Lullabies by Trains by Night

“I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.”   - Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches

Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city.

As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure.

To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not.

The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.”

  - Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpset

My place is a place of trains. At a short distance from my home, the largest marshalling train yard in British Columbia spreads its breadth across 68 tracks. Grain arrives, coal leaves, spilled sulphur paints the tracks a garish dandelion yellow.  Its 360-acre expanse did not suffer noticeably from the First World War recession, nor the fire of 1920 which destroyed the downtown of our small town, nor the flood of 1921 which flooded half the city and produced a mammoth log jam that pulled down two bridges. At one time, in the 1930’s, these trains carried silk from far destinations to far destinations; silk spun in the making of cocoons of evolution, and slipped lovingly through the fingers of grand ladies. It seems that the steadfast history and grit of the trains here is as perpetual and persistent as the repetitive clickedty-clack sound of metal wheels on metal tracks.

 Clickedty-clack. Clickedty-clack.

Recently, relatives visited from the Interior. We sat on the back deck in the soft, summer air. At one point, the deck shook and an emphatic bang made the crows in the tree flash up, circle, and flutter back to their perches. We didn’t notice the tumult or the shudder, but our guests were alarmed. The rumbles, thuds, booms, claps, and clashes resounded throughout the afternoon. Interspersed with this orchestration were the plaintiveness, howling, or trumpeting of train whistles.

As I sat and made polite conversation amidst the bedlam of train, I became hyper-sensitive to the fact that, to someone unused to living near trains, these noises would seem clamorous, raucous, even deafening. But we don’t notice them anymore. Instead, these cannonades and trills are part of the fabric of the soundscape in which we live. The turbulence of train cars being shunted from track to track, the boisterousness of trains arriving to and leaving from the yard, carrying the wealth and treasures of nations and peoples, is exciting. Trains play in train yards like children in a playground – without inhibition, negligent of their glad-full noise. 
We have learned the language of trains. Whistles and horns – babble, wailing, and lamentation. The sonance of communication. One long – I am approaching you. Three short – I am backing up. Multiple short – I am in trouble! Happy New Year, Happy Canada Day. Even one that means good night.


 Good night, train.

Clothesline Choreography

“There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline . . .it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behing the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot un-see once it has been seen. A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality”.         

                        - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

My place is a place of clotheslines. Which is exceptional, nowadays. When I was a child, I played amongst the ballooning sheets and pillow cases, imagining myself an explorer in caves of snow and ice; or as a princess in a swirl of ball-gown taffeta. When my own children were small they did the same thing.  Spirited games of tag sometimes resulted in collapsed lines, the clothes in sodden heaps like languished mannequins.

When I lived, for a while, in the international housing complex of an American university, the joy of the clothesline was the joy of colour; of movement; of elegance. In a splayed, green pasture row upon row of clotheslines creaked in the wind, bedecked with billows of yards of colourful sari or turban cloths. African-patterned dresses, pants, and tunics capered alongside. Children screeched and laughed as they dove into the damp drapes of fabric, and babies lay on rugs under the clothesline, the sun-dotted sway of sheets sending them off to sleep.

The first community we lived in on arrival back in Canada did not allow clotheslines. Clotheslines were out-lawed by by-laws. The smell of over-dried clothes puffed from dryer vents, but not a single sock nor bra besmirched the piousness of barren back yards.  I recall that as a child in England poverty-ridden tenements boasted lines of laundry that draped across the street from kitchen window to kitchen window. I imagine that it is that sort of image, in part, that creates the property value lowering connotation of clotheslines. ‘Airing your laundry’ is considered in bad taste. In that regard, I suppose that draping my t-shirts to dry over blueberry bushes or draping old dungarees over the back of wicker garden chairs could be perceived as a form of anarchism, or just low wages.

But my place does not have such silly by-laws. A breezy summer’s day is an invitation to allow one’s raimnants to flirt with the wind.  I have heard of something called Project Laundry, which includes a collection of clothesline art and poems and essays that praise the joys of using a clothesline. Apparently, there are even clothesline consciousness-raising parties, and there is actually a National Hanging Out Day in the United States on April 19^th and a lobby to have weather-persons give drying forecasts each day. 

I would love to see, again, pastures of colour and peek-a-boo children in the sheets; the ache of textile to free itself from clothes pegs and pins and dance a mad, dervish tarantella with the wind.

The Ghosts of Heroes

“We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.”     - Brad Meltzer                                                

“I took in a deep breath, and smoke twisted around my head as I let it slip through my teeth. “Do you know what my favorite show was when I was a little kid?”

The look again. “I would have no idea.”

“Doctor Who. British sci-fi show.”

“I am familiar with it. Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt—“

“No,” I said. “The new show’s great, but I grew up on the old one. The low-budget, rubber monster show with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. I watched it on PBS all the time as a kid.”

I looked out at the dark ruins of Hollywood, at the stumbling shadows dotting the streets as far as you could see. The only other living person within half a mile was standing behind me, her eyes boring into my head.

“The Doctor didn’t have super-powers or weapons or anything like that. He was just a really smart guy who always tried to do the right thing. To help people, no matter what. That struck me when I was a kid. The idea that no matter how cold and callous and heartless the world seemed, there was somebody out there who just wanted to make life better. Not better for worlds or countries in some vague way. Just better for people trying to live their lives, even if they didn’t know about him.”

I turned back to her and tapped my chest. “That’s what this suit’s always been about. Not scaring people like you or Gorgon do. Not some sort of pseudo-sexual roleplay or repressed emotions. I wear this thing, all these bright colors, because I want people to know someone’s trying to make their lives better. I want to give them hope.”                                          - Peter Clines, Ex-Heroes                            

My place is the place of heroes; of a young, idealistic young man,  who fought the good fight but still lost. Running across a country, through chilling rain, and slogging snow, and unrelenting sun. Dipping his toe in one ocean with a vision to dipping it in the other ocean at the other end of the country.

Fate looks upon our silly human dreams with a bemused smile and a cruel attitude.  To this day, I whisper wishes, I mutter expectations, murmur things with feathers. One cannot utter a hunger too loudly, the Fates listen at doors and walls, their ears straining round a glass tumbler. Don’t speak your dreams too loudly, the Fates will dash them.

Nonetheless, we honoured today the hitching, fettered run of a young boy who wanted to make a difference. The fact that 35 years later thousands gather to re-enact the hopefulness of a romantic lodestar means exactly that.  A dying paladin made a difference. Despite the Fates.

Travels to Lilliput

“Small things are not small things for the small!”

-       Mehmet Murat ildan


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“Awesome does not look the same close-up as it does from far away”.  - anonymous

“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment”.                                                           - Linda McCartney

Awe and wonder come in many forms. There is awe in light - sunlight, moonlight, the light that crisps itself in molecules of snow. There is wonder in darkness – the soft, velvet wrap-around of a moonless, summer night; the shadows secreted in the bark-skin of a tree deep in the Cimmerian shade of the forest.

My place has awe and wonder that I didn’t even grasp until the wonder-full gift of a particular camera lens. A macro lens that acts as a circular doorway into the vast worlds of small beings and locales. Over the last year, I have been learning to see, learning to simply be ‘aware’. I am learning to open my eyes – to my place, to texture, shapes, curves, lines, patterns, light. My place has become like a Muse, constantly tugging at my mind or my heart to “Look! See! Wonder!” Now with the addition of this small lens, I am discovering secrets, bewitched confidences.

Ukrainian nature macro photographer, Vyacheslav Mishchenko, takes us into the diminutive, but movingly emotional, universe of snails. It is magical – the world seen through the eyes of a snail (or any other small creature) is full of pathos, poignancy, and joy, just as our own world is. His photography features snails enraptured by a drop of water; or stretching with ardent longing towards each other. Now I, too, can discover these other universes, these other ways of being. 

Mishchenko advises, “I would ask a photographer to be patient, to develop artistic taste, to be romantic and finally to love nature”. How could I not be romantic or love nature, when disappearing down the small again, large again rabbit hole, like Alice in her wonder-land - in one instant too big, but in the next finding her way into another cosmos through a small door with an even smaller key. 

I am fascinated by the minute, desiccated veins of drying leaves; by the grey worn wood of fences, and doors, and old barns that looks like old wool. By the glittering lines of a spider web that scores an evening sky; or the detail of shape and space in a crow’s shed feather.  I had not noticed these infinitesimal textures or spaces before. 

Thank you, my sweet, for with this gift of a small lens, you’ve made my world bigger.