Playing on the Tracks

I mentioned yesterday that I grew up in a house near the railroad tracks. It features prominently in my family history. My great grandfather made more money from his cattle off of the train company than he did at market. Apparently, if the train hit one of your cattle, the owners had to pay fair market price for the animal. That is, as long as you weren't around at the time of the impact. I'm guessing that little caveat was intended to prevent guys from driving their herd onto the tracks whenever the train came around. My grandfather was actually trained to duck into the woods whenever he heard the train coming so he wouldn't be seen if the train hit one of the cows. I don't think he was supposed to drive them onto the tracks. Granddaddy couldn't bring himself to put down a bull that broke its leg once and actually spent the time and money on cattle rehab for the brute. I just can't see the man who put his bull in a sling and cried at the deaths of his dogs actually driving the cattle onto the tracks to be hit.

That being said, he didn't try to drive them off either.

I'm sure there were practical reasons for this. Cattle aren't known for their quick response time and if he'd gotten caught up in a stampede of cattle spooked by the locomotive, it wouldn't have been pretty, but after the stories of my great-grandfather, I'm not so sure that he wasn't happy not to have to take his bovines anywhere to get his money.

Of course those tracks were still there when I was a child and still only about 200 yards from our front door. I remember distinctly my father leading my sister and I down the tracks for excursions into different parts of the woods that surrounded our home and teaching us safety about walking on the tracks. I even remember him snatching up my little sister as we ran down the tracks once when we were at a stretch of the tracks surrounded by swamp on either side when a train came into view. I think he was over cautious with that because we made it back to the house even before the train crossed our driveway, but I could see why. It may have been difficult to explain to my mom why he left my 6-year-old sister behind to defend herself against the oncoming train.

Knowing my sister, she very well may have won that fight. More on that later.

Our father having led us down the tracks on more than one occasion and having never issued any direct order not to play on the tracks by ourself (or at least not any that we remembered), we spent tons of our free time on the tracks. It made for an easy path to more interesting parts of our world and we lived miles from the nearest children our age. We were both of above average intelligence and knew which parts were safe to lollygag on and which should only be used as a route to another place. We also knew that when you heard the rumble to get off the tracks and into the woods or out far enough in the field that things couldn't get thrown off the tacks and hit you.

I'm not really sure my parents ever realized just how far down the tracks we went. There was a stream about a quarter mile down the tracks that we used to go down and play around. I knew my parents had to know something was going on from our growing collection of rusted railroad spikes and antique glass power line insulators. You only found those around the tracks.

We also used to spend a lot of times wandering the woods. We'd follow game trails and pop out a mile away from our house on the dirt road that passed behind our property. We'd done this for years before my parents started becoming protective and warned us (with me already being in middle school) not to wander so far that we could hear our mom calling for us. My aunts used to dread watching my sister and me because we'd become so accustomed to wandering that we'd take off at the first turned back and dissapear into the woods and fields with nothing more than our dog and maybe the wagon. We never understood what the big deal was when we inevitably wandered back to the house. Mama and Daddy never cared, why should they.

For some reason, I'm not sure that K, or my parents even, are going to be keen on E taking up the same childhood hobbies.