Beside the Tracks

Normally at this time of the year, I am either packing my bags for a train trip to Ohio or taking same, but this year I don't have to do that because the course work at Methodist Theological School in Ohio has been completed. I wrote the following essay in 2010 while on the return trip, and intended to publish it then, but I lost the notebook and it only recently surfaced. So here, a year later, are some thoughts on riding the rails....

When you are on the tracks, it seems there is no "right" side. The beautiful people do not live along the tracks. The tracks reveal the back door, the back yard, the places we want no one to see.
I hate the morning train from Toledo to Chicago, especially the January one. One gets to Toledo from Chicago in the middle of the night so one does not see, but the morning train reveals everything. At night there are sections of light and sections of dark, but the light of day reveals sections of light surrounded by gray-brown snow and sections of rusting metal bowing to piles of crumbling brick. It is surreal to me because my mind's eye recalls the story of industrial might, a story of energy and life.
It would be easy to stop with the wonder of what killed these giants, what rendered the factories and foundries into dinosaurs, their bones silhouetted against the morning sky, but I know about economics and pollution, outsourced jobs and managerial corruption, but I don't think the why is important. It is, and it is sad. Death is always sad, and I cannot help but think of industrial Indiana as a dead zone!
But it is not just Indiana; wherever the trains go through towns it seems to be a smaller version of the same---crumbling depots, boarded up houses, railroad right-of-ways resembling city dumps. There seems to be no right side of the tracks.
But there is also incredible beauty along the tracks. There are those places where the railroad is the only way in; people cannot build or dump or leave their trash. The windows of the train reveal rare beauty, a glimpse of the North America that was. In those places, both sides of the tracks are right.
Like all else, the train ride is a mix---bad and good; joyful and sad; inspiring and depressing. Life is like that, and that is enough.