Twice, train whistles saved my life. Two instances separated by a hemisphere and nearly a decade. Here is the first.
When I was 16 years old, I worked for a fast food chain. That summer, for reasons I don’t think I’ll ever understand, I was put in pseudo-charge of what we’d now call a food truck.
It was a white, unadorned trailer parked in a gravel parking lot along highway 36 in northeastern Missouri, about 20 miles/minutes east of my hometown. A temporary satellite restaurant with a limited menu. A manager’s idea to extend the service area? To test viability for opening a full-blown restaurant in that even more rural county with so few options?
I worked there alone. I served breakfast sandwiches and cinnamon raisin biscuits, burgers and curly fries, big chocolate-chip cookies and bigger sodas to blue-collar workers on the move.
One dark-early morning, I was driving the flat rural two-lane highway east to open the trailer for breakfast. I was heavily tired and more or less alone on the highway.
When I was startled by a train whistle, I opened my eyes and recognized that I’d fallen asleep at the wheel of my gray 1990 Hyundai Excel, my first car. In my groggy state of mind, a series of instant-fire thoughts:
“I must be sitting on the train tracks. Where’s the train?”
“Wait. That doesn’t make sense. The highway runs parallel to the train tracks.”
Then I noticed the light of the train on the tracks, true enough running in parallel, and I pieced together the story I’ve held for the 30-plus years since: “That guy saved my life.”
I no doubt had fallen asleep at the wheel. So what had that train engineer seen? The weaving of my headlights? A tragedy unfolding?
The blasting of the train whistle was for no other discernible reason. No road crossing ahead. Nothing but darkness enveloping the headlights of our two parallel vehicles for miles of farmland in all directions. It was a literal wake-up call. It was intentional.
It was the desperate attempt of one human doing all they could, the only possible thing they could, to save another. It was what I would have done. If for no other reason than to try to avoid witnessing a horror.
I will never know who that person was/is. They will never know who I was/am. In my sentimental soul, I wish I could know. Of course, I’d let them know my side of the story. I’d tell them about what and who has happened in the years since. Wife, kids and such. I’d thank them for the impact they’ve had but never known.
I can get lost in waxing philosophical about the decades of rippling effect their action has had on me and mine. Not to mention those who’ve otherwise been tangential in my life. I’ll spare you from further saccharine meanderings.
And I will spare you from the second story of a train whistle beckoning me to live. In short, it was my irresponsible fault. Too much soju in Seoul. A soldier numbing out, detached and unaware. Low if not lost. Not exactly the echo of the Johnny Cash classic, though I do like that song.
I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when
I used to play guitar and sing Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” to my baby boys, my two now-teenage sons that I would never have met without hearing those two trains in the right and necessary moments I did. Separated by years and a hemisphere.
The Train Whistles is #TwentyThree in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.