Mair's Friday Presentation

Train 80: The Carolinian
(train through my heart)

We don’t take the time to find the right words. I never had the time to find the right words. I took the train and I took the time.

Train #80: The Carolinian. This Amtrak train services stations from Charlotte, North Carolina to New York City. I picked it up in Greensboro, North Carolina after dad drove me 3 hours to get there. It was one of those places. Where there is a desolate gravel parking lot with a smattering of vehicles (although it is unclear if the are actually functioning or not). A structure or shack that could function for multiple purposes (not because it is glorious and modern and a well-designed multi-use space but because it is a box, with a door and a dusty window that suggests something can happen at some point, although due to its seeming abandonment, it is unclear, like the vehicles in the parking lot if it is still used for anything at all). The steps up to the structure and then and a slight incline leading to a plank to nowhere (of course, this is where the train theoretically pulls up, positioning one at the correct height to board). With a slight breeze that is as hot or maybe even hotter than the air temperature, my dad and I stand at the railing, talking slowly and softly.

The train stations I will visit along the way are Burlington, Durham, Cary, Raleigh, Selma, Wilson and Rocky Mount. After crossing the state line into Virginia we will stop at the Petersburg station before arriving in Richmond my final destination, approximately 5 hours and 25 minutes, plenty of time to think, write and basically figure out my life.

On the train to Richmond. I thought I might finally lose my shit either due to dad’s help or in spite of dad’s help. I wish I had found the words to tell Nicole I needed her. Needed her to be here for me, to be with me and so now anything that is difficult is sad. I just get mad and upset that she didn’t come with me.

Maybe, just maybe, traveling through the countryside of the South on an Amtrak, I will find those words. Find the places in my heart, where the tracks run through but there is nothing else….no one else ventures there and I haven’t in a long long time. Dad says the trains run through the places that people don’t go, the places time has forgotten….the junkyards, the poor parts, the backwoods, where there are no roads. The train through my heart.

It was only 3 days ago that Dad drove 8 hours to Richmond to pick me up to return to HorseShoe. Nicole had to work and I said I would be fine to go to the funeral by myself. I had not been back to the place I used to call home since so much about me seemed to have changed. Traveling back to the place that made me. The place I left as soon as I could. I went straight to 169 Kimzey. Jack and Grammary’s. I knew I was older now because the first thing I said to Pam and Allen’s kids “you’ve grown up, I hardly recognize you!” This, of course, is the one thing older people always say to kids. Funny to catch yourself saying something that makes you aware of yourself in a much different way. Right, I am older too.

At Grammary’s funeral, they repeated the words from Jacque and Kim’s wedding, “The world is too dangerous a place to not have love.” Grammary didn’t attend her daughter Jacque’s wedding to a woman and died less than a year later. Like all things southern, we let peculiarities exist but we don’t name them. Grammary and PapaJack went to Jacque and Kim’s house every Sunday evening for dinner though.

Standing outside at Mills River Methodist Church in HorseShoe, North Carolina, a mile from where I grew up, I listened to the buzz of the mid-morning bugs, working hard before it got too hot to do anything. Already under the hot sun, the weight of the heat stood as heavy as the tension between my mother and me. We were still barely speaking.

After the funeral, we returned to the house on Kimzey Road and the instruments came out. I had forgotten that part but quickly slipped back into the sensations of myself many years ago-the surround sound I knew in that cove was being in the midst of every musical instrument possible. I could never quite put my finger on where that part of me came from because I was only looking at my “biological” family for those cues. But my mountain loves: canned food, fish ponds, streams, bluegrass, gospel, sitting around the living room with sports on the tv, meals together at the table….that was all from my Combs family. The family we spent every holiday with, more than ever spent with my biological grandmother, aunts and uncles. I had my first crush (Reese), my first prom dress (Grammary sewed it from a Vogue pattern out of magenta sequins), my first babysitting job (the babies I saw earlier and did the “my how you’ve grown” cliche), my first concert (Pam took me to the Damn Yankees/Bad Company show), my first real political discussions (with Jack; the beginning of this fiery radical activist), my first grandmother who always fed me and sent me off jars of pickles, beans, applesauce, preserves, a bag of at lease 10 amish friendship muffins and several pairs of Jack’s retired Levi’s (my favorite fashion statement at the time). Grammary, the one who took care of me on sick days…making mac and cheese and soup. We lived right beside them, in a little red house on a hill with a trail through the trees between the two.

As I sat there that night, the music filling up the empty space of Grammary with Jacque’s voice-I felt it all inside of me again and I couldn’t stop smiling….Amazing Grace, I’ll Fly Away, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Reese, on the upright bass introducing The Combs Family Band. Grammary would have been on the piano singing baritone, and there were tears as they decided who would sit in for her tonight.

Where did I go this summer? I went back. Back into myself, into the hollow of the mountain, the cove in the hills, the branch in the stream, the depths of who i was. Still part of who I am.

This past weekend I sunk into the depths

The places I don’t let myself go

The places I am afraid to go

The places I fight so hard not to go

And I got so far removed from Nicole, able to see her and hear her but not being able to reach through all of the shit building up around me. And for the first time in my life, we were able to find Each Other again. Not through the words of time but through our bodies. Slowly and softly. I felt the train running through the tracks where no one goes and we danced to the sound of the train whistle. We dance back to Each Other

Through Each Other

Against Each Other

With each movement, feeling the train moving steadily through, feeling walls dissolve, inching a little closer to each other. Until the Each and the Other were indistinguishable.

Train Part 2: Between a Swamp and Cornfield

So, I am over an hour past my time due into Richmond and I am sitting in the Selma North Carolina train station. With the one and only worker sitting in a wheelchair watching a fuzzy television, she seemed unconcerned with the fact that instead of the usual few passengers that come through this station, there were now over 100 sweaty, worked up stranded people.

At 12:15 (it is now 3:15) the train broke down.

My dad’s last words before I got on the train were, “It is better to be on a broken down train than a broken down airplane”. It didn’t occur to me that he was predicting the next 10 hours of my life.

We sat on the broken down train somewhere in between “heat and mo’ heat” (as quoted from the self-professed Sunday school teacher in the seat in front of me)

Or as someone else put it “between a swamp and cornfield”. Both descriptions of our location and situation were quite precise. Many of the passengers were heading to DC and felt we were much safer on the completely closed up, no air-at-all tin can of a train than “out in the wild”. One woman started hollering there was a big field rat out the window, coming to get us (it turned out to be a groundhog). Another woman was for Viktor Newman to fly his plane in to pick us up (he turned out to be the lead in the soap opera the young and the restless).

**Speaking of tin cans, I am reminded of my stepfather’s multiplicitous, recycling use of Miller Lite cans. He has a dog training method that involves saving the empty beer cans, filling them with pennies and shaking them in an intimidating manner at the five house dogs to hush them or get them to calm down. The dogs, being the persistent and smart animals they are, were frustrating him to no end by escaping from the chicken wire fenced-in backyard. Nicole offered to help him re-build this fence, but Charlie declined. Instead, he created what I have termed “the redneck electric fence” which consists of a series of strung together Miller lite cans filled with pennies running the entire border of their property.

With a heat index of 100 degrees, sitting in a train with no power on a single set of tracks in the middle of nowhere, north Carolina for over 2 hours, the lack of oxygen combined with the heat began to make me believe that I had imagined a life in San Francisco and that really I had just been here all the time, living this life between a swamp and a cornfield and that maybe it wasn’t so bad.

Unfortunately, my dad was channeling his psychic ability that day because his other insightful words prior to getting on the train became the next fulfilled prophecy.

After the 2 hour wait for a rescue (this IS 2005, not 1935), a diesel train came to pusll us into Selma, NC where there would be buses to pick us up.

My dad’s words 8 hours earlier about trains: “Now, Mair, the Amtrak train is NOTHING like a greyhound. The train is much nicer than a bus”.

I will point out here to discuss the South’s very complicated and layered use of the word “nice”. (It is much like the word “fine”). And can mean anything from actually what most think of as “nice” to the nice that suggests much to the contrary.

So, I am in Selma at 3:30pm with buses to arrive in “7-8 minutes”. The Red Cross Of Selma came to assist with cold drinks, stale crackers and beef jerky that won’t expire in my lifetime.

**Again I am reminded of my very far away, California organic lifestyle. Staying at my mom’s house, I made salads everyday. There was an unlabeled jar where we traditionally kept bulk olive oil with the liquor pour top that was routinely refilled. On my third day of salad eating, I inquired about the contents. It tasted slightly unusual, not quite the olive oil flavor I expected. Charlie spoke up in between bites of his two ground beef burgers and microwaved vegetables admitting to a switch up. A break from our understood use of this particular bottle. He wanted to deep fry some corncakes the other night. So, he drained the oil from the turkey fryer and funneled it into the olive oil jar because of its liquor pour top function. This oil I had been using for 3 days on my $10 organic salads had deepfried 2 Thanksgiving turkeys and 3 pork tenderloins....6 months ago.

“The busses are here!!” The crowd swell broke me from my heat delirious reminiscing of my family dynamics.

We herded ourselves, slow and sweating onto a suspiciously hot bus, preparing for our departure from the home of Vick’s Vapo-Rub, Selma NC. One passenger suggests that because the bus isn’t moving yet, the air condition can’t work properly (you know, similar to that feeling on the runway in a plane where only the jet fuel fumes are coming in through the air system while the pilot is gunning the engines to make the air flow?) As we pulled out of the train station on a greyhound bus, everyone cheered! The sun was beginning its painfully slow descent, resisting the horizon’s take over.

In the thick air still holding the reverberations of the cheers and exhausted excitement, barreling up I-95 in the bus (the bus that saved us from the train) it was quickly determined that the air condition was indeed broken (might I remind you that safety regulations require that bus windows cannot be opened). This was not unlike the tin-can of a train with non-opening windows I had been rescued from several hours ago. The train was actually cooler. We are all soaking wet, suffocating and the guy in the back with a heart condition is freaking out. People are going nuts yelling at the driver. I think a riot might ensue.

Bus driver makes a U-turn and we are back at the Selma Train station. The long swing of the bus turning around is the force needed for the tears to come out (it has taken this long). Why has she not gotten in the truck to pick me up?? Is it because I keep telling her not to? I think I have deployed the word “fine” more than once.

Black Mountain, North Carolina to Richmond Virginia: 15 hours and 31 minutes. I could have been in central Florida right now. Or Kentucky, or New York City, or 15 hours and 31 minutes closer to San Francisco

Part 3: Broken

46 hours before I leave (on an airplane).

To go back to San Francisco

To leave Virginia

To leave the south

To leave my girl my home my world

As it exists now.

It shifted somewhere in there, pretty early on, became who I was where I was what I was. I don’t even think of this as “going back” because “back” assumes things are the same as when I left and they aren’t.