Letters from the Front John Pezaris, Pasadena, California, 12 June 1995. PHANTOM TRAINS This letter was originally sent to my dear friend Susan Gardner. When I was growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, late at night, you could hear the train from my bedroom, especially during the summer when the windows would be left open against the heat. The train had a long, soulful whistle that you could hear for miles and miles through the hills of the Mystic Valley. When it got to the stations nearest my house, you just might hear the rhythmic wheels on the tracks, if the wind was blowing in the right direction. Years later, my office at MIT was next to a freight line, and every so often, the building shook from the train cars going by. Although I didn't realize it at the time, it felt like a small earthquake. Where before the train whistle was distant and peaceful, it was now loud and insistent. My apartment in Cambridge, not too far away, was, oddly, too removed to ever hear the trains. Perhaps it was because they didn't run at night; perhaps it was because they didn't sound their whistles after dark; perhaps the apartment was just too loud from the incessant murmur of the city. Now that I live in Pasadena, Land of the Automobile, I miss the train. The rest of our nation might associate trains with the vast midwest, or perhaps great train destination cities like Chicago, Philadelphia or New York, but for me they are a distinctly New England phenomenon. Late one night, a few weeks ago, I'd returned home from an evening out with friends. The very busy street I live on had fallen silent as all of the cars in this bedroom community were in their carports, or behind their gate-protected subterranian garages. And I heard a whistle in the distance. You hear a lot of unusual sounds, living on a very busy street: motorcycles by the dozen, busses, hot-rodded cars, skateboards on the sidewalk (took a while to identify that sound), turbodiesel trucks, and, daily, emergency vehicles. This whistle was none of these. It repeated. Slow to build, long, beckoning, and distant. I smiled. It brought back full-force the security of my childhood; lying in a dark room, ciccidas chirping, and the hot summer air carrying that plaintive sound. Maybe Pasadena isn't that bad, I thought, it does have almost everything, even childhood memories, you just have to look a little harder than most places. And then I thought: but where are there any train tracks nearby? This is a car-domniated town. It took some time, but I remembered that in the center of Pasadena, there are some tracks near one of my favorite watering holes. It's about a mile away, just far enough to give a train whistle it's characteristic sound as it echos off the hills and mountains. A few days later, I was walking in downtown Pasadena. There are indeed train tracks there. Or were. There's a very nice station, abandoned. Where the tracks cross the road, they remain, but elsewhere, the long steel rails have been removed, the wooden ties with them, a dead-straight bed of ballast left to mark their place. And this was not done recently. The station has not been habited for years, the streetlights overhead are rusted and some have fallen, the parking lots are overgrown. It looks like something that belongs in a Western ghost town, not a thriving city of 100,000. Phatoms haunting me? Maybe. I hope someday to find that there's another set of tracks on the other side of town. - pz. Next Letter, Start Again Copyright (C) 1995, J. S. Pezaris, All Rights Reserved.