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.
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.”
On that afternoon 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 legs more 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
