In a White Room...

...with black curtains near the station...

Not really, it doesn’t have any curtains at all, black or otherwise, it’s surrealistic southwestern art deco marble, tall, aching empty and echoing... and sure, feel free to get out the old Cream, it’s their song set the mood of the moment.

It’s really just a little local running across Oklahoma and part of Texas,  but it’s still a train with a name, and that gentle reader?  That is something I wish I saw more of.  Anyhow, one morning a couple of weeks ago I took a buddy of mine to the city to catch the train.  Of course I went to fetch him from the return trip, that’s just how it’s done where I live.  The departure was early in the day, but the arrival was at night and the difference was most literally night and day.  You couldn’t really feel them with the morning sun shining, the echo of all the souls that had passed through the place, but at night it was all but unavoidable.  No one stayed downstairs to listen to the whispers and the echoes, most everyone was up on the platform waiting on the Flyer to pull in.  Everyone that is but me, I did stay downstairs for a time communing with the past.  Ghosts, yes, but they have their story too.  I did them the courtesy of listening for a bit.

...I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines
wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves...

They look at the empty room and ask what has become of their land, their people.  They ask where is everyone?  It was hard trying to form them an answer.  So many of them passed over well before television had come into it’s own, the world as it is now is a total mystery to them.  All they know is the feel of those few souls who wander through for one reason or another, and they do wonder what has happened.  They wonder at the emptiness and the fear.  I think a few of them are convinced Hitler must have won the war.

...platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.
I walked into such a sad time at the station

As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning...

How do you explain to souls who out lasted the dust bowl and the depression, who bested the war machines of Hirohito and Hitler, how do you explain to them what has happened to their land?  The answer is you really can’t, the truth is (mercifully) beyond their comprehension.   I did the only thing I could think of I knew we’d likely share: I started whistling Amazing Grace, trying to set a pitch and pace to make a harmony against the echoes.  Amazingly, from around the corner came a voice taking up the song, a woman’s voice clear and clean rising up to shatter the silence of the place with lyrics of faith and redemption.  I shut up, and so did they, the whispers faded away, you could feel peace fill the space. 

...I'll wait in the queue when the trains come back
Lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves...

I went up the stairs to the platform with the others to wait for the Flyer. She was only twenty minutes late, these days the freights have priority.  She arrived looking a trifle way worn and weary, in need of a bath really, but still... if you’ve ever met the train you know what I’m talking about: the throb of those big diesels resonating in your chest beneath the whine of the dynamos they drive, the motion and the mass of the thing that will not be denied, her cargo of humanity stepping down onto the platform as they have since the days of steam... yea.   For so many, many reasons trains with names are a good thing.

Lyrics excerpted from the 

1968 “Cream” song “White Room” 

written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown