CHAPTER 24
I had fully recuperated from my appendix surgery as fall began its descent toward winter. We had made our pilgrimage to the grandparents for Thanksgiving and my mind was thinking about what to ask Santa for Christmas. Iva and I discovering the truth was still in the future. Some of the puppies dad had given to friends ended up in the pound for chasing chickens. Topper was growing into a gentle dog and Peppy still romped about when I played and slept by my side.
I had conquered my bike, although there was a very limited area for me to ride it where we lived. I was limited to riding up and down our lane, which got boring soon enough. I was hoping for early snow to cover the hill so I could sled again, but the field remained brown and non-sledable. The sky was a constant late-November-early-December slate gray color.
I hiked up our hill and couldn’t pull my eyes from the ridge at the top. My mother told me over and over for two years, “Stay away from the crest”. I wondered what lurked there, monsters, Martians or did the earth simply fall off to nothing on the other side.I could not take my eyes off the crest.
I was nearer the top than I had even bothered to come and saw how the land fell off sharply above the peak. I could see distant trees lining the horizon. They sat back a distance from the crest and were lower that the hilltop. I decided to go all the way.
At the top I stopped and looked at what lay beyond. There was a pair of railroad tracks. This had discovered the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
I clambered down the other side, a steep cutout made ages ago by the men who lay the track. I stood by the first set of rails. I looked both ways and saw the rails narrow into the distance. Cinder and coal chips covered the ground with a bit of litter here and there.
This was not threatening at all. It was quiet and empty. There was nothing much to see beyond the tracks but woods. I hadn’t much up close experience with trains yet, but I did have my little phobia about crossing tracks.
Yes, in my boyhood I developed a mild anxiety
about crossing railroad tracks. The reason was a movie. My dad sometimes took me to the movies. There was a theater in Coatesville called The Silver. It showed a lot of second-run films and B-movies, mostly action films and Westerns. I remember some films I saw there with my dad. I saw The Sea-Wolf (1941 release), with Edgar G. Robinson at that theater. That film stands out in my mind for some reason, perhaps the brutality of “Wolf Larson”. Maybe I expected another animal story, like White Fang or Call of the Wild. After all, The film was based on a Jack London novel and had Wolf in the title.
(Note, I read a Blog saying The Silver was an all-Black theater back in the old Coatesville. If so, then a couple of honkies slipped in because I know that is where my dad took me to see a number of movies in my childhood.)
That theater showed double features all the time.
It played short comedies in between. I remember seeing several of a series about some bumbler that we called “Behind the Eight Ball”. This series was actually called “Joe McDoakes” (1942-1956), but the title card always showed him standing behind a giant 8 ball.
This theater often ran Three Stooges shorts. I would get nightmares from them. It wasn’t the characters or their beating up each other that bothered me. It was the opening title credits that spooked me. I found the weird mask in the background accompanied by the “Three Blind Mice” theme music somehow upsetting.
(For some reason getting an example of the Three Stooges Title Card was next to impossible. It took a lot of Goggling to find just this one. This is mystifying since every Stooge short from 1945 through 1959 used that background. I wasn’t the only child of my generation frightened by the image perhaps.)
One movie I viewed at the Silver that frightened
me about trains, or a least the tracks, was Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). I remember little of this movie except the climax. (SPOILER ALERT!) Tracy pursues the villain, Cueball, across a rail yard. Cueball gets his foot caught between rails on a switch. A train comes zooming down the tracks and kills him. I became very hesitant every time I came to a train crossing after that film, which I would do every day walking to junior high school in Downingtown. I stepped very carefully.
Noticed I wasn’t afraid to cross tracks, just cautious. I was cautious the day I discovered what was beyond the hill as well, but my need to know was stronger than any fear. I stepped gingerly across the first set of rails, watching intently where I placed each foot. I successfully crossed and now stood in the space between the parallel tracks. I was so intend on not getting my foot stuck I hadn’t noticed a distant sound. I heard it now. It came from the west and looking in that direction I saw the train coming.
I no sooner saw this train that I heard another from the east. Turning around I saw it as well. I stood frozen in the narrow space between the sets of rails. Trains were coming toward me from opposite directions. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. This may have been the wisest choice, I don’t know. Would I have made it if I had tried to cross either rail at that point?
Both trains reached me at about the same moment.
There was a swirling wind buffeting me with leaves and debris spinning through the air. The force from each train must have countered out the other.
Centrifugal force didn’t knock me over or suck me under. I closed my eyes and stood stiff as a board until the great roar in my ears subsided. Any object protruding from a freight car could have decapitated me. I was shook up, but whole and alive. I would live to see Christmas. For once I did not hesitate crossing a train track. I ran across the rails and scrambled up the cutout to the safety of my own hill.
My final curiosity at the Swamp was satisfied.
In those two years I became an overly imaginative, nightmare-plagued, highly curious, socially inhibited, physically awkward, self-reliant, risk-taking loner. And Dad was soon to thrust me back into civilization.
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