The Summer Train

      One of the sensations that I can conjure if I concentrate, with which I also become reacquainted a few times a year or so, is the vaguely electric warm potential of summer nights in the still streets of my hometown. It is a crystal clear remnant of years of repeated circumstance piled into my memory, not connected with any particular scent or event or person (I find that many of my memories are attached in this way). The feeling of being out and about, actively bored, tracing familiar paths walked hundreds of times through silent block after silent block, is an unbroken thread that winds itself through the tapestry of my adolescence, connecting familiar faces and phases and tracing the terrifying transitions that came with growing up. 

     At 14 and 15, we darted through yards and shadowed parks playing man hunt, a game where most of the allotted playing time was spent walking alone through the night searching for movement in your peripheral vision. When the enemy was spotted, a chase might unfold through the neighborhood the raw exhilaration of which wouldn't be matched for months of high school. My first kiss took place after a long walk around town late at night, stretching my curfew, finding shadows to wrap ourselves in between the pale orange beams of streetlamps. If nothing else, my friends and I would wait until after midnight and stream out of basements or off of porches into the night just to buy half gallons of cheap iced tea and walk the railroad tracks that cut through town until we got too sleepy to balance.        

     In my adult life I remain assured and am regularly reminded that I will always be in love with the sound of that train's distant dependable whistle cutting through the thick warm air of small town nights in the summer. It seemed during the slow procession of my childhood and adolescence that a short time into summer vacation, a night would come when I would find myself lying awake in bed listening to the train fly by, and mentally mark the close of another year added to my body and mind. The train's rumbling progress brought with it cascades of emotion, long imagined adventures with juvenile crushes, sorrow and confusion over expiring friendships, fear and excitement of witnessing my own body and identity fluctuate and develop. As the bizarre whispering tendrils of sleep crept into my sensory landscape, I would float out into the still orange night and do battle with the monsters of youth.

      The hurdles of small town boredom, ever increasing in height as we grew up, led us not only into the tumbling, socially charged catharsis of drugs & alcohol in parents' basements but also out and up, in the middle of the night, onto the roofs of school buildings, where I found my first personal niche. After midnight, we circled the high school, spotting possible weaknesses that would allow us to explore new sections of the huge expanse of roof under which we spent overstimulated, half-awake hours during the mornings and afternoons. We chose school buildings for their general sturdiness and strange, blocky geometries that allowed us to wander the roofs without worrying about being seen from the ground. I was most often the first to scout a new way up, the most daring climber, and the quickest with encouragement when one of my friends got spooked or claimed to be too tired to take a lap around the roof at 2am on a Friday night. When the corners, gaps and shadows of the high school roof had been exposed to us, and we had ridden the waves of adrenaline that carried us through those first expeditions into the unknown, we spread out onto other roofs around town because it just seemed like the natural thing to do - we cherished those close calls with janitors, the slinking through darkness to seize our chance to climb, but above all, the heart-pounding pleasure in getting away with something so innocuous but delightfully against the rules. Thus was my appetite for adventure forged in the tepid coals of small town adolescence - excitement had to be cultivated, not encountered, so the burden of finding an outlet for our pent-up angst and energy resided entirely in our imaginations.

      On visits to my home town nowadays, I'll often pick a night to stay up a bit later, until the traffic of errand-runners disperses, leaving silent streets in a near-vacuum waiting to be filled by the rusty echoing howl of the train's whistle. I amble over the cool floors of the house I grew up in, grasping onto the excitement for the known-but-unknown that I grew up with, reduced now to a faint unsettling deja vu that my mind manipulates and rearranges the older I get. My hand turns the lock and slides the chain in its housing, a ritual made reflexive by hundreds of nights of quiet practice. I step out, or rather my trusty legs carry me, every step and movement printed in muscle memory, the cracks in the sidewalk looking just right, the night enfolding me reliably. I am far removed in time, and I walk in the middle of the empty road, and the tangerine street lamps evince silhouettes of past lives, when it seemed like everyone I loved was within arms' reach and we had perpetual plans to meet at midnight just to be near each other. On a night like this I will walk and think and feel until my soul is reacquainted, however briefly, with the billowing sense of possibility that caused the summer nights of my boyhood to nearly vibrate, and I will breathe in the still blackness, retracing my younger self's steps I'm sure, remembering pieces of me and wondering how they fit together.