Predawn Ramblings

Its 3:45am and I'm sitting upstairs with the window open letting cool air mix with the warm inside. Over the music playing from my ipod I hear banging outside, like someone kicking an over sized rolling garbage bin. Muting my ipod and putting my face to the screen I realize what I'm hearing is the sound of the cars from a train linking up. I've never been sure how far the tracks actually are from this house, but after a quick look at google maps it appears to be nearly a mile.

The most impressive thing to me is that the houses, trees, and hills between, do little to hush the whistle and bang of the horn and steel. That raw industrial sound makes me wonder what it's like to be in the middle of war, with bombs whistling down, slamming into the earth. Shock waves you can feel before you hear. Flashes of light behind clouds like a rainless Southern thunderstorm or a switchback-ed mountain top busy with midnight traffic.

The train dead ends at an industrial area, which I recall as the Safeway Warehouse. In the summertime, on our way to the river, the aroma of fresh bread from the giant bakery punched us in the gut and made us wish we'd brought lunch. There, behind the bakery, used to be a motorcycle track, a baseball field, a park and a playground. Every couple of years the river would run its banks and wipe the lot clean like a dirt blackboard, preparing it for the next schmuck's answer to the problem. We never knew what to expect, except the wide cool river against pebbled shores and walking trails. A place that seemed, to a ten year old with a single mother and kid brother, the perfect afternoon adventure. The warehouse on the hill melted into the trees and the sounds drowned in the eddies and shallow rapids. After hours on our bellies like little brown trout to their spawning grounds, with burned backs, and hair a little blonder than before, we'd pack it up and hope Portland could afford a few more days in the sun.