Train Tracks, and a July 21, 1987 postcard

It took about two minutes to walk from the mid-point of the hill that our house was on to the train tracks. Freight trains carrying coal noisily traveled those tracks several times each day and night when I was a child. The traffic slowed down greatly as I got older and the strip mines around us had lower yields.

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would wander around the tracks looking for random items of interest. There was a lot less trash in those days, so we were mainly fascinated by rail road spikes which looked like nails on steroids. At one point, we collected over a dozen of these heavy and useless objects and deposited them in our dilapidated barn. They stayed there in a pile until the structure caved in many years later. Aside from the highly collectible rusty spikes, we occasionally found some wires or large bolts, but nothing exceptionally fascinating came of our trips to the tracks.

In my teens, I started walking the tracks alone and would sometimes follow them for as much as an hour outbound in each direction. I didn't know where they lead when I started walking them. I just knew that I couldn't get lost if I followed them and, having a poor sense of direction, this was of no small importance to me.

One day, I was about 10 or so minutes from home walking along the tracks and a man was following at a distance behind me. I'd never seen anyone else walk those rails and was afraid he might do me harm. I hustled forward until I'd gone around a turn and was out of his line of sight then climbed an embankment that was overcrowded with bushes and cut up through fields and woods in a long diagonal back toward my home. I don't think he meant me any harm, but seeing anyone out there with me filled me with adrenaline. I went home scratched up and shaken.

Though that experience scared me, I didn't stop walking the tracks. Aside from that lone experience, I felt very free on those walks. It helped me spend time away from my family and to escape my emotionally abusive mother. It was also a way for me to be outside, but for other people not to see me since no one (aside from that lone man on one occasion) tended to walk there. It was a rare situation in which I could be free of public shaming and bullying about my weight by strangers so I wasn't going to abandon that route.

As I approached my mid-teens, one of the biggest reasons that I kept doing it was that following the tracks all the way to town lead me very close to where the post office was located. It took about a half hour or so, but it was the most direct way for me to get to our post office box without my parents' assistance. Even after I got a car and lost weight, I would sometimes take that walk because it was so peaceful and exhilarating.

After I got into my long distance relationship with Tito, I used that walk to tape him a few times. It was the only way that I could walk and talk in public and not be seen as a lunatic because the only "risk" (aside from errant wanderers following me) was that a train would come along and I'd have to step aside and let it pass. I could also just pack up the tape I was working on, seal it in the padded mailer, and send it off when I reached the post office.

Of course, as I detailed in my book, the post office was a place that I became ambivalent about because the workers were nosy and sometimes withheld my mail. I spent no small amount of time on those treks thinking about whether or not I'd be able to retrieve goodies from my pen pals when I reached it both because of random delivery schedules and the postal workers' behavior.

This card from Tito, which had a Japanese theme but was not sent from Japan, tweaked the workers who may have tampered with my mail.