I grew up near the tracks. Heard the trains so frequently I barely noticed them.
But I had also grown up with stern warnings about being on the tracks. Stories of children playing chicken and getting their feet stuck and getting hit by trains. This made being on the tracks exciting.
There was a short cut to the lake if you crossed the tracks, but you had to know where to go. One place, behind the house of a kid I knew, the track cut through a steep ridge creating a secluded space on the tracks hidden from all views unless you too were on the tracks. Apparently poison ivy dotted along side. I had been shown it by my older sister, but I could never remember what it looked like.
It was the secret, dangerous place of children. The rails were smooth and shiny and there was the particularly tarry smell unique to railway ties that I always found oddly comforting. I would peer at the gravel rocks that the tracks and ties lay on, suspiciously waiting for them to trick me and grab at my ankle and pull me down. I had never known anyone to get hit, or to attempt to even play chicken but the threat of possible death and the threat of adults and the threat of the law was always omnipresent.
Lore had it if you lay your ear upon the track you could hear the trains coming through the tracks long before you could see them. We all tried it, but even seeing them we couldn't be sure we heard them through the tracks. I fancied the rails to be warm on my cheeks cooling from the heat of the screeching wheels even if they weren’t.
We put pennies on the tracks and waited patiently for the train to come. The trains were always bigger than you expected and frighteningly loud. I never got used to it. If we were lucky we’d find our pennies flung off the tracks flattened beyond recognition. We couldn’t spend them, but they were worth even more to us, as evidence our power to use tools flatten copper to this impressive degree.
It was a wintery day when the schools had closed due a storm. I and my older brother of about five-six years had taken the opportunity to walk to the tracks. I don’t know why we went. I don't know if we planned it or just found ourselves there. We had trudged through the field and battled the wind and pellets of snow across a field. The ice crested snow scraped off the coating off the top of my cheap boots.
On the tracks we discovered a small and somewhat chipped glass orb. And then another one. What was this?
Back when the games of marbles were still allowed on school property, I grew up watching mostly older boys, but girls too, playing incomprehensible games with marbles and other assortments of glass balls. This was serious kids stuff. It was highly competitive and from time to time there was the odd injury.
Out of all the many different types of glass balls kids were trying to collect, the most common were the “crystals”. A manufacturing plant of asbestos-fibre products now long closed, was just a little ways farther down the tracks along the lake. We had all heard of it, but few of us had actually seen it. Or if we had, it probably escaped our attention for being a rather dull ordinary and irrelevant adult monster sort of building. But it either received or sent shipments with the crystals as packing material. Or so the story went. Or maybe we made that up.
The crystals had currency. They were the lowest end of marble food chain that could be used to shoot for more valued marbles. I seem to remember that maybe it went something like this: you were offered five or maybe ten chances to hit a more valuable marble with your crystals. If you hit it you won it, and kept your crystals. If not you lost everything.
And on the tracks that day, my brother and I had found the motherload of crystals.
They were everywhere. As many as we could possibly want. We reckoned that they must have spilled off a train car somehow. It never occurred to us how such a thing might have happened. For it was like someone gave us the permission to print money. We were dumbfounded. And then we were dizzy with excitement. It was ours if we acted quickly.
We trekked back home through the snow in a hurry to get a duffle bag and spent the afternoon collecting them, giddy with conspiratory joy, my stronger older brother heaving the weight of them back. That duffle bag filled as full as he could lift them, bulging with childhood money. There was a double darkness to the secret joy to it, having been both on the tracks and having this unfair advantage being showered on you as a result of it. Like stealing stolen money from bank robbers.
By the time I got old enough to learn the marble games, they had been outlawed forever by the school administrators, whether for marble gambling or the throwing and resulting injuries, I don’t know. I don’t know if my brother took advantage, but I never got to reap the benefit of them. I remember the bag, the joy of discovery and that wintery day more than anything else.
Years later the tracks and the lake came to mean different things for me; escape from parents into the poetic moroseness of a teenaged mind; the endless lines disappearing into nothing; the slate grey of the relentless water; the boys at the beach who’s attention we hoped to attract, the naked couple we spotted having sex on the rocks one day. And like many things in your childhood the mother load of crystals disappeared along with the hoards of other toys, fading away along side childhood memories into unknowingness.
Recently I was recounting the story for my even older sister. She told me she has them. She had used them with her students many years later. I imagined they were packed away in her basement somewhere. I forgot to ask her if she kept them in the old canvas duffle bag.
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