm on wheels that on several passing cars carried massive steel sets of train wheels—a train carrying train wheels. What luck, Gene thought. He listened as above the rumble and bells of the railroad crossing signs, high-pitched squeaks would emanate from the wheels on the track. He wondered at those sounds; were they the sounds of the wheels pressing into the rails as the train rocked to and fro? He wondered, leaning on his bike’s handlebars, if he could get close enough to the train, lit only by the red flashing lights of the crossing and the sodium yellow of street lamps, if he could get close enough to the train to see where the high-pitched squeaks of metal-on-metal were coming from. He wondered if he could put his fingers between the wheels and the rail and what it would feel like to have them unrecoverably crushed?

He wondered, as he looked as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tipped and stamped like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he could feel a difference in the weight of cars that passed over gaps in the tracks. He could feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and slowly strobing red lights. All the sensations together felt heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would’ve looked by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to where the sound goes.