The Railroad Not Taken

Sometimes I like to walk along West Cliff Drive, where houses these days go for two million, three million, four million dollars. Rich people love the coast; they’ll pay big bucks for a sea view, fresh air, the water, boating and surfing. Go inland half a block, and the prices drop by two thirds.

But 40 years ago, the coast -- the waterfront -- was where industry lived. It was where fish were gutted, where sewage was dumped, and where the rents were low. The rich lived up in the heights above the stink and noise. Not just in Santa Cruz, but everywhere.

When I was very young, my family lived right on the waterfront in a town I'll call Petropolis, California. There was our house, then the street, then the railroad tracks, and then the water.

Yeah, we got the sea breeze; it smelled like crude oil. At least it did when the oil refinery up the coast a mile or so burned off waste gas. That only happened, oh, 18 hours out of the day.

Right down the street from us sat a little harbor, but the run-down docks and rickety buildings were the home of fishing boats and other working vessels, not weekend boaters; the fishermen flushed their bilges into the bay every day, which drove the seagulls mad. Little globs of crude oil and fish guts floated together in the water.

I stuck my finger into the bay a couple of times and tasted it; what does a three-year-old know about toxic waste? Working from memory, I would say the water tasted the kind of fish sauce that you find in Vietnamese restaurants -- in Hell.

My sister and I had no safe place to play. Our neighbor next door was a lumberyard; our neighbor across the street, an abandoned Southern Pacific depot. Railroad trains highballed by a dozen times a day. Mom kept us from going out the front gate by ourselves -- she thought.

But the train tracks were an easy stroll for a three-year-old and in truth I wandered out there when Mom wasn’t looking to play in the old depot. If that weren’t enough -- I could toddle a bit farther down to a polluted little beach where petroleum residue made zebra stripes across the sand. I could have toddled right into the water, stepped on half-buried nails, whatever. In retrospect, it was a terrible place to raise children.

But I loved it. I loved it to death. I loved the noise, the oil tankers docked in the bay, the boats and trucks coming and going, the old seaplanes that landed offshore on weekends, the men and trucks moving things in and out of buildings, and the machines. To this very day, I perk right up in industrial neighborhoods. My inner-three-year old still loves them.

But mainly, I loved the trains. Passenger trains, freight trains, long ones, short ones. They made the ground vibrate, they made the house shake, they were huge long hurtling machines on mysterious journeys. And if you waved at them, the engineer waved back and sounded the locomotive's mighty horn just for you. Or at least my three-year-old self thought so.

My parents, who thought baby-talk was cute, taught me to call trains "choo-choo trains." I had all the train books -- my old copy of "The Little Engine That Could" is still around here somewhere. At some point my parents heard me say that I wanted to be a choo-choo train driver when I grew up. Which was true. My mother loved that so much she they prompted me to say it whenever we had guests over so everybody could wallow in the cuteness.

Eventually we moved away from Petropolis to a blue-collar 'burb across the water where the air didn't smell like crude oil -- most days. My new neighborhood was safe. It had real playgrounds -- but lacked seaplanes or railroad tracks.

I still loved trains, but the immediacy of it all faded; they didn't rush past my front door anymore. I caught on to my mother' little game, and when she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I started saying "I dunno" in a sullen voice. Three-year-olds don't know when they're being manipulated, but four-year-olds do. Parents, be advised.

So I grew up and did not become a choo-choo train driver. My depression-era parents wanted me to have all the advantages that they didn't, so I went to college, took white collar jobs with big corporations, moved to the big city, bought nice toys, all of that. Most of my work was ephemeral: presentations, memos, manuals, plans for doing this or that.

You look back over a career like that and wonder if you've ever accomplished anything worthwhile. It's possible that I'd have been better off learning an honest trade and joining a good union. Well, what's done is done, but...

I used to do a little public access television in San Francisco, and years ago my producer and I drove over to Mill Valley to interview a visionary artist at a gallery full of oil paintings of naked women flying with killer whales through skies like astrological maps. But that's another story.

Anyway, interview done and videotape in hand, we drove back out through Tam Junction toward the freeway. There's a railroad crossing on that road, and the barrier came down just as we got there. We were the first car in line, right at the barrier, but for a change I wasn't looking at the train. Until the engineer sounded two mighty blasts of the horn, and I looked up by reflex.

The engineer in the cab was me. And he was leaning out of the cab and grinning at me. And waving.

When I say he was me, I mean that he and I were identical. He had the same face, the same hair, the same mustache, the same tinted glasses, the same build, the same grin. He even wore the same clothes that I normally wore, right down to color choices.

I have no explanation for this. Corrobation, yes: my producer will back me up on everything. And we married each other some years later, I know where to find her.

All I know is that I never became a choo-choo train driver. But somebody did.