RAILROAD CROSSING

By Jill Dorsi

Our neighborhood was called Overlook Heights, and it was one of those cookie-cutter bright-and-shiny developments that appeared everywhere in the mid-1950’s. Amid the rural splendor of the Allegheny Mountains, it was a celebration of conformity and civilization, all newly-built houses, mostly brick, mostly ranch style or the more enviable “split-level,” and for all intents and purposes, mostly the same. Our parents were confident that they had created a haven that was safe, secure, and utterly American. The fathers went to work, the mothers cleaned the houses and cooked the meals, and we children were free to roam and explore. There were three streets than ran parallel to each other. On the south side, the roads offered steep inclines, that assured exhilarating sled rides in winter, challenging uphill bike rides in summer; and on the north side, all three streets converged with a quiet, winding country lane.

My younger brother, Sam, and I lived with our parents on Harris Street, the middle road, bordered by Lynn Street on one side and Curtain Street on the other. Although we often played with the neighborhood kids riding our bikes up and down the hill and drawing hopscotch squares in the middle of the street, we were also fascinated by the other end of Harris Street, where it met the country lane. Sometimes we would wander down that way to explore. The lane was paved with macadam and at first seemed like an ordinary road, but it soon entered an old and dark woods where it disintegrated into a rutted and rocky dirt road. The trees closed overhead, blocking the sun and creating a humid twilight.

No cars travelled there, and humans were never seen to enter, save for a few intrepid souls – namely Sam, me, and once in a while, one or two of the braver neighborhood kids. We would walk along the packed dirt until we were immersed in the gloom -- in other words not very far. Then we would lose our collective nerve and run back into the sunlit winding lane that led to Harris Street, where the other kids were riding bikes and playing hopscotch in the sunshine.

Sam and I worshipped Mark and Timmy. It was a natural and well-deserved adulation: they were older than us, courageous and capable, possibly in possession of super powers and certainly imbibed with wisdom and experience beyond their years (of 12 and 9 respectively). They lived with their mother, our mother’s sister, in another state, where their house was completely surrounded by woods, a forest that was even deeper and darker than the one at the edge of Harris Street. With them as our leaders, my brother and I entered the forest at the end of Harris Street with something close to confidence.

Mark and Timmy knew important secrets of the wild: the berries you could eat and the ones that would make you fall to the ground instantly writhing in pain until you pooped in your pants and died; how to identify the spiders that hid beneath rocks – especially the ones that would bite you with fangs filled with a venom that made you dance until your heart exploded and you pooped in your pants and died; and where you could find ancient Indian paths that led to magical places where treasure had been hidden two hundred years ago. In the company of our wise and brave cousins, my brother and I journeyed further down the dim wooded lane than ever before.

As we walked, it seemed like we were traveling down a dimly-lit corridor into another world. The air became heavy and dank. Mark walked at the head of the line, followed closely by Timmy. My brother and I brought up the rear, walking side by side.

I was wearing red shorts and a cotton tee shirt, and I was already sweaty and uncomfortable. Tiny little bugs, so small I could hardly see them, buzzed around my face and zoomed up my nose. I tried desperately to sneeze them out of my nostrils but nothing seemed to work. Then Mark warned us to be as quiet as possible. We needed to be on the look-out for wolves and mountain lions.

“They like to hide in dark rocky places like this,” he explained, his voice full of portent and the knowledge bred of experience, “especially up high, in the trees…But they can see that I’m the leader, so they’ll go for me first. Save yourselves, I can fight them off. ”

In an instant I forgot about the bugs flying up my nose. The sweat dripping from under my arms and the fact that I had to pee really bad became minor distractions. My heart beat hard and fast in my chest as I craned my neck to search the treetops for wolves and mountain lions, crouched and ready to spring. What would happen if Mark was attacked? How would we defend him? If Mark couldn’t beat them off, could Timmy? And really, truth be told, once they were done with Mark and Timmy, wouldn’t they turn on me and Sam, perceiving that we were younger and probably more tender?

Mark and Timmy just kept on walking. As I had known all along, they were fearless.

Suddenly, we were no longer in the woods. The forest receded up the banks on either side of us, and like a miracle, the dirt road was bathed in the sunshine. But before the brightness could kindle some confidence inside of me, something even more ominous threat presented itself. Not 100 yards away, a set of railroad tracks snaked across the road! Mark and Timmy approached the railroad crossing without hesitation, but Sam and I came to a dead stop.

“Come on,” said Timmy. “What are you waiting for?”

“Don’t stand still too long,” Mark added. “Mountain lions are attracted to easy prey.”

“We can’t,” I said. My throat was so dry I could hardly speak. Worse than mountain lions, more treacherous than spiders that made you dance until you pooped your pants and died, were the railroad tracks. My mother had told us, over and over again, never to cross the tracks or even to approach them. Speeding trains could appear out of nowhere, creating a powerful wind in their wake. And, she said, in dark tones, that wind would catch you up and suck you under the wheels of the locomotive. You wouldn’t even have time to poop in your pants. You would be dead and the consistency of hamburger meat before you knew what had happened. Death by speeding train was a non-negotiable and intractable fact of life.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Timmy impatiently. “Just walk across the tracks. Don’t be such a baby.”

“My mother,” I began tremulously. “She says we shouldn’t ever cross the tracks. She says a train will come and suck us under the wheels.” I looked fearfully down the tracks, convinced that a locomotive was about to appear without warning.

Mark scoffed. “Come on, your mother just made them up to scare you. That can’t happen. There’s no such thing as getting sucked under the wheels. ”

I instinctively backed farther away from the railroad crossing, my stomach churning, as Mark and Timmy moved farther down the road on the other side of the railroad tracks. The urge to pee intensified. Not believe what my mother had told us? Not obey her? The thought was as unsettling as crossing the tracks was terrifying, yet I could not let it go. Just how far from the tracks did you have to be to be safe from the sucking wind? Yet -- Mark and Timmy clearly knew everything – were they right about my mother?

“Are you coming or not?” yelled Timmy. They had rounded a bend in the road and were out of sight.

“Coming!” yelled Sam , all of a sudden, and before I could grab him and hold him back from certain death, he had bounded away from me, crossed the forbidden tracks, and disappeared around the bend.

I stood all by myself, the woods at my back, the treacherous tracks in front of me. The air was dense and electric. The little hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end.

“Are you waiting for me?” I called, trying to make my voice sound confident and strong, instead of shaky and scared, and not being particularly successful. My brother, younger than me, counted on me and would be waiting for me to appear.

“No,” yelled back Mark. “We don’t want to stay in one spot too long because the wolves will get our scent and start tracking us, we’re moving along. You’ll have to run to catch up or go back.”

I said a quick Hail –Mary-Full- of-Grace, sorry-God-for-all-my-sins prayer, topped it off with a hurried but very sincere Sign of the Cross ( just in case I died, I wanted to go to heaven), and dashed across the tracks.

Nothing happened. On the other side I was in one piece, still alive and breathing, not a mass of hamburger meat. On the other hand, my cousins and my brother were nowhere in sight.

“Wait for me!! I’m coming!” I yelled, and I began running as fast as I could, trying to keep a sharp eye on both sides of the road, where I was sure wolves and mountain lions licked their lips. “Wait!! Wait!!”

There was no response. I was suddenly certain that they had all been attacked by the wild animals, devoured by mountain lions and wolves, blood and pieces of legs and feet and arms and hair everywhere while giant dog-like creatures sniffed at the remains, their jowls dripping. I would find them when it was too late to help, and I would be left alone on this desolate road to find my own way back home, across the tracks and through the woods. I would have to be the one to bring the news to the grownups. I could already hear my mother blaming me for my brother’s tragic demise. “I told you never to cross those tracks,” she was saying. “And now look, your little brother has been eaten by a mountain lion. It’s all your fault.”

But when I rounded a bend in the road, I discovered all three of them, alive and in one piece. They were standing calmly in the forest, their backs to the road. No wild animals in sight. It took me a moment to understand what on earth they were doing. And then I understood everything. They were enjoying a bathroom break, standing casually in the forest at their leisure, comfortable and nonchalant. Sam, too. He was standing side by side with Mark and Timmy, as if in the few moments since I last saw him he had become their equal.

I had to pee myself, worse than ever, but I had absolutely no idea how I, a girl, was supposed to accomplish this in the woods. Surely I couldn’t pee standing up the way they did!! I was about to suffer a humiliation that topped all my fears of trains, sucking winds, and wild animals. I was about to wet my pants in front of Mark and Timmy.

I stood in the road with my legs crossed, looking at the backs of my amazing cousins, and my little brother. Never before had I understood the real difference between myself and my cousins. Super powers and magical knowledge had nothing to do with it. The difference was that they were boys, and I was a girl. And come to think of it, my brother was a boy too. Where did this leave me?

“I’m here,” I called to them. Timmy and my brother stayed where they were, not bothering to look around, but Mark, as the leader, came over to me.

“I have to pee,” I told him in a whisper, keeping my eyes on the ground.

“Okay,” he said, confidently, understanding the problem immediately, without being told. At 12, he really did seem to know everything.

“I’ll show you how girls pee in the woods. . . You bend all the way over, put your hands on the ground in front of you and then spread your legs out way far behind you.” He demonstrated a spread eagle position that involved balancing himself in a position that resembled a crooked, awkward bridge. “ Pull your pants all the way down around your ankles so that way none of the pee will get on you. Go on…go behind those bushes over there. You’re a girl so you can’t pee in front of us. . . Oh, and don’t put your hands near any rocks…. spiders are attracted to the smell of girls’ pee!!”

I did as I was told, and found a spot behind a bush. I pulled my red shorts all the way down around my ankles, along with my underpants, and positioned myself in an imitation of the awkward sprawl that Mark had demonstrated. Oh….it felt so good to pee. … but something was badly wrong. There was warm wet stuff on splashing onto my ankles and seeping into my socks and shorts. Somehow I had managed to choose a spot that placed my ankles, along with my shorts, socks, and panties, downhill from the stream of pee. I finished as quickly as I could and tried to dry everything off using some leaves that I tore from nearby bushes, but my socks and underpants were unpleasantly sticky and damp. I decided to ignore this and hurried back to the road to join the others.

Now we walked in a new formation. Mark remained, of course, in the lead, but Timmy and my brother travelled together, either abreast of Mark or just behind him. I brought up the rear, all by myself. I was too far from them to join in any conversation so I spent my time thinking. My stomach was curdled with guilt about dashing over the railroad tracks in blatant disobedience of my mother; but I had to acknowledge that no harm had come to me or to Sam in the process. I found myself considering what Mark had said about my mother inventing the story of being sucked under the wheels of the train. And what did that mean? Could it be that she was not the all-knowing person I trusted her to be ? My head spun with confusion.

Even more perplexing was the new relationship between my brother and Mark and Timmy. Something -- no, everything!! -- had changed in the moments after we had crossed the tracks. Was it because my brother had been brave enough to run across and joing Mark and Timmy while I hung back? Or was there some covert, existential brotherhood that existed between boys that had had to do with peeing in an upright position?

Mark walked confidently, using a big stick that he had found as a staff. Sam had picked up a stick from somewhere as well, and he wielded it with an ease and skill equal to Mark’s. Harris Street and its sunlit games of hopscotch had become some far-off remote world that I had forgotten how to find. Mark, Timmy, and my brother were no longer reassuring in their familiarity; they were different from me, foreign creatures, and I felt alone and desolate, left behind.

Suddenly the air around us lit up with a blinding flash, followed immediately by a crashing rumble of thunder. The wind came up around us, blowing the rain hard into our faces. On either side of the road the trees were whipped about, bent almost to the ground. There was no sign of human habitation anywhere – no houses, no barns, not even a garden shed that could offer shelter. Over and over again the lightning flashed and the thunder made the ground shake.

“What are we going to do?” I called, frantically wiping rain out of my eyes so I could see. “Where should we go?”

“Keep walking,” said Mark.

“But the lightning…” I began. “We have to go home!!”

“We are going home,” said Timmy.

“You’re a sissy,” said Sam.

Not long ago, I would have been able to conceal my fear and discomfort by acting kind and reassuring to my little brother, but now he had become independent of me, a full-fledged member of the Mark and Timmy club. Instead of looking to me for reassurance, he was acting like he was as brave and capable as Mark and Timmy themselves.

“We turn here,” said Mark with authority, and the three of them struck off from the road and began to walk across an open field. There was no path to follow, only Mark up ahead. I followed mutely. Through the rain and the approaching dusk, I could just make out large figures ahead of us in the field, figures that were four-legged and growing larger as we approached.

Mark held up his arm to signal a halt. “We are going to have to walk through that herd of cows,” he cautioned. “There is probably a bull, and he will attack. But don’t worry… he will see that I am the leader, so he will go for me.” Bulls, wolves, mountain lions – they were all the same, they knew who was important. It wasn’t me.

I was sobbing and talking to myself, mostly in a kind of a prayer. Hail Mary, full of grace, I’m sorry I crossed the railroad tracks, sorry I am sometimes mean to my brother, please let me get home…

“We’re almost there!” yelled Timmy, exuberantly. We were?

Then I saw that he was right. We had come to the meadow at the opposite end of Harris Street, the end of the street that boasted the steep sled-riding hill. It was true, we were almost home!! There was no path, just the clearing that Mark was making by beating back the underbrush with his stick. We stumbled through pricker bushes, fighting against weeds that wrapped around our ankles like wet, slimy fingers. We struggled over small rocks and rough ground, trying to avoid obstacles in the dim light. Mark and Timmy reached a small ravine, and I saw them jump, my brother at their heels. I fought to catch up, and made it to the gully’s edge. I could just make out the shapes of the three boys up ahead. They were walking quickly as if unhampered by underbrush, and they were talking excitedly. I scrambled down the steep ravine wall and made it to floor of the chasm.

Oh my god. Hail Mary, full of grace.

I was on the railroad tracks. Actually, walking on the railroad tracks. In fact, I was trapped on the railroad tracks, pinned in on each side by the walls of the little canyon.

I ran after the boys awkwardly, hanging onto my soaked red shorts so that they wouldn’t fall down. I listened hard for the sound of an approaching train through the rushing of the rain and thr grumbling of the thunder, and then I saw it-- coming straight for me -- the bright, unwavering head lamp of a speeding black locomotive!!

Mark, and Timmy, and Sam must have already jumped off to safety because I couldn’t see them anymore. I was completely alone in the dark. I tried desperately to escape the train, leaping onto the rocky wall, grasping blindly at branches, rocks, anything that I could use to pull myself out of the ravine and away from the impending gory death about to engulf me.. Something sunk sharp teeth into my wet, exposed thigh…a wolf? A spider? …Whatever it was, it held me fast. I couldn’t move, I could climb no further… there was no way out and this was the end…

“Are you coming?” yelled Timmy. His voice was not far away. I looked up. I was still alive. Where was the train? Timmy, Sam, and Mark were about two hundred yards away, standing on the solid macadam of Harris Street, where the railroad tracks crossed the road. They were bathed in the cabin light of a car. Their mother’s car. Not a train at all.

When we got home that night, Mark and Timmy and Sam regaled the grown-ups for over an hour about the adventure we had had while we drank hot chocolate at the kitchen table. The next day my mother took me to the doctor for a tetanus shot because I had impaled my thigh on a piece of rusty barbed wire in my frantic attempt to escape certain death. I didn’t ask her but I wondered if, by being so deeply impaled on the barbed wire, I would have been saved from being sucked under the wheels of the train. If, in fact, there had been a train. Or, for that matter, if in fact, you could be sucked under the wheels of a train at all.

The events of the night gave me a lot to think about and memories of it haunted me unceasingly. Every night, I would lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling and relive its the terror. I would feel the wind and the rain; I would see again the flashes of lightning that illuminated the cows, placid in their wet, stormy field. And then I would consider what I called “The Ultimate Moment.” Me, running from the train, trapped by the barbed wire, unable to move forward and awaiting annihilation. And then – like a sudden burst of bright light – an awareness of who I was --- a sense of me, being me, separate and apart from Mark and Timmy and Sam -- a creature unto myself, a girl, wandering alone, on an unfamiliar road, in an isolated landscape, crossing the railroad tracks.