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Friday, Apr. 22, 2005 / 11:03 p.m. ~Train Storm~ We had one of those storms that builds from a distance, and you can hear it coming, hear the thunder louder and louder, and if you're outside you can smell the ozone, and you know it's coming, and despite the radar images you watch onscreen you just can't know the scope, but then it arrives and it's violent, and short, and before it gains any ground at all it's gone. Not even enough time to worry about logging off or shutting things down or to wonder what that siren sound is, and is it a new tornado warning system? It can't be a train, like that sound I hear on nights when I'm lying awake in bed close to 1:30 in the morning, or is it 2:00?, thinking, No, there are no trains near here, that can't be a train, it makes no sense, and then I drive into the old part of town out here, and I drive over the tracks, and I try to gauge the distance, how many miles is it, how far can sound travel, how quiet must it be, in general, for that sound to make its way, here, past my own closed windows, to sound so familiar and comforting? The house from my dreams, the house where I spent several crucially important years of my life, that house, the one that won't go away and sometimes I wonder if it should, if there is a need, was situated just beyond railroad property, a small stand of woods between those tracks and our back patio, our yard soft over the septic tank, the grass where I stretched out lawn chairs over the years and lay to bake in the sun, hoping for an optimal shade of golden tan to wash over my skin, alternating between sweat and suntan lotion, not long before the letters 'SPF' became a household acronym. I remember the trains, the whistles blowing, more like horns, train horns blowing, sounding, warning, announcing, and when inside, the rumble, the rattle of the old windows, the pausing to finish a sentence, but the constancy, the familiarity, the comfort, the sameness, the expectation, the waiting to see how long this one would be, the wondering where it was going, and what would it be like to hop on? I have a favorite self-portrait from that time, from then, when I was first starting out in photography school, an experiment in black and white infrared, and I love the track behind me, I love that I'm sitting right there, next to it, right where so many trains had passed before, and no doubt pass still, and that I'd walked through woods to get there, and that I can see that comfort in me, yet I'd set the camera on tripod and rushed to sit and appear that way.  Cost of the War in Iraq
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