Reserve Proof
There is a moment here that few ever come to realize---
A proverbial two fingers of ‘reserve proof’ poured into a crystal tumbler, there to be savored sip by sip in just reward---
An equilibrium of sorts in the push and the pull of everyday, a stasis in the corporate heartbeat which those who count beans and stare at computer screens in Fort Worth and Omaha and Jacksonville are perhaps unknowingly deprived of---
Moments that never register as a spike on a graph or spreadsheet or a figure on a quarterly earnings report, and one in which those poor souls sheltered in the glass and concrete facades of Wall Street are seemingly, and hopefully, oblivious to.
They are jealously reserved for those hearty individuals who laced up boots and learned a skill or trade or craft, one that doesn’t involve the tying of a Windsor Knot around the neck every morning and enduring a commute to a cubicle or corner office, there to lash it as a marionette to various rungs about a corporate ladder.
Yet, they are instants of brevity that rarely, if ever, convert to dollars and cents on a direct deposit slip that arrives in the mailbox every other week.
They are as a fringe benefit that only the worthy are afforded, those sage and seasoned souls who earned their credentials in the extremes of physics and metallurgy, and the temperature and other elemental challenges that Mother Nature seemed fit to bestow upon their existence in a 24-7-365 fashion.
When, at midnight, a knuckle lets go and gladhands separate on a grade, and the curses emanating from the locomotive cab are as angry as the lightning slashing from the darkened sky, with sheets of rain arriving in chapter-and-verse proportions straight from the pages of Genesis, threatening to wash from the land all those who dare venture into it---
Someone still has to go out and replace the damn thing.
These character-building moments are steeped well in tradition, their seeds first planted in the Welsh soils of Penydarren, there to be watered fully with saturated steam at the hand of a Cornish fellow by the name of Richard Trevithick.
Water is powerful, and useful, and ancient---
And in its antiquity, it is patient.
That which has fallen upon the geologic ramparts that schism the land from north to south, needs some place to go.
For eons it has sought the seas, and in an effort to reach them it has flowed from headwaters in the Sawatch Range and the Sangre de Cristos, scouring prehistoric and ever-changing channels across the land in a seemingly random and meandering fashion.
The Arkansas and the Cimarron and the Canadian Rivers, along with their local tributaries and a thousand other flows, have removed sediments from the land since the Laramide orogeny, 80 million years ago, and faithfully deposited them into the oceans, leaving the High Plains of today’s continental United States anything but flat.
Water, perhaps more than any other natural element, has been the bane of railroad builders and operators for more than two centuries. It has created rivers to bridge, canyons to blast rights-of-way out of, and then it has sent raging torrents down to destroy both; yet without it, Trevithick’s contraption would remain as fanciful as anything Jules Verne could imagine.
And though the builders of the Southern Kansas Railway had no gorges to contend with, they were nonetheless saddled with the watersheds that rippled the land across Indian Territory and all the way to the bluffs of the Llano Estacado over Texas way.
Here, in the cool and colorful and splendorous moments that precede the dawn of an April morning, is evidence of such.
While the eastbound grade up out of the valley of Wolf Creek is by no means as mentionable as that which tunnels under Raton, it is still held in respect by those who throttle their charges along BNSF’s Panhandle Subdivision.
Our crew aboard an old Dash-9 has reached a brief interlude, an over-the-hump equilibrium of sorts on the great curve at Gerlach, Oklahoma. Just moments before, our hogger set his units for dynamic braking, and trumpeted for the South County Road 198 grade crossing as he coaxed 6,000 tons and just as many feet of train up from Shattuck, in the process rolling over names like Buzzard Creek and Boggy Creek, and running along the margin of Sand Creek, there to push over the top of the grade and have the windshield view filled with this.
In days long passed, when conductors and engineers were revered and respected and were the absolute authorities over their realms---
When brass was polished and boiler jackets shined and lace curtains could be found in the cab and caboose alike---
Coffee brewed on a potbelly stove or was kept hot in a mason jar placed strategically against the locomotive backhead, there to be shared in drowsy moments along a run that began in Amarillo sometime after midnight.
Today, the waycars are long gone and backheads have morphed into digital control consoles, but coffee is still the nemesis of fatigue, with fresh aromas filling the cab as the hot contents of a stainless-steel thermos bottle are poured into a travel mug---
A Rule G-compliant version of ‘reserve proof’ not quite hot enough to burn the tongue with the first sip, but just right.
And in that savoring, there is only the rumble of an FDL behind the bulkhead, and the whine of dynamics as the aged GE performs as advertised.
Nothing else.
No words to spoil the moment.
Only a brief intermission when all the world is right.
A stasis between the push and the pull of life.
While the tie knotters are still fully in slumber, the fortunate take their pleasure in hot coffee and a gaze out over the valley of the North Canadian River, and there before them, as an ornament dangling on the invisible bough of orbital gravity---
The last dying sliver of a crescent moon---
Faint and struggling in the eastern sky, trapped between the receding colors of night and the luminance of an emerging day---
A gift from the universe, either by chance or by design, presented to them at this particular spot on a curve they’ve rounded countless times.
Soon enough the signal at West Gerlach will come into view, and they’ll roll down into Woodward on a ‘clear’ indication.
But for now, in the last few semi-tranquil seconds, there is little else to do but admire creation in all its multi-hued glory.
It never gets old.
One might wonder, only in a joking manner, really, if the view from corporate headquarters could be this magnificent.
Perhaps not audible above the throb and drone of diesel locomotion, a slight chuckle offered forth from the right-hand seat might answer that question---
Not a chance in hell.
-
Special thanks to Jeff Ford for his assistance in the preparation of this piece.
Reserve Proof
There is a moment here that few ever come to realize---
A proverbial two fingers of ‘reserve proof’ poured into a crystal tumbler, there to be savored sip by sip in just reward---
An equilibrium of sorts in the push and the pull of everyday, a stasis in the corporate heartbeat which those who count beans and stare at computer screens in Fort Worth and Omaha and Jacksonville are perhaps unknowingly deprived of---
Moments that never register as a spike on a graph or spreadsheet or a figure on a quarterly earnings report, and one in which those poor souls sheltered in the glass and concrete facades of Wall Street are seemingly, and hopefully, oblivious to.
They are jealously reserved for those hearty individuals who laced up boots and learned a skill or trade or craft, one that doesn’t involve the tying of a Windsor Knot around the neck every morning and enduring a commute to a cubicle or corner office, there to lash it as a marionette to various rungs about a corporate ladder.
Yet, they are instants of brevity that rarely, if ever, convert to dollars and cents on a direct deposit slip that arrives in the mailbox every other week.
They are as a fringe benefit that only the worthy are afforded, those sage and seasoned souls who earned their credentials in the extremes of physics and metallurgy, and the temperature and other elemental challenges that Mother Nature seemed fit to bestow upon their existence in a 24-7-365 fashion.
When, at midnight, a knuckle lets go and gladhands separate on a grade, and the curses emanating from the locomotive cab are as angry as the lightning slashing from the darkened sky, with sheets of rain arriving in chapter-and-verse proportions straight from the pages of Genesis, threatening to wash from the land all those who dare venture into it---
Someone still has to go out and replace the damn thing.
These character-building moments are steeped well in tradition, their seeds first planted in the Welsh soils of Penydarren, there to be watered fully with saturated steam at the hand of a Cornish fellow by the name of Richard Trevithick.
Water is powerful, and useful, and ancient---
And in its antiquity, it is patient.
That which has fallen upon the geologic ramparts that schism the land from north to south, needs some place to go.
For eons it has sought the seas, and in an effort to reach them it has flowed from headwaters in the Sawatch Range and the Sangre de Cristos, scouring prehistoric and ever-changing channels across the land in a seemingly random and meandering fashion.
The Arkansas and the Cimarron and the Canadian Rivers, along with their local tributaries and a thousand other flows, have removed sediments from the land since the Laramide orogeny, 80 million years ago, and faithfully deposited them into the oceans, leaving the High Plains of today’s continental United States anything but flat.
Water, perhaps more than any other natural element, has been the bane of railroad builders and operators for more than two centuries. It has created rivers to bridge, canyons to blast rights-of-way out of, and then it has sent raging torrents down to destroy both; yet without it, Trevithick’s contraption would remain as fanciful as anything Jules Verne could imagine.
And though the builders of the Southern Kansas Railway had no gorges to contend with, they were nonetheless saddled with the watersheds that rippled the land across Indian Territory and all the way to the bluffs of the Llano Estacado over Texas way.
Here, in the cool and colorful and splendorous moments that precede the dawn of an April morning, is evidence of such.
While the eastbound grade up out of the valley of Wolf Creek is by no means as mentionable as that which tunnels under Raton, it is still held in respect by those who throttle their charges along BNSF’s Panhandle Subdivision.
Our crew aboard an old Dash-9 has reached a brief interlude, an over-the-hump equilibrium of sorts on the great curve at Gerlach, Oklahoma. Just moments before, our hogger set his units for dynamic braking, and trumpeted for the South County Road 198 grade crossing as he coaxed 6,000 tons and just as many feet of train up from Shattuck, in the process rolling over names like Buzzard Creek and Boggy Creek, and running along the margin of Sand Creek, there to push over the top of the grade and have the windshield view filled with this.
In days long passed, when conductors and engineers were revered and respected and were the absolute authorities over their realms---
When brass was polished and boiler jackets shined and lace curtains could be found in the cab and caboose alike---
Coffee brewed on a potbelly stove or was kept hot in a mason jar placed strategically against the locomotive backhead, there to be shared in drowsy moments along a run that began in Amarillo sometime after midnight.
Today, the waycars are long gone and backheads have morphed into digital control consoles, but coffee is still the nemesis of fatigue, with fresh aromas filling the cab as the hot contents of a stainless-steel thermos bottle are poured into a travel mug---
A Rule G-compliant version of ‘reserve proof’ not quite hot enough to burn the tongue with the first sip, but just right.
And in that savoring, there is only the rumble of an FDL behind the bulkhead, and the whine of dynamics as the aged GE performs as advertised.
Nothing else.
No words to spoil the moment.
Only a brief intermission when all the world is right.
A stasis between the push and the pull of life.
While the tie knotters are still fully in slumber, the fortunate take their pleasure in hot coffee and a gaze out over the valley of the North Canadian River, and there before them, as an ornament dangling on the invisible bough of orbital gravity---
The last dying sliver of a crescent moon---
Faint and struggling in the eastern sky, trapped between the receding colors of night and the luminance of an emerging day---
A gift from the universe, either by chance or by design, presented to them at this particular spot on a curve they’ve rounded countless times.
Soon enough the signal at West Gerlach will come into view, and they’ll roll down into Woodward on a ‘clear’ indication.
But for now, in the last few semi-tranquil seconds, there is little else to do but admire creation in all its multi-hued glory.
It never gets old.
One might wonder, only in a joking manner, really, if the view from corporate headquarters could be this magnificent.
Perhaps not audible above the throb and drone of diesel locomotion, a slight chuckle offered forth from the right-hand seat might answer that question---
Not a chance in hell.
-
Special thanks to Jeff Ford for his assistance in the preparation of this piece.