The Midwest
The Lost Years
I am not sure how we ended up in Elkhart Indiana. We were trying to ride a freight train to Florida, but somehow in Harrisburg we had hopped the wrong train.
It had been freezing in Harrisburg. There were no open freights and we were getting desperate so we decided to ride one of the flat cars that carries semi trailers.
We crawled up where there are four tires surrounding us and the three of us huddled under our sleeping bags.
It was the coldest I have ever been. We rode all night huddled together with the three bags on top. It was morning when we realized that we were moving thru Mid America - not Florida.
The Englishman who called everyone “squire”, the carnival guy who changed his name about once a day and me.
We raided the McDonald’s dumpster after closing time and scored a huge bag of tossed out product. But on our way back to the Elkhart yard the bull stopped us in his four wheel drive and said he didn’t mind if we caught a car out in the morning but to not sleep under the cars. Yea, that sounds like good advise.
The next morning we shopped around and found the ELIN going to Indianapolis. The conductor allowed us to ride in a unit that was on the tail end of the line. He showed us the water and told us when they changed crews in the night to say we were a section crew catching a ride.
When the train stopped the next day to do something a new conductor came back and gave us $10.00 and reminded us that Jesus would always help us in times of need. That is a bit of knowledge with which I was very familiar and have often relied on miracles of faith like someone would depend on the electricity coming into their home.
This conductor like every worker we encountered on the rail lines was friendly, kind and helpful. It was if we were all engaged in an active conspiracy - trying desperately to keep an American legend alive.
July 2012
Sometimes I have trouble remembering the names of my four wives. I can always call them up but they are not on the tip of my tongue. I wonder if that is odd?
Recently some business transactions were to require an upper level background check on myself and others to proceed. I just laughed at them. As if profit would motivate me to open my family to those very old and deep wounds.
My daughter and her sons know nothing of the problems I faced as a young man, and I will do everything on earth to prevent that from happening.
She was raised away from the insanity that her mother and I lived in during the 60s and early 70s, went to the Air Force and is a software executive. My grandsons play college ball and live a remarkably normal life. It is the greatest blessing of my troubled life.
Until recently I had a firewall between the trauma of those days and my present incarnation. Two lives never to be connected.
But this thing with time is bothering me. How is it all these vignettes are penetrating that fire wall and playing in my mind’s theater over and over.
It is now leaking into my dreams as well.