Balloons as a base

Bigfoot walked the train tracks behind my house. That's how we met.

(We moved way out to a small town about three hours outside the city. It was a writer’s retreat after the success of my first novel. I was tired of how social I was expected to be. It didn’t seem worth the trouble of charming anyone any longer. I had written a book that mattered enough to get published. After the book tour, I was ready for a nervous breakdown.

People were turning away already, as if we stood in an endless receiving line, never sure who was host and who was guest and who was waiting tables. Everyone was telling me to go write somewhere, come back with something. I was ecstatic and exhausted. I was very frightened.)

We happened to live beside a field on a plot of land beside a farm. The farm had sold some of the near field in order to keep running and we lived on a parcel of land between the far field and the farm house. The tractors drive by our house every morning before dawn. There are all sorts of reasons to stay awake: the cows milling about the grass, the banging of a gate.

A train track runs diagonally across what remains of the near field. At a certain time of the night, the train would stop and a conductor would jump down and open the gate. The farmer could have replaced the gate with a cow guard. That would have let the train pass without difficulty, but Tom the farmer was unwilling to spend a dime solving the problem. He thinks it’s the railroad’s responsibility.

The field is his on both sides of the tracks. This had been going on for a long time. In the deep darkness, the conductor gets out and bangs the gate fiercely, really just hammers and tears it to the ground. He might have made his life easier and driven straight through, but he wanted no evidence on the train. He’d tear down the gate and drive into the field and stop a while to tear down the other gate.

When the train was stopped in this position, sometimes the herd got bisected as they quietly grazed in the moonlight. They would start mooing. One night I was awakened by the sound.

I stood in my house coat on the front porch, still in my slippers, with a cup of coffee, trying to steady my impressions. I hadn’t quite mastered the way country folk abandon sleep when the time comes, the reason they are always tired, always active.

I watched the conductor get back on the train, having trounced the other gate yet again. As the train pulled away, it nagged its horn as if to say: “Fuck you and your gates and your cows.”

I watched the tired farmers come awake, not so disappointed. Some of the men set out to carry the pieces that could be salvaged and repaired, while others guarded against the frightened cattle stampeding through the gaps in the fence. I put on my boots and rushed out to help.

It was Tom and his two sons and one grandson. They all strode like versions of each other and set to the various tasks without saying a word. They worked with great competence while I stood holding my flashlight so they could see.

I had a nice flashlight and anyone who could be of any use was always welcome. I was gradually expressing my way into the life of the farm.

I wanted the fresh air, the vigorous ingenuity of it all. I thought I might write a book about it. I was never essential. I played no important role in any operation. I held things for people and I ran errands. Mostly I stood around, especially at night. I was usually up anyway, writing. I thought I might call the book: “The Light on the Hill.”

That night I volunteered, without fail, to get up and open the gate at 3:30 AM precisely. I would stand there till the train passed and then close the gates behind it. The very next night, I explained this new plan to the conductor who was much obliged to me.

The train passed at top speed after that. The driver bipped the horn to say hello to me but would not stop for anything. It was a dangerous sight to see every night at such an hour, mesmerizing with its constancy. The messages of the world flew past in graffiti on coal cars, flat beds loaded with behemoth slabs of die-cast metal, cars stacked into trays overtop of each other, rushing past in my flashlight, sometimes for a full hour. They were bigger loads now since they didn’t have to stop. Eventually everything would fade into a deep silence and I’d sheepishly close the gates.

It was also my job to ensure that none of the herd were on the far side of the tracks when the train came through. I was so useful! But this task proved to be quite difficult over time. The more I shooed the cows away, the more curious they became of the grass on the other side, as if it were somehow better than that in the field at large. Perhaps it was. It was clearly much safer on the near side. On the far side, they would be cut off from the safety of the barn, exposed to wild animals.

The most dangerous animals around were stray dogs, sometimes a badger or a rabid raccoon, a spooked buck. Wildcats and wolves are just legends around here. No one has seen a bear in 50 years of recollection.

One night most of the cows were huddled, packed tight in the thin wedge of grass beyond the tracks. They stood on the tracks as well, dinging the rails like bells with their hooves.

The herd moves like water. Where ever you push offers some resistance. You can only do so much to convince it of one way or another.

I couldn’t seem to move them at all. I couldn’t circle beyond them into the corner, so I couldn’t drive them back across. They had trapped me, restrained me amongst themselves. I could only yell at their infuriating indifference.

The plain truth of the situation dawned on me, namely that I would not be able to move them and the train was coming at full speed and would not stop for anything and there were at least a dozen cows standing on the tracks now, trying to crowd into the little wedge of good grass.

The train would derail and perhaps explode or spill toxic chemicals into the earth killing everything and everyone in a 50 mile radius of the very spot where I was running around madly, in an absolute panic, incapable of inflicting my will to elicit the smallest change. Helpless, in fact, impotent, weak, unworthy of my responsibilities, lacking all credibility as a man. Those great gluttons would not swear off a bit of good grass to save their lives.

At that moment, a great peaked whistling sound cut the air.

At first, I thought it was the train whistle blowing from far off. But there was something else to the sound, something expressive and plasticine, something like a voice speaking in a sort of ruptured scream. It was also like a machine sound, as if some great mechanism were being cold started and revved up to speed. Truly terrifying, like the world being ripped in half in the bare hands of something awesome. The air resonated with micro-tremors that seemed to pierce right into my body and shake the base of my brain.

The cry was a true command. The sense it managed to express to me was that some entity was allowing me to bear witness to it commanding, with the utmost authority, that the cows leave this side of the track and clear the tracks altogether. It was pronouncing a territorial claim to that corner of the field as if the tracks represented a boundary between nations. An eloquent speech in every way, and yet not really speech at all, but some glottal snarl that worked just the same, saying everything with nothing, so perfectly, so convincing.