The Canyon at Night

     Tonight it’s very quiet. Everyone is in bed. My husband is snoring softly beside me. A train is passing; its wheels clacking and rumbling. The tracks are very close to us in this wisp of a railroad town. Most of the time in the day I don’t even hear the trains or their whistles, they barely register in my brain, unless I fear being stuck by one. Such are the consequences of living on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’.

     At night they can sometimes be irritating. But tonight they are soft, a little more distant. May be it depends on which way the wind blows…Even the screech of brake-locked metal on metal as the train slows into the station, isn’t too bad tonight. It’s funny that sometimes it comforts me and I didn’t even realize it until just now.

     The mountains in which we live should actually be peaceful and perfectly quiet at night, except for crickets, frogs and maybe owls. I rarely hear owls, although they often leave large messages that they’ve been here deposited on top of my car, perched as they were, in the oak trees above it.

     But my town is in this little crack of a canyon. Wedged twisted and woven between a long three-cord ribbon of river, free-way and railroad track. So always, even when you pay it no mind, there is the ever present sound of this blended white noise. The freeway offers whispered rhythmic sounds, rising and falling, as the cars pass like ocean tide. Sometimes at night I pretend it is the ocean-- vast and dark and flat. The occasional semi-truck horn blast is really the sound of a boat announcing its return to safe harbor. Or maybe a low melancholy fog warning. We don’t get fog here…

     The trains and cars and distant river sounds create a kind of song that I have listened to every night for years. The river, the trains and the traffic all flows along here. The River only down, as the others strain along in both directions.

    Our bedroom ceiling fan whirls along with the symphony too. It doesn’t matter what time of year, even later we just get out the down comforters and enjoy the added tempo of the rain, or the quiet stillness that is snow falling. The snow actually feels like a blanket settling. You can wake from a dead sleep and know it has snowed by the very feel of it. All of this turning and flowing and whispering and clanking, who knew I was addicted?

    I hear no crickets tonight, just train whistles being tapped out in secret- code, they do that, the engineers. My dad used to have a code for my mom that she could recognize and know he was headed in to the train yard.

    But there are also the maniac trainmen that rocket in at 2 and 3 a.m. with horns blazing like guns in a shoot-out! Sadistic men who don’t bother with the polite middle-of-the-night toot, or quick little private messages. These people clearly relish waking up as many sleeping souls as possible. I have counted over fifteen or more, long, loud, consecutive horn blasts at a time. It is more obnoxious than cats mating, or drunks conversing in the hallways. Who knows, maybe it’s always the same guy who does it? I always vow, in a slumber- wrapped rage, to complain in the morning. But I never do.  Maybe everyone else does the same thing; I always forget to ask about that too.