If a train came along, we
might just stand still and enjoy its passing.
That would not be very safe, of course, but I’d certainly hear it coming
and have time to get back to the bank where one end of the span was
anchored. I was wrong. As we peered down at the falls through the
spaces between the track ties, we couldn’t hear anything over the thundering
water. I realized my error too
late. I glanced up and saw the light on
the engine moving rapidly toward us.
The trestle was built only
wide enough for a train, and then a tiny bit more in case someone was dumb
enough to get caught out there when a mountain of steel came beating down the
tracks. And because the builders didn’t
have casual walkers in mind, there were no railings. We stood on an emergency walkway, two
parallel boards perhaps each ten inches wide, laid out in a string across the
ties and parallel to the tracks.
We quickly started back off
the trestle where we could step out of the way of the oncoming freight. I held on tightly to Dave’s shirt collar to
ensure he didn’t bolt ahead of me, slip off the narrow path of boards and
tumble over the edge of the trestle to the falls below. The train closed on us rapidly. We weren’t going to make it. Better to wait it out here, I quickly
concluded.
The two locomotives pulling
perhaps a hundred cars now charged on to the trestle and the structure began to
shake. That settled it. I sat us down and wrapped Dave in my arms and
legs as if I sat behind him on a toboggan.
Squeezed in between the edge of the trestle a few feet away and the
rails that would carry the train past us, we sat watching the behemoth fly up
to devour us.
When something that large
is about to miss you by inches, it appears to be coming right over the top of
you. I grabbed on to the edges of the
boards underneath us and held on for dear life, steeling myself against the
urge to jump up in a heedless panic, only to slip over the edge and fall end over end down into the water.
“We’re perfectly safe,
Dave,” I shouted . “Just keep your head and your hands down.”
And for good measure,
“Close your eyes!” But I left mine open
till the very end.
The blast of air as the
train passed over us … for that’s what it seemed to do … pressed the cheeks up
into our eyes and felt strong enough to blow us off the trestle. It might
indeed have done so if we had remained standing. The roar was terrifically loud, like a
thunder clap that went on and on.
Dorothy on her farm in Kansas would have recognized all the earmarks of being swept
up in a tornado. We held on to the
planks beneath us and with my legs I held on to this most precious bundle, my
son, for as long as it took. And it
seemed to take forever.
I may have imagined it, but
I thought I saw something coming toward us sticking out of the side of the
train.
I flopped down on my back
and forced his head down on my chest. He
resisted my effort and started back up.
“Oh, God,” I thought, “don’t bolt.”
He didn’t. He lay back.
I had been staring over at
the side of the trestle, making sure we didn’t somehow slip over that way. But now lying on our backs, I no longer could
gauge how close we might be to the edge.
Looking upward at the sky, all I could see were big puffy white clouds
painted on a bright blue canopy. A
loving God lived up there, I began to fervently hope, because now it was all up
to him. Other than gazing at his front
door, I could do nothing but wait this out.
And then it was over. The train was gone. Dave moved, but I held him down a few seconds
more.
“We’re going to stay here a
minute so we can recover,” I said, “before we get up and walk down the planks.”
“Hey, that was neat!” he said, turning his
head around and beaming up at me.
“We’re going to stay here a
minute,” I repeated, “so Dad can recover before he gets up and staggers down
the planks.”
I suppose I learned
something that day. So much for always
feeling in charge, for example. In fact, I look back on the incident as holding
signs of everything that would play out in my career as a father. No matter if future calamity were brought on
by stupidity or fate, I could not save my son from forces so overpowering that
they were beyond our control. I was
often able to do nothing but figuratively keep my arms around him in the coming
years when I stood with him as he grew to be a man. He would sometimes overrate his own
capabilities as I had, but he would own his own disappointments and grief. I would have nothing to arm him with but
hope, which was what he needed most from me.
He would face deadly disease and later the loss of the woman he loved,
his own precious bundle gone off to a heaven he didn’t believe in. Through his life, he would walk out on his
own train trestles and he would somehow survive. I may have sometimes been clueless as a
father, but I loved him through it all.
And that would be enough.
And honestly, as I told my
wife later, over and over, we were indeed safe.
We were not THAT close to the edge of the trestle and the train
derailing on top of us had no more possibility of happening than it might the
next time I waited for a passing train while I sat in my car at the
crossing. Still it was a dumb stunt on
my part and I can’t really object when my son today introduces me as “my father
… the man who tried to kill me … several times.”
And I won’t forget that
day, as I sat up and looked around at the beautifully colored leaves of fall,
and then down at the water raging beneath the trestle. I no longer felt like a great explorer, but
it was good to be alive. In a few
minutes we walked off the trestle, my legsmore than a little wobbly.
“Wait’ll Mom hears about
this!” Dave said gleefully.
I could hardly wait.
copyright David Griffin,
2010
The Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet, South Carolina
ave@windsweptpress.com
