I once saw a train wreck, live and in person, when I was a young teen sitting out on the porch of a farmhouse in Kaufman County. We were all sitting on the porch in Warsaw, Texas watching the train after the annual corn fest. Alta and Sterling were well into their 70’s but they still worked the farm they had had most of their lives. Their small 2-bedroom farmhouse was adjacent to several hundred acres of maize and corn growing at its peak height in September. My brother Kirk and I would take turns running into the cornfields and getting scared. 10 yards in and you were completely isolated. The silence was surprising and the huge zig zag spiders were threatening. Sometimes the only way out was to call out and follow someone’s voice.
Each year these two septuagenarians would invite my family over to eat corn and celebrate the harvest. They loved to see my brother and I rip on a dozen cobs of corn. Some consider this pig food but my (pre)adolescent self found that fresh corn out of the pot and a stick of butter was truly blissful. It was hot, probably in the 90’s, but after August in North Texas 90 feels really good. After dinner we were sitting around on the porch because it was much cooler than inside – there was no air conditioning to speak of. We had been sitting there with little conversation - the Freiley’s weren’t talkative people. We sat there being with each other and enjoying the serenade of the cicadae’s of late summer. If there is any romance in farming I’m sure that this is where I came to believe it.
Well, we were sitting there and in the distance was a faint rumble and Sterling says “Must be the seven fifteen right on time”. The long dirt driveway to this farmhouse crossed railroad tracks about 50 yards from the house. The proximity to the raildroad and graineries added not only practicality to the farm’s location but but served as a visual testament to their commitment to practicality. The train was really long and really loud. We sat there watching the cars roll by because there was absolutely nothing else one could do. As we watched it slowly dawned upon my mind that I was looking at the tops of the boxcars. My ears also noticed that the noise level had dramatically changed in character. The large moment of inertia, the linkage between cars, and the sheer momentum of several hundred cars on a large freight train means that a train wreck happens very slowly. Slowly means more than a minute. The train slowly rotated on its side for maybe two dozen box cars. Time stood still or in any case it slowed way down. Disbelief was frozen in our minds until the slow thaw of reality. The visual and auditory information didn’t cause the thaw. It was the deep kinetic vibrations of the ground underneath our feet that that made it real. What takes even longer than comprehending all of the signals is grasping the actuality of it, the implications, the disasterness of it..
The wheel assemblies broke free once the sides of the cars hit the ground. These assemblies were extremely heavy and buried up below their axles in hard packed September baked dirt. Dirt, gravel, goods and heavy gauge sheet metal shredded and flew everywhere. It was spectacular.
Sometimes even when all of the information is at hand the mind balks at the conclusions. Your mind suspends judgement because the conclusions are not acceptable or expected.
