John Labovitz

John Labovitz is the owner/publisher of the most inclusive index of electronic publications in the literary field that exists. He lives in Seattle and can be reached at johnl@meer.net.

Rail Lines

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On the rail-lines far from highways, we see the places as a traveler a century ago might have: across meadows and wooden fences, creeks, fields of horses and cattle. The closest, most prominent building we pass is the depot station, now boarded-up with paint peeling from walls, station name sign fading. This view of the backsides of the country is forgotten by tourist bureaus in this age of freeway exits and strip malls. Backdoors, forgotten cars, glimpses of Main Street a block away, a huge Aztec calendar painted on the back of a building slowly eaten by green ivy.

A boy sitting near me wears a blue and white-striped train engineer's cap. He calls out the names of trains and stations -- ``Flagstaff...Santa Fe... Amtrak... Orient Express...'' He holds his family's train tickets firmly and confidently. He is too young to know that he inherits the romance of the rails, and the motion of travel, and the myths made real, the magic spirits evoked when names of far-off places are uttered.

In East LA, our train passes furnace stacks, rusty fuel tanks, cranes, low-lying warehouses, cyclone fences, railroad yards. The browns, oranges, and grays of a million tons of iron and aluminum are trimmed with a rainbow of graffiti. Layers of spray paint on nearly every fence, wall, drainage ditch, tractor trailer, create a pulsing mass of letters, words, glyphs. I imagine this vernacular body to be alive, obviously sentient, growing larger to fill its environment, mutating to adjust its living story to the ever-changing present.

We pass long snakes of freight cars waiting on side-spurs. These cars, too, are covered with graffiti, and I imagine a novel written out on the side of boxcars across the country. The story has no beginning or end; you may start reading anywhere -- you can pick up the plot later. There are parts of the text that are slow, ancient, obscure, needing careful interpretation from under layers of rust. Simple, direct narratives push on across the dual lines of the midwestern plains, confident and moving fast. In the yards and stations across the land, where cars are linked and switched, voices join in clumps of explosive dialogue. Coming out of the yard, words are linked into sentences, whole chapters assembled, creaked into motion, and hauled and howl down the rails.