Part One: Now Arriving

AUDIO VERSION

When I was a tow-headed kid with a crew cut who wore striped t-shirts and hockey tape around the tips of his tattered sneakers, there were several passenger train routes through Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Great Northern had its Empire Builder, Burlington the Zephyr, and North Western the 400. Northern Pacific had the North Coast Limited, Rock Island the Twin Star Rocket, and The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad – known as The Milwaukee Road – had their flagship Hiawatha; these were the engines of the Industrial Age.

Meanwhile, on TV, Lawrence Welk, Dick Rodgers, and Florian Chmielewski (shim-a-less-kee) were delighting viewers with static camera shots of folks dancing in circles to Slavic music played by a concertina and a saxophone.

North American settlers who still had ties to the land were taking their last romantic spins with polka dancers and passenger trains. Boeing’s 707 was lifting people above and beyond as rock ‘n roll was warning folks to keep the white patent leather “off o’ their Blue Suede Shoes.”

The new heights and sounds of jet planes and rock ‘n roll were age spots on the hands of industrialists, and more pain in the hearts of the indigenous. The 1960s micro-age foreshadowed the coming tech revolution with sleek speed, new rhythms, and futuristic peeks at outer space on television. Between dances, the emerging media began to paint revealing color over episodes of black-and-white, Wild West lore.

Historical context and emerging trends meant nothing to a little towhead. I stood in awe on the platform at the Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis as my oldest sisters boarded a big steel coach with seats so huge you could sleep in them.

Taking the girls to the train was a family affair but, since there were nine of us, you had to cast lots for the privilege to watch them leave. They’d wave at us from their seats with excitement that was magnified by hair pulled back in white headbands that matched their gloves and the teeth of their ear-to-ear grins.

The aging, relatively tiny train station in Minneapolis may as well have been Grand Central or Penn Station to me, but it only had four platforms - Grand Central has 44. That meant nothing as well; the quixotic drone of a single locomotive beneath the tin-roof of the train shed canopy, rusted I-beams, and massive iron rivets was all I needed to be drawn into the geriatric allure of Industrial Aged nostalgia.

I knew my time to ride the big steel rails would come, and happily waved in response to my sisters’ hands that kept flapping as the train began to chug toward a romantic, ten-hour roll through parts of cities and towns never seen by the girls; it would carry them over rivers and through the woods. To grandmother’s house they’d go.

My only train ride had been with Jimmy Brinkhaus and Tommy Kobold on the Dan Patch Line of the Northfield, Minneapolis, & Southern Railway. We climbed into an empty box car for a couple hundred yards as the freighter crawled along Bailiff Place in our Bloomington, Minnesota neighborhood at speeds that were ‘safely’ slow enough to be overtaken by six-year-olds in tattered sneakers. That was the only train I ever ‘hopped’. Cautionary tales of a kid who slipped and had his leg cut off convinced me to bide my time for a big cushy seat on The Hiawatha.*

I had to wait for the train til I was twelve, when I was deemed old enough to take the trek down to grandmother’s house by myself. The sisters were nearly grown up by then, and curb-dropped me and my powder-blue Samsonite at the downtown terminal with instructions to wait for the proper announcement before climbing on board.

There were more stops by then, so mine would be a 14-hour trek. The recorded broadcast echoed through the building: “Now boarding, Jefferson Lines and Continental Trailways service to Northfield, Faribault, Owatonna…” that was my bus.

A bus… and not even a Greyhound.

The announcement continued, “…Dodge Center, Rochester, Stewartville, Spring Valley, Decorah, New Hampton (home of Sara Lee), Oelwein, Waterloo, Vinton (famous for popcorn), Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Mt. Pleasant, Fort Madison, Keokuk (World’s Largest Street Fair).”

There were some small towns in there, too. One of the last stops would mock me; Burlington was famous for railroads.

The bus trips down through Iowa, to Mom’s family farm in western Illinois all blend into one memory. I imagine a dozen rides, but it was probably four, and I admit to artistic license in recounting them.

In my memories, Jefferson Lines wasn’t so bad, but there was no observation car with a 360 view of the amber waves, no refreshments in the diner, and no place to explore except that tiny, overused rest room in the back. I’d play a balance game in that stinky little box by standing in a sports-stance and counting to see how long I could last without touching the walls as the bus bounced along Highway 63, or some crumbling County Road. It was a game of skill and will, in that you never really wanted to touch anything in there.

Jefferson Lines curb-dropped me in Waterloo for continuing service via Continental Trailways. The new rig had the same little box in back, but I’d already set a world record at Bus Bathroom Balance and would strike up a conversation or read a book. I read a lot of books. It took a full day in a Soviet Gulag to get from Oelwein to Ft. Madison one time as I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Sometimes, I’d just look around at the characters. I saw a cute girl my age one time, in Stewartville, but she got off the bus too soon for me to gather courage. It was only three hours to Iowa City. Despite my lack of courage, the bus rides were good to me, they got me to the farm.

One thing I liked about riding high was being almost eye-to-eye with truck drivers like my uncle Benton ‘Jiggs’ Burton. Mom once asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.

“A truck driver,” I replied.

I had Jiggs in mind. He was a tough country boy who could drive and fix anything. He could shuffle cards faster than anyone on the planet and finesse a 40,000-pound truck with no power steering using big, industrial-age-spotted hands.

He was part cowboy, part man of the world, as he drove herds of cattle across the plains to big cities and stockyards at Kansas City, Chicago, and South St. Paul in a snub-nosed hauler that could be tucked into a modern sleeper cab.

Years later, I’d bypass the steel rails and bus rides and re-trace Jiggs’ path to Illinois in a modern truck that could be steered with a little finger. In 2001, I ran into his son, cousin Bill. I hadn’t seen them in more than a decade; not since time turned a dozen buildings and two feed lots on the farm into more tillable acres that grew soybeans and corn rather than family and livestock.

Family reunions were semi-annual affairs at the farm where cousins renewed best friendships then dispersed to not be seen or heard.

We’d drive cars at 13, shoot squirrels with .22s, and each other with BB guns. We’d ride branches of mulberry trees like rocking horses above bedsheets that would harvest fruit by the pailful rather than the one-at-a-time plucks of gooseberries. We'd stay clear of the bulls, stampede the hogs, and skim low and quiet in ponds, like alligators, then pounce with rocks to thump bullfrogs that would expand dinner menus for us, and the feral cats.

After supper, at a dining room table that could seat about 50, games would be dealt, talks would include politics and religion. Iced desserts came from fresh cream and wild berries that were hand-cranked by big spotted hands and little would-be industrialists. No matter how or when I got there, it was always summer at the farm – in the way I remember.

In 2001, when there was little left but gravestones and memories, I was pleasantly surprised to learn from cousin Bill that Jiggs, the old truck-driving shuffler, was still with us, about 30 miles south, in a Mt. Sterling, Illinois nursing home.

The receiving nurse pointed down a hall cluttered with service carts and orange fiberglass chairs shaped like ice cream scoops, to a man who was now of a tiny world and draped in a wheelchair he couldn’t drive.

Jiggs didn’t know me from a deck of Hoyles and looked up with grumpy disgust for interrupting his habitual gaze. When I reintroduced myself, his eyes flashed like the bulbs of a Polaroid. As I thanked him for great childhood memories and recounted quail hunts, Sorghum Festivals, and Old Settlers’ Days at the town square bandshell, the mood, and his eyes, got soft and syrupy.

When there was nothing left to say, I said “Welp…” and eased up out of the scoop-chair. His eyes just blinked this time, with a fading, bittersweet resignation. I sensed he knew that other than his two kids, he’d just seen the last visitor from the outside world. He knew the freak coincidence, or divine intervention, was but a final glance at days-gone-by in a country farmhouse full of kids, card games, banjos, and roars of laughter. The picture had fully developed and started to fade. The cards had no more hands to shuffle.

I felt good, like a visiting Angel, for a split-second, then slinked like a reaper down the hall of the Senior Dying facility before slumping in my pickup to spend the next ten minutes in a weep I didn’t fully understand. A few weeks later, Jiggs went to see the outside world, forever. His legacy isn’t on the Internet.

Jets and Zooms replace train rides that once were the connections to rural families and farms. The horsepower of a leaf-hauling F-150 exceeds the force of a snub-nosed cattle rig. Thick, age-spotted hands of industrial strength pass on, as slim fingers finesse keypads of code.

Things aren’t as I wish to remember they were. The future – as it always must be – is now arriving.

*Writer’s note: Through a Bloomington, MN nostalgia page on Facebook, I learned that the story about the kid who lost a leg to train hopping wasn't just a parental scare tactic. It was Ronnie Knutson who tragically gave a leg that saved many others. God bless you, Ronnie.