One bright Saturday spring morning full of bird songs and lawn mowers humming, the train never made it to town.
I’d been listening to the breeze in the lilacs and the distant rumblings of tons of steel storming along the horizon.
All of a sudden the whole countryside was jarred by a terrible by a terrible screeching, banging and grinding as if the whole earth had slipped off its axis. Big news and lots of rumors were on the loose.
We raced to the scene north of town in my uncle Bill’s car. On the way he lectured me on the seriousness of this once-in-a-lifetime event.
What an amazing sight! Freight cars were torn, tangled and piled upside down all over the twisted tracks, like a giant scrabble game ended in a tantrum. Dad took movies of Uncle Bill and me standing around looking real serious and waving at the camera, with the train wreck sprawled across the background.
He got some good action pictures of railroad men stalking back and forth shaking their scowling heads. They were congregating around some small footprints beside two rusty railroad spikes jammed in a switchbox. Meanwhile, I kept an eye out for injured hobos.
A train crew brought in a big diesel wrecker machine on rails, and went to work cleaning up. We hurried home to eat, and raced back to watch and take more movies. The wreck was disappearing fast.
The mangled tracks were replaced. The derailed, ripped and smashed freight cars were lifted back on track and refitted with earth-stained steel wheels that still rolled. Total wrecks were loaded on flat freight cars to be hauled away.
Late Sunday, the tired crew and salvaged train pulled creaking slowly through town without a spark. The great train wreck weekend of early summer 1959 was history.
Three railroad detectives, two county sheriffs, state police officers and a village constable caught up with one scared 10-year-old two weeks later. He made the mistake of returning to the scene of the wreck and trying to recreate the crime.
It was front-page news when he confessed. He also spilled the names of some friends. No identities, including his were ever printed or officially released, but it didn’t matter. By that time everybody knew who they were anyway.
This month’s poem was written by Taelen Thomas who was an early Stone Circle regular. He now lives in Carmel, California and does a lot of one-man literary theater. Two of my favorite characters he portrays are Jack London and John Steinbeck.
Since he no longer attends Stone Circle, Taelen has given me permission to use his poetry. I perform five of them, and “Hobo” is a crowd favorite.
When I was a little boy both my grandparents lived near the Ann Arbor Railroad. If I was visiting and heard a train whistle I’d run for the tracks to watch the diesel locomotives and freight cars rumble by.
Once, standing there I saw a hobo. Grandpa Wooten had actually worked on the railroad as a young man, and used to tell me stories about meeting famous hobos. Seeing that hobo was like seeing a rock ‘n’ roll star.