28 d geleden
Wednesday evening I ran the Heritage east out past Mount Juliet, out where the subdivisions finally give up and the road goes back to being a road. No plan to it. I just wanted to be somewhere the light could get all the way to the ground.
About ten miles short of Lebanon the crossing arms came down on me. Little two lane, no shoulder, corn on one side and a hay field on the other, and here comes a freight out of the west taking its own sweet time about it. I shut the motor off, which I don't usually do, and put a boot down.
You forget how long a train is until you are sitting in front of one with nothing else to do. I got to counting cars and lost the number somewhere in the hoppers. Grain, tankers, a long string of container flats with names on them from ports I will never see. The whole thing pulling that low rumble up through the tank and into my hands.
Fella in a pickup behind me got out, leaned on his fender, and neither one of us said a word the entire time. Just two men watching something that was going to happen with or without us. When the last car went by and the bell quit, he nodded at me and got back in.
Crossed over, rode on into the dark toward Lebanon, and turned around at the square without stopping. Some evenings the whole point of going out is that a train makes you sit still for six minutes.