Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 27, 1992 TAG: 9201290301
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A 10-YEAR-OLD'S TRIP
LAST WEEK, when the nights were cold and still, I found I often went into the yard after dark just to see the way the full moon threw sharp black shadows against the frosty glass.Winter nights are so astonishingly quiet. I found myself listening for the same rustlings and chirpings that fill the summer dark. A foolish expectation. Nothing stirred or flapped or chirred in that cold grass.
But several times I heard something else that I didn't expect at all. I heard the throaty insistence of a train.
There are no train tracks in Floyd County; there never have been. The tracks nearest our home run through Shawsville and Elliston, a good 10 miles to the north and more than 1,200 feet lower. In the cold, last week, the sound from those trains followed Goose Creek's hollow right up into our yard.
I've never lived near trains. Never close enough, that is, to see or hear them passing daily. And so I've never lived with that homesick restlessness trains are said to engender in those who watch them fly by daily.
And yet last week, in my frostbitten moonlit front yard, I don't think I could have been more filled with mournful restlessness if I'd longed after trains all my life.
Away and away trains roll, hugging the earth, disappearing into the shadowy horizon. Almost anything could be over there, wherever that train is going. Almost everything that those who aren't on the train will never see.
I'm too young to have known the days when trains were the main mode of transportation. In fact, I remember only one trip on a train: Roanoke to Norfolk. My sister and I were barely old enough to travel alone, so it was a great adventure for us to set out to visit a friend who'd only recently moved away.
Sadly, though, I remember more about my traveling outfit than I remember about the train. It was a terribly chic, dark-blue halter dress, cut down from one of Mama's. Cut down enough, in fact, to have yards of material left over to make into a matching shawl.
I must have been a sight: a 10-year-old (certainly I wasn't any older than that) with my skinny little shoulders sticking out from under the edges of that shawl!
Or maybe I didn't wear the shawl. Because my only other clear memory of that trip involves the scratchiness of the upholstery.
I hadn't thought of that trip in years, until last week when it presented itself to me again in my silvery, cold front yard, brought to mind by a freight train sounding across 10 miles of the night's astonishing quiet. Suddenly, there was a memory. Even more astonishing, here in the dead white cold, than the train.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.