2007 - Vol. 4, Issue 2

An immobile adventurer lived in the person of Zelda. She was immobile as defined by American culture. Zelda didn't operate motor vehicles. To her, the open road meant walking along the railroad tracks. The few trains that rumbled past were freighters. All that engine power pulling varying numbers of cars. Sixty–four cars added up to a mile.

Zelda was physically small. Although she carried a little extra freight, it remained proportional to her body. She balanced atop the three–and–a–half–inch–wide rail head, traveling as if on a regular sidewalk. Her engineer's cabin carried large glasses and wavy, shoulder–length black hair. The rail rambler moved through a material world containing scattered hearty plants, bits of broken glass, general litter, and small–sized gravel.

Zelda's imagination filled the void left by social isolation. Here, she became the protagonist of a war novel or movie. The scenes varied from a WWII partisan fighter to a brawny 1980s Hollywood hero. She could easily shift to a Special Forces agent, courageous and feared. Her bullets never missed.

The major objective in Zelda's war, however, was to overthrow her eyesight. Her visual acuity was a repressive regime, and limited access to the world. Beyond a few inches, objects grew exponentially blurry. Her brain learned to compensate for the lack of visual information. This included intellectual approximations of height, width, and depth.

During boot camp, commonly called girlhood, Zelda pretended her eyesight did not overtly restrict operations. She rode a bicycle like the other kids. She was agile and witty, a tomboy. In junior high, when she had to leave her seat to see the blackboard, she heard the groans and giggles of the other students. In higher grades, more teachers also expressed their annoyance.

Living in suburbia, she could not proclaim the public rite of passage. In class some kid would raise a hand, "I have an announcement."

Everybody knew what this meant.

"I got my license."

"Congratulations," said faculty and friends.

Customary polite applause affirmed social promotion to independence for the new driver.

In college, the struggle continued. Zelda took courses that didn't utilize the chalkboard. Required curriculum sometimes forced Zelda to sit away from the group. She said she couldn't see, yet her quest for information was labeled a behavioral problem by professors and students alike. Zelda did earn a Bachelor's Degree in liberal arts.

A few years out of college, Zelda rented a studio apartment in a partitioned house. The phone seldom rang. She assumed everyone held a degree and superior skills. Zelda's notions of her personal abilities, to translate these into a productive working career, passed her like the trains she couldn't operate. The rails never said, "Not at this time," or "Good luck on further endeavors." They didn't shut her out. They were where she walked to relieve her sadness.

Zelda picked up a stick, an imaginary bayonet or sword. In times of war, she became part of a guerrilla unit. One never knew when the enemy might use you for target practice. She crossed a bridge, then heavy–duty, East Washington Street. Following the tracks behind a small industrial area, she noted a couple of beat–up cars. Zelda knew the small, blurry, glittering objects were fragments of glass and metal. She had touched them on her journeys. She knew glass reflected light, crunched beneath her feet, or tinkled when kicked. The metal compressed or made a clang when kicked. Both had fooled her a few times, appearing as stray coins.

She walked a bit further on the rail head. Her stick had rejoined the regime of reality, so she dropped it. Sounds alerted her to look left. Two blurry figures sat on a loading dock. Their loud laughter and slurry speech identified them as drunken males, joking at something in their world. On her right was a diamond, where some people were playing softball. Zelda dismounted toward the field. When she reached the backstop, the softball players stood in a group in foul territory off to the third–base side. The players ignored her as she walked around the backstop, crossed home plate, then walked between the mound and third. Beyond the outfield lay uneventful territory. She returned to the ball field rail line.

As much as she wanted to hike along less familiar tracks, the peacetime economy turned unemployed Zelda back towards East Washington Street. Zelda noticed the tracks nailed to the cross ties. She couldn't be an engineer, a so–called Rounder, nor was she a hobo. Yet she wanted to know the rails.

A section of track was shaped similar to a capital "I." The top, where Zelda balanced her hike, was the rail head. The base or flange extended somewhat holding the spikes that were driven into the cross ties. The train wheels rolled along, fitting nicely into the mold. Steeper grades alongside the ballast once made the rail head harder to walk upon, yet Zelda easily conquered them.

She came to an intersection — a "frog" — that guided her to the line that didn't retrace her footsteps. A little way off, Zelda noticed the switch signal and blurry looking pull rods that moved track sections. A cutoff line led past a locked gate in a lumber yard. For a moment, the imagined scene was WWII. As Zelda pondered the barbed wire, the German noun with its article "der Stacheldraht," came to mind. She considered cutting off a piece of wire with a tool on her Swiss Army knife. The scent of Midwestern weeds wafted into the plan. Zelda didn't know what she'd do with the wire, therefore she negated the operation.

Zelda's reconnaissance mission received audio reports indicating a possible train whistle. She marched in that direction. A tiny path surrounded by high bushes and shadows led to a bridge over a creek. Zelda picked up a new stick about two–and–a–half feet long. Pretending she was on a covert offensive in a rural, foliage–laden war, she charged the small hill in a few leaps. Upon the bridge, she didn't find audio or visual train indications. In the military theater, Zelda's Special Forces only encountered inactive, fictitious enemies.

She left the bridge. Her stick became a sword as if she were the legendary Zorro. She crossed the artery. She marched, balancing along the rail head, meeting another frog and the line leading toward her base. She rounded a curve, then dismounted for a side venture.

A white or light–colored car sat parked in the gravel near the tracks. Dropping the rural war scenario for reality, she heard men's voices. Urban jungle fantasies lurked on the edge of her steps. She didn't look, but listened for the sound of a moving car door. In this reality, a man rode closely past her on a bicycle. "Eeuugh," came from his vocals. Something about that sound caught Zelda. Was he clearing his throat? Was he putting her down as an undesirable female? Zelda felt uncomfortable, foul.

About a block further down the partially paved, one–lane road, Zelda noticed a mother, child, and cat walking toward her. She tuned in their pleasant conversation.

"Ma'uw," said multilingual Zelda. "Your cat?" she asked the humans.

"Yes," the mother said.

"Ma'uw," Zelda repeated, squatting to pet the cat.

The gray–and–white kitty responded. Zelda connected with the humans on a commonality shared by cat lovers, and recharged her imagination. This brief trackside encounter stood in contrast to the rigid social structure of the local women's oriented community. Whereas Zelda longed for female camaraderie, her interest in trains and especially war repelled their dogmatic society.

In her less–than–perfect body, Zelda remounted the rail head as the color from the summer sun's rays faded into darkness. She arrived at her exit from the tracks. She knew this area well at all hours, day and night. Here was her bivouac. The electricity plant hummed steadily, across the tracks on the other side of barely two–lane Livingston Street. Zelda spent nice days at her trackside spot, sitting on a low–rise square metal utility box. Small stretches of abandoned track sank into the crabgrass. Zelda found pieces of broken rail ties. She whittled their oak wood hardness with her Zurich–purchased knife, though she only seemed to whittle daggers.

She lived on a neighborhood artery near her bivouac. Gentrification had not entirely devoured the near East Side. During the less wintry Wisconsin months, Zelda listened for the whistle. She'd scurry out of her efficiency apartment, cross the thoroughfare to her spot and the passing train.

Long trains usually came at night. Most had two engines that hauled sixty to eighty cars. She stood near the tracks, using her hands, watching, swaying, and counting. These night trains nurtured her imagination. Once in a while, she thought about war trains carrying supplies or prisoners. She noted the rail corporation initials painted in large letters on the cars. She could read them even if their edges were not well defined. Some cars also had illegible graffiti or pictures.

Zelda admired the powerful engines. Just a block south of her base, the yellow engine cars mumbled in a base voice, jogging along the curve. She loved it when the train burst forth with the mechanical strength equivalent to thousands of horses, galloping into an alto chorus as the train increased speed on the straight–a–way.

Zelda stood several yards from the tracks. Speaking in rail language, she raised her right arm over her head and made a fist. She bent her elbow to a ninety degree angle, quickly pumping several times. Satisfaction came when the engineer sounded the horn. She always waved at the crew as they passed. Usually they waved back, as the ground shook from the mighty machinery.

To Zelda, the longer the train, the better. Her longest train contained three engines, and hauled 170 cars, plus a caboose - a rare sight. The rail company's conversion to computerized system monitoring meant the elimination of the great caboose. Contrary to regular operations, Zelda had seen this fantastic train during the day. Away from her bivouac, she had waited with cyclists at the bike path rail crossing. Absorbed by the passing train, she ignored the other people, who seemed frustrated by inconvenience. Zelda stood, joyfully counting and moving slightly to the train's rhythm.

Old train songs appealed to Zelda, yet she did not know what sort of work she could do with her love for the rails and their folklore. Her chronologist efforts never deciphered the freight train time table. Historical and business research required reading. She imagined the reading loads to be 200 pages a day. Twenty pages left her visual engines spent. All of her ideas required a level of visual acuity she did not possess. She fought the unending war. She wanted to run, but lacked legs. She wanted to fly, yet was without wings. She could not imagine her future. Zelda existed as the time of day chugged along its unseen rail.

Zelda's present meant going outside. She walked along her familiar thoroughfare, locally nicknamed Willy Street. She heard the "Ding, ding" warning from the rail crossing, and headed for the tracks. The Erie Lackawanna had not sounded her distinctive whistle. When a daytime train came, it was usually this run. The end car was fixed by her Livingston Street bivouac, with its orange engine idling by the next northward cross street. She walked beside the stationary train. Today, it had nine cars neatly placed. The two crossings called out their "Ding, ding." Zelda looked at the still train, wondering what it was hauling.

Desiring adventure, she decided to risk it. She climbed the ladder on the rear hopper car and peered over the top. "Coal," she muttered. All nine cars contained coal. Zelda stood there for several minutes. She wondered if any one noticed her ascent. The coal seemed so lame, motionless. She heard the constant "Ding, ding" from both crossing signals. The sound annoyed her. Zelda descended from the car, bluntly discovering that the lowest ladder step to the ground seemed much further than when climbing. She stumbled over a cross tie and onto the ballast. With wounds to her rail head poise, Zelda left her for her bivouac.

Around a quarter of an hour later, Zelda sat idly in her one room apartment. She heard the distinctive whistle: opportunity moving again on its route.