She Likes Trains: Shining Railroad Eyes (1)
Shelley J Alongi

 

The man with the gun, picking the switch, hitting the inner locker, where are the bells, and derailing the rock train. This only covers part of the four days I had with the engineer. And they were four days worth every headache it took me to get to Austin Texas even if four days with the engineer was not why I came there. It doesn’t matter. After the last seven months of tears and grief, it was just meant to be. This week it was all about railroad shining eyes.

Railroad Shining Eyes

The thing I notice about Charlie is that when he gets into the actual discussion of trains his eyes shine. It’s almost as if he’s looking at something and remembering. He steps back in time. Gone are the curtains and the trying to figure out how to do things. On his train he knows how to do things. He’s in his element, or maybe one of them. Railroad shining eyes.

The following is an account of the conversations I had with Charlie on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, September 21 through 25. He is a former working railroad engineer adjusting to blindness at the Chris Cole Rehabilitation Center in Austin, Texas. I could have never in a million years planned this one. Even if neither of us can see them, he has railroad shining eyes.

Notes do not necessarily appear in the order of days.

This is an accounting of the information given and received. Mostly I think he was impressed with the railroad language I know. He did work in the field of construction and spent fifteen years working for two railroads: the Santa Fe and the fort worth and Western. He said this was a dream job for him. He said he does miss it. The conversation also encompasses blindness. At this writing he still struggles with it. I consider this wild and crazy guy one of my railroad conquests and I didn’t even plan for it.

Set the scene: Chris Cole Rehabilitation Center, Austin Texas. I am here to be assessed for the Business Enterprises Texas program. The days are all hard though not all necessarily long. We decide it will happen in August, if at all. By the end of the week I have been tested in cooking, orientation, money management and organization, note taking skills. Along with the cooking there is a business lunch, conversation with Karla Martinez a BET stand owner, and a plan for returning to the center should I decide to take the training suggested and required. The only obstacle and it is a big one at this writing is the cats. I will not relocate to Austin without my cats. If we can work that out, great. If not, I will stay home, write novels, publish them, promote them, and work in the food business. But, for here and now, this week I almost think is more about conversation, telling my story, and being comforted after the loss of my number one engineer, something he seems to understand. But, this is about him and we will get to all of that as the story progresses. He does have a reputation of which I am only aware but do not know any of its details. He has two sons, one daughter and two grand children. His daughter is close and his sons are in San Antone, the colloquial name for San Antonio. He is probably nine years younger than Glenn. I don’t know at this writing what age he was when hired on with the Santa Fe. He said he was hired in 1979. He does apparently enjoy bar hopping. This theme asserts itself several times in the unfolding of the story. I will let events speak for themselves. One night I sit down and say: “I’m exhausted.”

“Intoxicated?” he says, smiling. “I think this could work out.”

I tell him I’m not an alcohol person, though I’ve had rum and I’ll drink wine on occasion. But I’m not into the hard stuff at all.

When I first discover he worked for the railroad I have to ask of course if he’ll talk about it to me.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll take you to the bar at the west lounge and buy you a virgin Shirley Temple.”

At first, I almost believe there’s a bar in the west lounge. The building is divided into east and west used for different purposes each side having a lounge with a coffee pot, refrigerator, there is a microwave in one of them, table and chairs, places to pass one’s time indoors. I haven’t’ discovered the west lounge on Monday when our first introduction occurs, but by the end of the week it is a familiar stopping point on shelley’s latest railroad adventure. And, there is no bar. But, oh, well. Someday he’ll wine and dine me, I’m sure. I think it should be my treat.

Overall Observations

I think he thinks a lot about adjusting to blindness putting him in a somber mood though not unapproachable. Not having a full acquaintance with his personality I don’t know if this is normal.

“Blindness is awful, Shelley,” he states once. “My teacher took me to get registered for something and the office was at the old Fort worth depot. I heard the bell and the train squealing and I sobbed. I could be the one operating that train.”

He initially lost his sight in 2013 in a period of three days due to a kind of stroke that damaged the optic nerve and took away all his vision. I told him I see neither light nor dark.

“Your blindness is neutral he says. First he says what about you for a minute? I’ve spent so much time talking about him I guess he wants to know about me. It was cancer of the retinas, I say.

“That’s too bad,” he says.

I don’t even remember it now. I’ve always been blind it’s a way of life for me. But, he sees it from a sighted perspective. I suppose he always will. In regard to blindness, I suppose neutral for me is the way to describe it. His poignant description for him is of a curtain of darkness that can’t be removed. He wanted to take a hammer and knock it away. This for me is a compelling image. I don’t know if it will always remain that way for him. Sometimes, he would come to the table in the cafeteria and stop as if he wasn’t sure where he was. One time I said “Around the corner. My over all impression is that he is adjusting. It is a slow process. I love my new engineer friend. I always wanted to know what kind of people run trains. This is one with children, grand children, an interest in NASCAR number 11, former owner of a boat, hunter and fisherman, a twenty year common law relationship with a woman, an interesting life and a daunting challenge. I always think about how he ran the train al that responsibility and then to go from that and all the other things he did to not being able to navigate in your own house and That is a rather large adjustment. I wanted to reach out to him and help. I don’t know that I can do that, really. Everyone has to adjust in their own way and I cant’ do the work for him. But, I did say I would help if I could.

“I could learn a lot from you,” he said to me on Friday at breakfast.

I emailed my phone number and email. He asked me how to check his email because he just switched to Gmail. I told him I don’t know because I had a gmail account and they disabled it for some reason. But, I’m sure the next time I see him he’ll have it all figured out. He’s come a long way since being afraid to navigate in his own house. I found that out from Justin who ended up on the flight home with me on Friday night. That is another story in itself. We ended up seated next to each other.

During our outside conversations he would ask me how I was writing things down. Slate and stylus, I said. Braille.

“I bet you’re pretty good at it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you really jotting all this down?” he asked me once when I reached into my leopard print bag to get out my book. My journal is a leftover from working a Disney Christmas when I won it in a drawing. It has served me well. This week, I left the red rock hopper at home ,but not the bells. They were, as usual, my trademark.

“Yes,” I told him, I was really jotting it all down.

So, here it is. Engineer lineup. He knows who my number one engineer will always be. And, I have his picture now.

Altogether, we had about six hours of conversations, various meetings in the hall and several meals together.

In the Beginning

I discovered that he worked for the railroad on Monday September 21 at dinner. Somehow I ended up at his table, the one closest to the door exiting the cafeteria. James, Dee, Steven, Charlie and I sat at the table. I said something about the train. Without wanting to go into great detail I said I have friends who work for the railroad.

“You have friends who work for the railroad?” asked the man I vaguely knew as Charlie.

“Yes.”

“I used to work for the Santa Fe,” he said. “I hired to work on the Santa Fe in 1979.”

“What did you do?”

I can’t believe how almost not nervous I am.

“I hired on as a brakeman and then got my engineer card. I worked for the Fort Worth an western for five years. I ran the train from Grapevine to the stock yards.”

I think it’s really strange that I would find someone at a rehab center for the blind that worked for the railroad. But, when I think of it, every time I turn around here I am finding someone who knows someone who either works or worked for the railroad. Maybe in Texas this isn’t so unusual at all.

“Will you tell me about working for the railroad?” I ask, still not believing I’m talking to him with some calmness. I am nothing even resembling calm. I am the railroad Queen of Bells. I revel in railroad stories and crews.

“Sure,” he says a little more energetically now. “I’ll dazzle you with my past.”


Well, I had an engineer friend who was killed in February. I used to listen to him on the radio and he would spot the train and had to wait for the blue flag.”

“Wow, you really know trains.”

“I just used to listen a lot.” I told him I spent time at the Fullerton train station and reading online and talking to crews when I can. He was impressed.

“When I talk to you I’ll tell you my story of railroad heartbreak,” I told him. We separated for the night.

I don’t remember much about the rest of that night. I think he left and I went back to my room to do some homework for the next day and organize my week. All week I would go to dinner and then as it turns out, talk to him and then go sleep and wake up early and organize. But tonight, I’m just discovering this is how my week will play out.

Here, I must insert my story. Those of you who know me will recognize this part of my personality or fascination. I said I learned he worked for the railroad on Monday evening. Tuesday morning I sat at the table just before his . Someone sat next to me and mentioned his name or something. I heard him say “good morning, Steven” in his smoker’s voice or just a hint of Texas drawl that isn’t too overwhelming. Those consonants he spoke to my benefit all week. They are hard to describe: dropped or short or some linguistic thing that someone from my academic past has probably neatly labeled. No matter here. They are pleasant. Every engineer I talk to has their own characteristics. This one has those distinctive consonants plus maybe the film over the voice due to cigarettes, a passé habit now says the former railroader of newer ones. He can sure light his own cigarettes. Blindness hasn’t stopped him from doing that. Now, he may have had to learn how to do that, but he sure got the hang of it. This helps reinforce the fact that he will pick up those non visual skills, as they are named in the blindness field. I with my non rehab perspective just call them doing things. I just do things. Whether they are visual or not I do not know. In any case, Charlie sat at his table and I sat at mine. Suddenly, a feeling of nervous anticipation flooded me reminiscent of the start of Many conversations with Glenn, the peanut butter in the mouth feeling. And, yet, there is something different here. I have permission to talk to him about the railroad. We had already established the fact that we will talk. And, besides, I can’t count on him finding me because he can’t just look up and see me. I need to be pro active. I can’t leave this to chance. I knew I only had so many minutes since I had to go cook for the assessor and he had to go to class.

“Well,” I said, “I better go strike while the iron is hot.”

In this place one does not stop someone from doing something. Everyone is learning to adjust to blindness, so in a place where with my skills in place I should excel, there’s no way I’m going to let my still unexplained fascination with the railroad stop me in my tracks. I approach the table with confidence, ready to take the bull by the horns.

“Are you sitting over here, Charlie?” I ask. It’s common to verbally affirm someone’s presence in a situation like this, so here we go.

“Yeah,” he says in much better spirits today.

The funny thing about this week is sometimes I am not sure what I say to start the conversation. I don’t know if I said my name, but he knew who I was and I knew who he was, so we were on.

“How did you get interested in trains?” he asks.

“An accident.”

I talk about Chatsworth. In September 2008 a Metrolink commuter line train missed a signal and slammed head-on into a freight that had a clear signal, killing 24 people including himself. The freight engineer was severely injured and had to be cut out of the cab because of the resulting fire. It turned out later I know someone who knows that engineer. I gave him these details.

“The freight guy was texting?”

“No, the passenger engineer was texting.”

Then, the story. I talk about Glenn. I explain that for the past five years I talked with an engineer named Glenn who taught me a lot about the railroad. “He would say “Good night queen of Bells” when he worked in Lancaster and I listened to the radio at night. If he knew I was listening he would say that to me. This happened over the last year, from February 2014 to October, 2014. In October 2014 he transferred to the Antelope Valley line and was killed in march of 2015 a week after the accident. We talked a lot about that during the week.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Then, he gave me the details of the accident that killed Glenn.

“Yes,” I said, not really surprised that he knew about it. The story did make national headlines in February, 2015.

“A tractor trailer was fowling the crossing and his train hit it and derailed.” The reference is to the February 24 derailment in Oxnard, California at Rice and 5th Avenue of a Metrolink train when it hit an abandoned tractor trailer. “That was the migrant worker,” he said. Yes, it was.

“I’ve had some spectacular derailments,” he told me. “Was anyone else killed?”

“No. There were some other critical injuries. The other engineer was injured and released.”

“He was the only death,” he confirmed.

“Yes. I told you I’d tell you my story of railroad heartbreak.”

“Oh,” he said sympathetically. “That’s what you meant.”

“Yes. And, I wasn’t sure yesterday if you wanted to talk about the railroad. I mean I thought it might be painful for you.”

“No,” says the grandfather of two, “I was under the weather.”

James says earlier he was drinking whisky over the weekend of the ACB convention. That could explain it. His friends Kelly and Steven got food poisoning from a restaurant the day before, so it seems everyone might be under the weather after their weekend. Me, I just slept after arriving on Sunday because I had been awake since 11:00 PM Saturday night. So, Tuesday morning, after everyone had time to recover, I was ready to tackle this new railroad adventure.

I am very happy.

“I’ve got to go,” he says now.

“Can we shake hands?”

he puts down his fork. We clasp hands. Solid hands maybe callused.

“Wow,” he enthused, “you work out.”

“No.” I do have a strong handshake. His hands are strong, not clerical.

It’s worth noting here that he says “hon” and “sugar” a lot. Texas words? Maybe. I’ll tell you a sugar story when it comes to Wednesday. Now, we know we will talk. We were off to our day. For the rest of the week, I wasn’t shy. I knew I had to find him. And yet, I had to wait till Wednesday.

By 3:00 PM on Tuesday I was exhausted. I sat down in the main lounge near the coldest vent I could find in order to stay awake. I had my orientation and mobility lesson with Ed, who says, by the way, that Charlie is good with directions. I would think he would be. I think we all think Charlie is doing better than Charlie thinks he’s doing. It’s either that or he just wants approval. Why do I understand that? Or, the man is a perfectionist. I understand that, too. Sitting in the lounge I finish sending invitations by email for my business lunch to occur on Wednesday September 23rd. I manage to stay awake. Coming to dinner I once again sit at the table I sat at the night before. I never make lunch this week except on Friday. At dinner the Blue Ball Coalition keeps me in stitches. There are about three very energetic guys who have a blue ball on some kind of string that stands straight up at their table. It’s like the highball, really. Well, they tease mercilessly when they find out who is around them. I became famous that week for accidentally hitting someone in the head with a tray, it’s the hand-eye coordination. There was no spill. I’ve had years of practice with a tray so it was just a matter of misjudging distance. My nickname from the BBC became “head hunter.” The next day when engaged in conversation with Charlie they started to tease me and I nipped it rather rudely, I must say, except that sometimes that was the only way to get their attention they were so intent on teasing. Well, I won’t defend myself anymore just to say that I am sitting at the same table where all this occurred. Even after their hysterics tonight, I am exhausted. After dinner, unsure where to locate Charlie, I go back to my room and lie down. Then, I awaken at 1:00 AM. All week I awaken at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning to complete assignments or organize various projects. The morning finds me at breakfast, sitting at that last table, waiting.

“Good morning, Charlie,” I greet him. He returns it.

“I’m sorry, Shelley,” says the polite engineer wither reputation when he sets down his tray, “I laid down last night and fell asleep.”

“Oh, you had a nap,” I smile. “Was it a legal nap? Forty-five minutes?”

He thinks about this for a minute.

“Forty-five minutes or less.” He picks up on my illusion to the rule for a legal nap when on duty. “No.”

again, he’s impressed.

“Well,” I’m laughing now, “don’t worry about it. I fell asleep, too.”

This place does that to you.

It is later on that I find him in the hall. It seems to be our lot to keep meeting in the halls of the bunker-like campus. Down the hall from the residential desk is a door where everyone exits and walks west toward Sunshine Avenue to start their orientation and mobility training. This door is called the residential door. Just past it is the entrance to the cafeteria. Parallel to it across the hall is the break room with soda machines and snack machines, a table and chairs, a sink and coffee maker, the staff break room. It is in this hall way that we met more than once during this week, both on our ways to separate places.

“Excuse me,” he says frequently as he uses his cane to gage distances and explore his surroundings. He uses a lot of trailing techniques, common when trying to find certain locations.

“Hi,” I say when encountering him there, or I say, “”It’s me.” I keep forgetting people like to have others identify themselves by name.

“Shelley?” he says trying to determine who I am. He is getting better at recognizing me. By the time the week is over he knows who I am. He’s picking up on those skills. I’m sure by the time I meet him again somewhere along our paths he will be much more proficient than he already is.

“Yes, sir,” I say now.

All week I hold my leopard print bag, a lunch bag that I’ve just purchased from Pennies with a gift card my sister sends for my birthday. It turns out to be the perfect size for my notebook, slate and stylus, my wallet, and various things I think I need for the day. The only thing it doesn’t hold is a water bottle, but we are in close distance of water and I don’t make many trips outside. On the handle of this bag is my large karabiner with bells. I can’t be without my bells. I like to play with them, so now, detaching them from the handle and talking to my friend they slip out of my hand and clatter noisily to the concrete floor.

“What was that?” he now asks with feeling. Or, does he say “what the heck was that?”

“I have bells,” I explain. “I have switch keys and bells. I’ll show you.”

I put them in his hand. Monday night he has told me he has a bunch of switch keys and lanterns.

“I have a lantern from the C&NW,” I tell him.

“Canadian?” He’s probably thinking Canadian Pacific.

 

 

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Copyright © 2015 Shelley J Alongi
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