Tom & I are currently staying in the area where I grew up & on our first night here, a freight train went through town. We had arrived late; it was almost midnight before I was ready to tumble into bed. For me, travel days are always fraught with an overabundance of sensory input, so I was rather enjoying the utter silence of the neighborhood as I washed my face & brushed my teeth. Out of this stillness came, unexpectedly, the raucous call of the freight train’s horn. It conveyed its usual sense of urgency – Out of my way! I’m coming through! – but it also delivered to me an equally-unexpected pang of sadness.
This I quickly chalked up to nostalgia for I had grown up seeing freight trains & hearing the noises they make. When we were kids, my brother Paul & I loved to spot them running along the tracks that paralleled Highway 99, seeming to be in a tight race with the family car as we headed south to visit relatives or spend a couple of weeks at the beach. And anyway, weren’t the horns & whistles of trains, especially when heard in the dead of night, positively notorious for evoking feelings of poignancy?
Yet when another freight train came through the next night & its horn again left me vaguely disquieted, it was time to put some effort into discovering precisely what it was that this sound was awakening in me. So, much like the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – when a morsel of tea-soaked madeleine suffuses him with an exquisite sense of joy & he tries to find its source – I alternately concentrated on, & then deliberately distanced myself from, the sound of the horn. Sure enough, an image sprang to mind: It was of me, standing by the bedroom window of my first apartment, watching a freight train go by in the darkness & listening to the exigent call of its horn.
Back then, I was fresh out of college & not living under my parents’ roof for the first time in my life. Tracks ran near enough to the apartment building that I could see the trains, across some empty fields, from my window. At dawn or during the night, something in the sound of their horns gave voice to the conflicting emotions I always seemed to be experiencing, chief among them an intense longing for… I knew not what. Another memory floated up: From time to time, I was inclined to buy random art supplies for no other reason than that I just wanted to have them, even though in those days, despite my perennial love of art, the idea of making it couldn’t have been further from my mind.
Fast forward many years, several apartments & a couple of cities later: One day I went to an art supply store to buy a poster frame. There I was simultaneously overcome by a heartbreaking sadness & a wrenching desire to know how to use every item on every shelf in every aisle of that store, by which I mean, every tool & every brush, every piece of paper in every single tablet & the contents of every jar, bottle & tube. And the not knowing presented itself as both a physical & a spiritual pain. Shortly afterwards, I enrolled in art school.
If our deepest, most mysterious emotions seek a voice, then mine found it long ago in the sound of a freight train’s call. All it took was a few blasts of a horn the other night to reconnect me to memories of my lengthy & circuitous path to art-making. Now I feel lighter, as though this process has exorcised from my being the remnant of some old & unhelpful baggage. And this, in turn, has given me back an unequivocally happy memory of freight trains – that of Paul & me sharing the excitement of spying them as they rolled along beside us on our way to the beach for summer vacation.