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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2002 ? 11B
Views - remembering Ambrose	Continued from Page IB
mother was screaming even with this) as the monster engine and its long string of cars pulled in. We stood there in awe at the engine?s great immensity, at the noisy steam pouring around us, squirting from mysterious crevices, at the huge iron driver wheels that were as big as we were, at the dark open window of the cab where the Man sat.
When I entered the naval service in 1948, I was sent with twenty other recruits to go by rail from Charleston, South Carolina to San Diego, California. The trip took us five days! It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in my eighteen years. We ate all our meals in the dining cars with their elaborate settings and service. We would sit and eat and watch the passage by our windows of the broad endless plains of the Middle West and the jagged heights and snow of the Rockies. At night, we slept in the swaying shelf-beds of the Pullman cars with their pull-shut heavy curtains. The lucky ones in our group (I was one) had the lower bunks that had windows, and we could see the same plains and mountains now lit only by the light of a near-full moon.
The years since the coming of the interstate roads and airplanes have made us jaded and forgetful of those days. Not all of us. Luckily some of us are nostalgic about those days. I was lucky enough to have such a person as a friend. One fall, he phoned me all excited. He had two tickets to ride an old train pulled by an equally antique steam engine through the hills of the Pennsylvania coal country. Would I like to come with him?
I?m not really sure why I said yes, but happily I did, and I went.
We left the Pennsylvania train depot in the early morning hours. The train was packed. I was amazed at the excitement of our fellow passengers. Some had tape recorders and they let the microphones dangle out the open doors of the baggage compartment to record the noise of the wheels. Others walked about with movie cameras, endlessly shooting the passing fall foliage of the countryside, the insides of the train, the engine, the passengers, themselves...
Slowly as the day passed, the feeling of what the oth-
ers were enjoying crept into me and with it my own long dormant memories of past years awakened. Slowly, but with increasing pleasure, I started to realize the wonder of what we were doing. I found I could open the window by my seat and, sticking my head out, I watched the long body of the train as it arced around curves with the steam pouring from its engine and heard just below me the clacking of the wheels.
Best of all, I heard the train?s whistle, long and beautiful as we passed a crossing or went over a trestle. Sometimes it sounded for no other reason than that we were passing a rising wall of stone that made an ideal reflector to turn the noise of the whistle out and away through the crisp, fall morning air across the fall colors of the hills and valleys.
When we passed crossings, I was surprised to see people, stopped and standing beside their cars. Families with the father or mother holding the baby, the other kids yelling, the dogs barking, all waving at the train as it went by. It took the passage of a few of these crossings for me to realize that it was Sunday and very early, that these people were not there patiently waiting for just another train to pass, they were there waiting for this train to come by!
It seemed that, besides my friend, others had remembered and they were there to see and bring their children to see this monstrous, noisy specter from their memories of a time that had past. When we passed small hamlets or single farmhouses, it was the same. People either came running out to wave or were waiting lined up on the porch or side roads. And always to all of these came the saluting blasts of steam from the engine and the long, long whistle blowing, blowing to them a song of other days.
When we finally arrived at the turning point in our trip, a small Pennsylvania coal mining town, the whole town was there. They served us lunch on long tables and a school band played over and over and over again, ?Sixteen Tons of Number Nine Coal.? As we were leaving, amid cheers, yells, goodbyes and the band playing ?Sixteen Tons? even louder, the ladies of
the town gave each of us a little plastic bag of anthracite coal. I lost my little bag years ago, but I did keep it for a long time to remember that wonderful day that returned me and so many others back to a time that has left.
Today, we are a mixture of generations and together our experiences are a confusing jumble of memories and ideas seen from the different viewpoints of our times and ages. To a majority of us, the trains we now have here running parallel to the Gulf Coast are a headache, causing delays and even danger by their presence. ?Move the whole mess five miles north,? is the latest cry and this may well happen sometime in the years ahead. This feeling pervades despite the
fact that almost all of the communities have restored their railway stations to what they think they once looked like.
The results look kind of nice, all painted up and seem to attract a good amount of tourists. To me they look like some young architect or decorator?s idea of what a railroad station should look like. Not the working stations I remember. Perhaps it really doesn?t matter. The trains that run on these tracks aren?t the ones we knew. Even their whistles are different. They are not commuters, they?re noisy, soulless cargo haulers. No one knows how to change all this. To bring back the magic. It?s been tried and failed. So, if they want to move them, let them move them. Who
cares?
It seems we can?t go back: and we can?t expect the people who have not been there with us to know what our experiences were like to want to go back. But, by jingo, we did have those experiences and they were great.
Still, every so often our experiences come back to whisper to us when we least expect it.
Like the train ride I had with my friend in Pennsylvania,
Like the people in tb? Bay?s depot the night of t. * talk,	*
Like the train whistle from the passing train at the very end of the wonderful talk by Stephen Ambrose,
Every so often,
We hear the whisper.