Peyote meeting and the empty nocturnal solitude of railroad memories

The meeting last night was rough, only because I was already sleep-deprived and fighting off a virus and not adequately prepared for it. I only had 15 minutes of lucidity where I met the peyote and then ten hours or so of physical discomfort, exhaustion and circular thoughts. But there is no such thing as an unproductive Peyote meeting. There are always good words said, and good prayers given, and the songs always pleasantly reverberate in the mind for days after. It is obvious to me, however that I of course do not  have the personality that easily tolerates sitting still for long periods. I spent a few hours, actually, thinking and remembering my time on the railroad and the smell of the humid, cool night air of the bay area railyards. Due to my all-night drive and the heater breaking in my truck the night before, I had slept poorly in the back of my truck the night before on the outskirts of Lordsburg, New Mexico in a gravelly patch a mile south of the Freeway near a small hill called Fraggle Rock, the two dogs nestled by my side like little space heaters.

I had not felt that sense of exhaustion since I worked for the railroad, and it is probably the most insufferable kind - exhausted not because of any physical activity (aside from a five mile run, I had been sedentary for the past thirty six hours while driving through Texas) but only because of sheer mental exhaustion and lack of sleep. We do it to ourselves.

I almost felt like I was back in the locomotive cab working pool freight in the Feather River Canyon and desperately trying not to be lulled off to sleep as we trudged upgrade at a shit-slogging 18 mph. The intermittent muffled grind of flange squeel mixed with the rumble of a GE AC-44 locomotive becomes a white noise machine, its static ambiance only broken occasionally by the locomotive passing a desolate crossing gate and the accordant bell with the Doppler effect in full swing. The locomotive alerter going off every six minutes was the other thing keeping us awake, the conductor often on the other side of the cab snoring and occasionally farting.

I have memories of many railroad nights like that. The memories themselves are almost soothing, and certainly cathartic. I only wish that I had written more of them down. Working pool freight, it was easy to be lulled off to sleep. But working midnight locals and switch jobs, it was anything but.

First off, it was usually chilly as hell and that alone prevented sleep, coupled with the fact that you were often out standing at a switch with the packset radio on your hip turned all the way up. It could be mind-numbingly boring, so to avoid it you had to remember how to day dream, or at least explore your immediate local surroundings and maybe tag an old no-trespassing sign or the chain-link fence post of the industry or loading dock that you were delivering boxcars too. These days, I’m sure that many switchmen just stare at their phones and browse social media (something that’s of course against the rules while attending a switch and waiting for the locomotive and the rest of the crew to finish spotting-and-pulling an industry, but who’s going to give anybody grief for it at 2 in the morning?), but up until the last few years that I worked there, that wasn’t really an option, and thank gahd, because these lousy devices that we are all addicted to tend to prevent day-dreaming and exploration of self. I would've missed out on obtaining the memories of these moments and places that I have now.

Standing at a switch near the tank plant in Martinez, standing at a switch at the Georgia Pacific loading dock in Fremont, standing at a switch near the chickenhouse in the West Oakland yard…the memories are ingrained in me, often because I was stuck standing there in the quiet cold solitude of old industry, alone with my thoughts, forced to process all the things I was feeling in my life at the time, and usually totally exhausted as I could rarely sleep during the day where I lived due to the fact my shitty neighbors always left their dogs outside to bark or the gentle ambient sound of the freeway was anything but soothing.

It’s funny how headache sets in when the body has reached a particularly exhausted state. Since I was still drinking back then it was often hard to remember whether the headache was a product of being hungover then going on a short run or whether it was just good old mental exhaustion. Despite the discomfort and shitty work hours of these times, I was grateful that I experienced them. I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process, and there’s always something about quiet solitude while surrounded by the remains of half-abandoned industry in a city at night that does one good. When I was 19 and would be aimlessly walking around the streets of San Francisco looking for places to illegally paint my name, it was a similar feeling.

Experiencing populated, busy places at night, when they are instead desolate and lonely, it is always easier to think more clearly and with more perspective, and you have the added bonus of feeling like the chaos of human aims might almost be tolerable.