It’s sometime after 1 am, I’m guessing, as I am up to get some water, and I can hear and feel the train rumbling through downtown a few blocks away just before the horn blasts. I know the train is going east over the Red River, because the engineers can’t blow the horn in downtown on the North Dakota side. I’m taken back to my teenage years, when I would hear the mighty beasts roll on through town out on to the Platte River Valley in Kearney, Nebraska. We lived up on a high hill and the trains’ passage was very audible, the sound focused across the rolling hills, even though the tracks were about a mile away.

I never slept then either, and with my room on the second floor of the house at the southeast corner, I’d have the windows open on either wall during the summer (sometimes to sneak a smoke). We were next door to a golf course, and I’d hear the wind pass through the trees, and see the moon-splashed links and lake; off to the southeast lay the lights of the university and the town below. In the daylight, this was quite a vantage point. Grain elevators 20 miles away were easily visible in towns like Axtell and Minden. I counted the trains once when I was ill, there were 25 in a 24 hour period that day, and that always seemed like a likely average. I’d consider where the train might be going, connecting towns and cities along the way, some that didn’t exist anymore beyond a sign noting the junction.

The train that rolls through downtown now is right out the window at the coffee house in a hundred year old building where I hang out; always enjoying them when I stop to consider them in their smooth controlled power, connecting me to the past times, archetypal, with many memories as one.