“Night-train noises, muffled and low, / nights when the Northern Limited left.”
I first read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in the summer after graduating from high school, and remained under its spell long after I accepted Anderson’s limitations as a writer. More than a decade later I was hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Bellevue, a town in North Central Ohio six miles east of Clyde along Route 20. Clyde was home to Anderson as a boy and served as his model for Winesburg.
The dominant business in
Clyde and the region was and remains the Whirlpool Corp., the largest washing
machine factory in the world. In 2003, the state put up a historical marker
commemorating Anderson’s gift of immortality to the town, where he lived from
1884 to 1895. During my years in Bellevue (1981-83), the only public nod to
Anderson I remember was the Winesburg Inn. Bellevue was a railroad hub and after
a while you stopped hearing the train whistles and the low rumble of the
engines. In “Tandy,” one of the stories collected in Winesburg, Ohio,
Anderson writes:
“It was late evening and
darkness lay over the town and over the railroad that ran along the foot of a
little incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west,
there was a prolonged blast from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that
had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked.”
A recurrent character in
the stories is George Willard, a young newspaper reporter who leaves Winesburg
on a westbound train. Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story
in Anderson’s collection: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his
life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his
manhood.”
I remembered Anderson and
his stories when reading Maryann Corbett’s “Lament for the Midnight Train.” Its opening lines are quoted at the top. Few sounds are as lonesome-sounding as a
train whistle late at night. Corbett writes:
“Midnights, we’d hear its
strange chord blow,
a distant dissonance,
treble-cleft.
Languid in summer, dulled
in snow,
it spoke to me calmly: Trust
and rest.
The night world works on a steady clock.”
I didn't live near enough to any tracks to hear trains passing when I was growing up, but there was a huge field right behind our house and running along it was a street that was a major route for trucks going into and out of Los Angeles. Many nights I would lie awake and listen to them rumble by, and I would often look out of my window to watch their lights go by in the darkness. The field is long gone, built up into apartments, and I don't know whether the street is still as heavily traveled as it was fifty years ago, but in any case I will always associate the sound of trucks in the night with the pleasant reveries of childhood and adolescence.
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