A Journey of Change

By Tim Walsh

The coal train slowly crawled out of Cleveland's freight yard at 2 in the morning, headed northeast along Lake Erie, toward Erie, Pennsylvania.

As the train gained momentum, Mike and I had barely settled down before we realized we'd made a major mistake. The rail car we boarded was an open hopper carrying 250,000 pounds of coal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Timothy Walsh
• Release date: Mar 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087957739

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The coal train slowly crawled out of Cleveland’s freight yard at 2 in the morning, headed northeast along Lake Erie, toward Erie, Pennsylvania.

As the train gained momentum, Mike and I had barely settled down before we realized we’d made a major mistake. The rail car we boarded was an open hopper carrying 250,000 pounds of coal. It was soon running 80 miles an hour, and we were battling gale-force winds off the lake. Our body temperatures quickly dropped. Even our Levi jackets couldn’t keep us warm. We had to find a safer and warmer spot on the train.

When we tried to stand up, the wind knocked us back. It was challenging to keep our footing while trying to balance on the coal. We inched over to the front of the coal car to see if we could somehow clear the 4-foot gap to the engine. But the train’s speed and the unsafe conditions, especially in the dark, forced us to stay put.

Mike reached into his backpack to get his rain poncho. We wrapped it around us, grabbed onto the grommets, and placed our backs to the wind. The poncho quickly became like a sail on the Pequod. We had to devise another tactic.

We started digging. We scooped up the baseball-size pieces of coal with our hands and put them in front of us to build a windbreak. The more we dug, the more the surrounding coal fell into the vacant hole. Like digging in sand at the beach. The hole kept getting filled back. We decided to use the poncho to help hold the coal back and allow us a little escape from the wind. Mike and I were now completely covered in coal dust. We continued our shaking and trembling. The only light was coming from the engine in front of us, and that was very little. I thought we might become the first people to freeze to death in June. The first steps of hypothermia are shivering and mental confusion, which we had both. We were 800 miles from home, traveling 80 miles an hour, on top of a coal hopper, watching the sun bring a sliver of light to the night.

CHAPTER 1

The day we graduated from high school, and a month before I turned 19, a buddy and I hopped on a slow-moving freight train not far from our suburban homes. We were headed on a ramble that would eventually take us to Woodstock. No, not Woodstock, Georgia, 25 miles from our house in Smyrna. But the one in New York, that was over a thousand miles from home. Which two summers earlier had been the site of the biggest rock concert in history. Oh, that wasn’t our original destination. Nor was train travel our original choice of transportation. It just turned out that way. Traveling wasn’t foreign to me. I was a military brat, one of six kids in an Air Force family. My dad’s final assignment was in France, about as far away culturally from where we landed in Georgia. Our journeys included a station wagon trip from Oklahoma to New Hampshire, a steamship voyage to France, and a flight back to the United States. Just as I was getting ready for high school.

But before I describe our journey, let me tell you about my friend Mike. He was the oldest son in his family and lived with his father, mother, and younger brother and sister. I never did know what Mike’s father did for a living. He always seemed to be sitting in a Lazy Boy Recliner in their living room, reading the paper. It always looked like a quiet and orderly house. His mother was a stay at home mom, like the majority of mothers in the neighborhood.

Mike wasn’t into academics and sports, he gravitated more toward motorcycles and photography. Like most teenage boys growing up in the suburbs of the ’60s, we listened to rock music, watched television, and went to movies. We played basketball, baseball, and lifted weights. We built our skateboards, had a few BB gun battles, and grew our hair as long as our fathers would allow.

By the end of our senior year, the two of us thought it would be neat to drive down to the Florida beaches and join our fellow graduates for our last celebration. The draft lottery was coming up in July. A year ago, my brother Dennis, a year older than me, drew a low number,