trestle wood by Lisa Werkhausen
“It’s made of the old trestle wood,” Rick says.
He’s talking about his dining room table. The table is about 12 feet
long, and crammed around it are nearly 30 people. Rick was a chef in the
White House in the late 90’s, cooking for Bill Clinton and his friends. Why
he was now cooking for my friends is still unclear to me, and overall
unimportant.
We were eating deer, butchered that day, beautiful salads, scalloped
potatoes, fresh bread, all kinds of cheeses, and I had baked a couple of
apple pies. A lot of the people I know are roaming types, so this many of us
being in the same place at the same time was a real rarity. Even though I was
rubbing shoulders with some of the people I loved most, my mind was stuck on
the table that was supporting all the food, drink, and elbows.
It felt like hurtling through space, with the night sky reflecting on
the water all around, the wind whipping me around. Sort of like that space
ride at Disneyland; only here, no matter how hard I strained my eyes, I
couldn’t see any scaffolding supporting this dream world. I was clutching my
jacket to me, pulling my hat down every couple of seconds, hoping the wind
wouldn’t take it from me, screaming at the top of my lungs.
Before I ever rode a freight train across the Great Salt Lake Causeway
I’d heard my friends talking about what it was like, but I was skeptical of
their accounts, seeing as traveling folks always love to romanticize the
miserable shit-show traveling really is 90 percent of the time. But at this
moment, the close encounters with the cops, the mile-long sprint along the
train, or the uncomfortable nature of living in a steel box for 30 hours,
didn’t matter. Being on that iron horse racing through the night was in fact
the most romantic thing I’d ever done.
The wind was biting at my face, smoking my cigarettes for me. My love,
clutching me in his arms, was leaned back against the cold, hard steel that
was tearing through the night without regard for anyone or anything. Every
mile further from the glow of the city, seemed to make the night darker, the
stars brighter. We’ve been on the Great Salt Lake for a good 15 minutes now,
and there is absolutely no end in sight. He points to the left. I whip my
head around trying to catch a glimpse of what he pointed at, and barely see
the dark contour of a sail boat that is weathering on the side of the tracks,
a stark reminder that everything fades.
Normally the high was different. We’d ride the bus to the train
yard. We’d wait for dusk and resume our relationship with the rails. We’d
wait in open tractor trailers, on loading docks, in junked cars, in a patch
of trees, or in a friendly neighbors’ backyard. We’d look for signs of old
travelers, scouring the steel or wood for monikers from decades past. We’d
wait until the trains’ headlights came into view, throw on our packs, and
crouch low, running through an alien world, unfit for humans. We’d find a
rideable car, looking behind and ahead as we ran, scanning for car
headlights; scanning for trouble. We’d climb the ladders, hide ourselves, try
to slow our breaths and wait. The brakes air up, and the sound of the
couplers expanding rolls down the train like a wave. We’re moving.
But this time it was the stars, the fucking stars, that took my breath
away. Out there in the middle of that strange inland sea, miles away from
civilization, with all this sky shining down on and up at me, I felt so
small; so vulnerable. The two of us and my dog, out there all alone, in a
world where humans don’t really belong, traveling across a man-made bridge at
65 mph.
Finished in 1904, the “Lucin Cutoff” was a shortcut from the original
rail lines laid through the famous Promontory Point, it included a 12 mile
long trestle over the Great Salt Lake. In the 1950’s it was replaced by a
causeway, but the route is still the same. In the late 90’s the old trestle
was pulled out from the lake, milled, and sold as lumber. Now, the Douglas
Fir trees that once supported the longest Southern Pacific trestle, are
supporting my dinner, my community; reminding me of simpler, more romantic
times.
