World runs on steel and rubber wheels

David Sherman

We’re in our little motel room off Ontario’s Highway 7. It’s 3 a.m. and we’re listening to a freight train rattle by. The familiar sound is comforting.

There is nobility in the shaking of a long line of box cars, flat cars, chemical cars, perfection in the endless parallel lines of steel.

It’s been steadfast, a constant that stretches from one end of my life to the other. Sculpted bullet trains move anonymous people at speed in foreign lands, but freight trains are our heritage, stuck on the slow road, clanking and howling reassurance.

World might be going to hell, news nauseating, prices stunning, but trains tell us things are moving. Life continues, a link to simpler times of our childhood. Long ago, in cottage country, we played on tracks -- a small lake in front of the house, a railroad bed behind us, trains cut through the pines and maples where we hiked to pick blueberries.

Today the rails are gone or buried under asphalt. Now bike paths or “aerobic corridors” crowded with peddlers and hikers and dogs. Poop is scooped but the ground does not shake, the imagination not provoked.

In the city, trains rolled by on the hill out our back door. We’d count the cars. Wave to the engineer. Maybe he’d wave back. We’d resume tobogganing in its wake, happier. A black stream of noxious black exhaust was exotic, slowly disappearing as did the line of cars. A ghost.

Flat cars with stacks of shiny factory-fresh automobiles. logs, heavy equipment. Flat cars with who knew what under canvas. Vented cars of cattle or pigs. Box cars full of no idea what. Maybe they were limousines of the itinerant.

But it proved lives were being lived, stoked the imagination and begged who and where.

They’re still rolling today, longer and mightier and more populous, though they’ve been pushed out of sight, today more a nuisance than a symbol of romance.

Latest count says about 38,000 locomotives and about 1.5 million freight cars roam the continent. Trains can now be as long as four miles, something to wonder as you sit at a level crossing, red lights flashing, warning bells ringing. Or lying in bed, far from home, hearing it roll through the night. Life in the dark.

I’m in a cookie-cutter highway hotel in Ontario. An ugly place to spend the night between departure and arrival. It’s late night, no place to eat but a new-fangled truck stop beside the hotel, accessible by the four-lane I’ll sleep beside. Most everyone in this time zone is in bed. Or maybe under a cardboard box.

A hotel maintenance man had visited to adjust something and tells how the joint housed the addicted and homeless during the pandemic. He doesn’t know what happened to his town, nothing more than a pinpoint on the map and is shaking his head when he leaves. His hometown was riddled with drugs and poverty. What happened?

The truck stop is not a "Hi, I'm Cindy, what can I get you tonight?" kind of place. It’s four small boxes stuck together, each with their own glass door opening on different Canadian cuisines, save for an abandoned cubicle of failed ambition. A collection of something like Tim Horton’s, Harvey’s, Subway, staffed by indifferent, underpaid adults and teens with acne.

In the football-field-size parking lot cozied up to the highway, a dozen or so 18-wheelers rumble, their orange, red, amber running lights like fantastic, angry fireflies. Cars keep whipping by in both directions, just flying lights.

There are no tables. I and my sandwich walk through the lot of smoking trucks and I prop myself against the fence designed to keep inebriates and suicidal from walking through the parking lot and becoming roadkill.

The burger was served instantly and tastes mostly of yellow mustard, onion and salt.

Trucks are like boxers or football players loading up on oxygen before mixing it up. Drivers are in their cabs, hooked up to 80,000 lbs or four tons of truck, trailer and cargo.

Some are lit. Others, despite the exterior light show, are dark, the AC running while these men and women of legend and song are sleeping or just resting their eyes.

Like the trains, they’re alive. No less dramatic with their anxious over-sized engines, stretched cargo and wheels the height of my car.

The country’s alive and moving and seemingly working. For the long-haul trucker and the railroad engineer work days are 12-14 hours. Stimulants use among truckers is also legend. They roll through the country day and night, snow and hail, rain and hurricane.

I chew the ersatz burger transfixed by the energy of it all, trucks and trains and automobiles, an orchestra of machines.

Everywhere else people sleep and wear the weight of the world or have decided they’ll smile away their impotency because it beats feeling like shit all the time.

But in the middle of the night, next to this crossroad and perhaps thousands of others, there’s vitality, efficiency, determination. And my own naivety. It seems life, at least for the time it takes to eat the mystery burger, is moving. The world is working. The rattle of the trains, the rumbling light show of cabs and trailers and highway are proof.

In the morning, I throw my bag in the car and join the parade on the highway.

As Dylan wrote, the night was indeed brighter than the day.