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On The Rails A Memoir By Linda Niemann Soft Cover
On The Rails A Memoir By Linda Niemann Bumpoed corners
On the Rails is Linda Niemann's story of working on the railroad and, in the process, reconstructing her life. A highly crafted, lyrical memoir, On the Rails is an unorthodox tale of hard drinking and gritty work, sexual adventures with both men and women, and discovering hope and a new life.
Like Kerouac, Niemann writes of finding oneself on a journey of physical jeopardy and exhaustion, in isolated places and precarious human connections, in a landscape whose only benevolence is "the darkness of the caboose and the unknown fragrances" of the desert.
On the Rails, A Memoir by Linda Niemann
Soft Cover
249 pages
Copyright 1994
CONTENTS
Introductioniv
1 Breaking In1
2 Under the Freeways15
3 Boomer in a Boomtown30
4 Brakettes Invade Tucson47
5 Pasadena Gothic75
6 The Monterey Local90
7 This Is the Place110
8 Cadillac Ranch124
9 The Pass to the North140
10 Down the Line159
11 Versions of Home170
12 A Road to Ride196
13 Northline205
14 Shasta221
15 End of Track233
Glossary246
Acknowledgments249
INTRODUCTION
I STILL REMEMBER the day my father took me to see the last steam locomotive. I was only three or four years old, but I remember he held me up in his arms to be sure I could get a good look. We were parked on the old road at New Laguna where the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad tracks run on an embankment so the last steam engine passed above us, pulling its cargo of freight cars. I was always very excited and delighted when he pointed out trains. Almost as soon as I could walk, my father used to take me with him in the pickup truck when he ran errands. Trips to the depot in New Laguna were my favorites because I loved to see the trains up close.
"Look!" he said, "This is the last time you'll ever see this." I remember I wasn't sure how one is supposed to look at something for the last time. I still vividly remember the moment the steam locomotive came into sight. I tried to take it all in but that train was moving so fast I saw only a little smoke from the smokestack before it was out of sight.
Traces of coal and old cinders stained the sand on the dirt road in front of the house where I grew up in Old Laguna. The blackened sand was the only trace that the first roadbed of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line west to Gallup and Flagstaff passed right around the edge of Old Laguna village.
The Pueblo people realized the link between trains and sex without Doctor Freud. Joe Sando, eminent historian from Jemez Pueblo tells a joke that other Pueblos used to tell to explain why Laguna is the most populous pueblo. The joke goes something like this: Do you know why there are so many Lagunas? No? Well, every morning at four o'clock, the train goes by and blows its whistle and wakes up all the Lagunas, who have a little sex before they go back to sleep.
Years later, when the railroad route was relocated a few miles to the north, my great-grandfather bought the old train-depot building that became the home of my Grandpa Hank and Grandma Lily. My parents lived with Grandpa and Grandma at the time I was born, and I spent the first year of my life in that old depot. The front door, which was seldom used by the family, still had the sliding window with the little ledge where tickets were sold.
All my family and relatives talked about the old days when the trains used to stop right there in Laguna. How exciting it was to watch the tourists step off the train to stretch their legs and to buy souvenirs from the Laguna children who sold small pieces of Laguna pottery and beaded pine. The train brought the mail and all goods and foods not available in the traditional Laguna economy. When I was a child, freight-train derailments occurred frequently near Laguna, and if train workers sustained no injuries, a party like atmosphere prevailed among the people because, in those days, the railroad company allowed us to take and salvage anything we could from the wreckage. One summer we gathered up enough singed and blackened cans of fancy hams to last the entire population of the Laguna villages for five years, and it spoiled my appetite for fancy canned hams forever.
The railroad was the life-line of outsiders like my great-grandfather and his brother and their cousins from Ohio. The railroad brought the Marmon brothers away from the Mad River near Bellefontaine, Ohio, right after the Civil War when so many other young men migrated west.
The railroad through Laguna followed the old conquistadors' route and brought nearly as much change to the Laguna Pueblo people as the Spaniards had. With the railroad came more government agents and missionaries and compulsory boarding schools for the young Laguna Pueblo children who were sent hundreds and hundreds of miles from their homes. Other Pueblo communities counted themselves lucky to be far from any railroad because it prevented intrusions by the Federal Government or other outsiders.
By the time I was born, jobs with the railroad were considered to be the best jobs a Laguna man might hope to find in the outside world. Aunt Alice Little's Mescalero Apache husband, Miguel Little, was a railroad man who lived in Richmond, California and only visited his wife once a year for three months in the summer. That was the way Aunt Alice wanted it. She was over forty when she and Uncle Mike got married. Family rumors hinted that Aunt Alice wanted nothing to do with sex, but it was clear from the twinkle in Uncle Mike's eye that he felt differently, though he was devoted to Alice and loved her very much, strange as she was. No wonder Uncle Mike loved the railroad, and he only worked as an electrician in the train yard at Richmond. We kids were so impressed that Uncle Mike got to ride anywhere in the United States with his free pass for any train. We looked forward to his return every summer until he retired and moved back home to help Aunt Alice with the garden.
When I was in high school, I thought it would be wonderful to work for the railroad and to live and sleep in the caboose. Later, however, I became attracted to the mighty diesel locomotives and the speed I imagined possible on a flat, straight stretch of track (without the train of boxcars, of course). I imagined myself going full throttle, highballing that engine down the track at a hundred miles an hour. One morning in 1973 in Gallup, New Mexico, I got my opportunity: I was standing outside the depot with my stepfather waiting for a train to Albuquerque, when a locomotive without a train pulled up and parked. The engineer left it unlocked and running while he hurried into the depot. I knew it was probably the only chance I'd ever have to steal a locomotive, but I hesitated and my big opportunity was lost (though certainly my life was saved). To ride and control the mighty speeding giant machine is a primal, fervent wish of us human beings, puny mortals of mere flesh and blood, overwhelmed by the Industrial Age.
Dreams about trains are almost universally understood to signify a journey or travel, a change in location, and sometimes death. In the Americas, the railroad is synonymous with the transformation and destruction of the indigenous beingshuman and animal. The world over, railroads made a lasting impact on the human psyche because the steam locomotives were the first giant machines mobilized out from the cities into the countryside, thundering past the people and through the landscape. More powerful than their sheer physicality was the critical role these giant machines played in moving food, materials and human beings. Railroads and their workers feed us and connect us with one another; they bring us and they take us away.
The best books change our consciousness as we read them and they free us to imagine then pursue our own vision of our destiny. Thanks to On the Rails, I think I have a good idea of what railroad life for a woman is, and I know I am not tough enough or dedicated enough for such an existence.
Linda "Gypsy" Niemann goes to railroading in search of something that will help her change her life. Her will to change, to transform herself, is complemented by the power of railroad life to transform human beings. She falls under the spell of the railroad, and later when she learns that her great-grandfather, Otto Flohr, patented improvements for the railroad bar-coupling device, we readers are not surprised; this woman was born to be on the railroad.
On the Rails explores the power of a woman's iron will joined with the power of the railroad to change her life so completely that the Gypsy who recounts the story has little resemblance to the former Gypsy.
Leslie Marmon Silko October 1996
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