First Sunny Day

Morning moon through frilly fog, then morning sun through trees and cold.  What a surprise!

The railroad men are mostly finished here and have moved on down the track.  All the motels have taken “No” off their “Vacancy” signs, and waitresses are back to knowing everybody’s name, even mine sometimes.

The money-making heyday is over, when at 6:30am, railroad men filled Mannings Café, heavily jacketed as they came in, and brightly colored in fluorescent orange.  They drove up in pickups equipped with little railroad wheels that can be lowered for driving on the track.  These are the bosses who stay at the Best Western, the only motel without a “No Vacancy” sign.  The workers eat in their rooms and ride company busses to the job site.  They are on per diem and stay wherever it’s cheapest, like me.  

“It’s snowing on the pass,” the bosses say.  “The ‘tie gangs’ have it pretty cold.”  Piles of old rotten ties line the track where piles of new ties were when I first came, evidence of their having passed.

After the old ties were removed and new ones put in, a big machine rolled along the track and leveled the rails.  I watched it work with clanks and grunts and no operator anywhere.  They say it sights a target on that push-cart out in front of it, and from automatic calculations, decides how much each tie needs to be raised, lowered, or tipped.  Then it rattles the tie into place while workers tidy up the little mess that it makes.  It used to that people operated machines.

Here, then, is the finished job—a segment of time and track renewed—men and machines have moved on.  I suppose that for someone who put a lot of himself into it, this section of track is beautiful.  My bicycle is, some of your poems are, and for some of us, the art of unusual living is.

When Robert Pirsig wrote “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he related the best insights about life to traveling long and inordinate, and inserted his thoughts into a character he called Phaedrus.  It’s a book for the long distance bicycle rider, travelers on shoestrings, and wanderers to places like Oakridge, Oregon.

When Ross Anthony wrote “Zen Repair and the Art of Riding Chili,” he too waxed introspective, thinking as I do, that travel is as much inward as it outward.  But he writes in first person, avoiding the escape of a fictional character.  How novel it that?  You can find out at www.RossAnthony.com

 

Michael Angerman is another among us who carries on about “Living Life” which he is now doing in Buenos Aires for the long haul.  He keeps a blog at http://yangerman.blogspot.com/

 

All of us are looking for truth, and I can tell you where it is.  Truth is two miles south of a little gray cloud where a dying fir stood in 1850 on which nested an osprey.  Not hard to find, not really.

Maybe after enough of these travels and logging them, I will discover the perfect version of myself.