The Tracks.
There’s this thing about driving fast. Driving really really fast.
Once you get a taste for it, its hard to push that down, sometimes so hard that you are still fighting it long past the point at which you’ve far exceeded your threshold for sanity: the most dangerous place to feel normal, the only place to realize you are alive. Beneath sweaty palms, a heart beat that pounds you back into the seat and a sixteenth note left foot socketing you in the groove, its just you, a machine menacing your nerve and a road daring, fuck you, accept the challenge.
This is all quaint and romantic until you transplant this scenario onto a desert back road, maybe one that never got paved since the last washout, with a surface cracked by the sun, slick with the rubber that has melted onto it and one that was never smooth in the first place, its rocky topping the result of whatever was laying on the side of the road when the macadam was mixed.
When you get that deep into the middle of that nowhere it takes everything up about a billion percent.
At critical focus, just trying to keep the car on the road and your body alive, its often hard to truly absorb whats flying past you at 130 miles per hour or however fast you are going beyond where the speedo pinned. With some 70’s rock blaring over the roar of the engine, the pulse of your neck beating against the nylon belt and the ringing in thy ears from doing this exercise over and over and over again at maximum volume, its super easy to get lost in the speed, the vibration of your machine and the perfection of John Bonham.
And then there are the tracks.
One of two things happens at the tracks. 1: Air. Full compression of some shitty rental car’s shocks. Swift reclamation of control. Followed by some type of vocalized celebration once you are sure that ya made it. Again.
There are never, ever, photographs of 1.
The other thing that happens at the tracks is, not so surprisingly, 2: Train.
And this is no train that goes through town. No. Trains in the middle of nowhere might as well be hundreds of miles long, it wouldn’t matter to anyone. So they just make them as long as a pile of synchronized engines can pull (and/or push) them.
When the train happens, you get to sit.
By poroxy of 2, if you allow yourself to receive it, you get 3: the screechy steel, oil scented transcendence in the hundred ten degree breeze. There is never shade at the tracks.
Monks wish they could achieve the moment of reflective meditation that occurs directly after you prove the minimum breaking distance required to go from however fast beyond 130 to full stop. That is a moment unlike any other and way out in the no humidity expanse of the Eastern Mojave, it lasts forever. Or at least seems to while you watch a twenty minute train go by.
I’ll never again forget my first one. It was in Arizona, definitely low desert, I was 19, it was the first time I drove across the United States, it was the first time I drove more than twice the posted speed limit, it was the first time I had to confront any number of fears that I didn’t even know were lurking.
After the first three or four minutes, once my pulse slowed to match the clack-clack clack-clack clack-clack of the train slow rolling over the joint in the track, long after the air drumming stopped, I switch off Allen’s Wrench to investigate the possibilities of local desert radio, which back in the early 90’s, was still a real big thing and was a huge part of the adventure of driving around the country. Independent radio broadcast, imagine some novel shit like that in todays world… Sitting there on the precipice of number 3, that was the first time had I ever heard Art Bell, unquestionably the most important broadcaster of the 20th century, its a shame he’ll never get his due largely because of the content he chose to discuss and with the high level of respect he offered virtually everyone he spoke to. There’s alot of details from that night remembered in the echo of that train, it was a big moment.
It didn’t seem like anything other than a train in my way at the time.
There have been many periods of silence waiting for a train to pass since, I suspect I look forward to them more than most. The reflection found in the shadow of a passing box car with your license plate pushed up against a guard gate is just an incredibly unique thing.
Earlier in the week I took these snaps, I had raced one of my oldest, closest and absolutely most reliable friend from the beach to vegas and I beat the fuck out of him by almost 30 minutes and I bet 50 or 60 miles. It was a somewhat of a fun weekend working in vegas, but just like every other time Ive shot there, there is nothing as refreshing as seeing that fucked up place in the rear view mirror.
Excited to get back on the road, got to drive one of my favorite roads in the country which contains my all time favorite stretch for attempting to set the new land-speed-in-a-rented-v4 record. That same road also cuts right through these tracks.
I crossed the border, fell into the groove and had just about made it through the A side of Physical Graffiti before I got to the tracks. The gate was down when I got there, no sign of how long the mustang in front of me had been sitting there. I put the toy car into park (why would you be able to rent a manual in america? if there is any bottom line statement about american culture, it is that right there…), wiped the sweat on my palms deep into the greying black denim burning up my thighs in the sun and searched around for the water which of course, was now on the passenger side floor along with a camera bag, two bodies, four lenses, an ipod, a phone, a hat, a scarf and some granola bars. Do Not fuck with Newton, that guy was totally not wrong.
Picking up my leica from the floor, for whatever reason, that first cross country trip popped into my head, it might have been the first time I had thought about any of that stuff since the 90’s, Heavy. Im all grown up now. Or at least a little bit grown up. I dont normally take pictures of trains, but the camera was in my hand, my head was full of romantic notion and the door was open before I knew it.
Standing out in the middle of the street, that first night in the desert from twenty years ago flashed back, the memory of that first absurdly long train brought with it all kinds of stuff I hadn’t realized I had forgotten. When this train finally cleared, my race was over for that afternoon, casually cruised under the afternoon sun lost in a sea of thoughts- adventures Ive had, the right people Ive met, the wrong people Ive let in, the few people I’ll never stop telling the new people I meet all about. I had planned to drive back to the beach that day. I didnt. I stayed lost in that desert, full of love, all alone, for a few days. I thought it would work itself out, it’s been about a year, Im not so sure it has. My brother asked me once why I stopped posting stories up here, I didnt have much of an answer.
Digging through some negatives this week, I came across these and now I know, it was because of this train.
There is the most amount of power and beauty in the most unsuspecting places, I think the answers are always right there in front of us, the hard part is just staying open enough to see it. Keeping an open heart in a city full of new yorkers is a test of will, but let’s give this a try again.
