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1.

When I was 8 I saw my first dead body. Before that I had never been interested in trains. Afterwards, somehow, they became my life. My house happened to be 2 blocks away from the railroad crossing at 5^th street, which is where I found the body. My mother adamantly advised me to stay away form the tracks because she was always afraid that I would trip on the rails, get knocked unconscious, and be left to the mercies of the 7:30 train. 5 years earlier, when I was 3, two students from my neighborhood had been hit by a train while crossing at 5^th street to get to school. So I followed my mother’s wishes and stayed away, even though taking an alternate route added about 15 minutes to my trip to school each morning.

The alternate route that I chose consisted of walking 3 blocks down Adams Street (where I lived) and turning left just before the bridge that crossed Bale Creek. After that I would follow Bale Creek to where it passed under the railroad bridge. This allowed me to go under the tracks, rather than over, which made my mother worry less about me and gave her more time to worry about everything else.

It’s fair to say that my mom is an anxious nut. I could put it in a lot nicer terms, but the truth is always the truth. Just don’t tell her I called her that. She has enough to obsess about without thinking people are talking about her behind her back. If you ever meet her, just smile and pretend you like her. That’s what I do most of the time.

My school, Ryland Park Middle School, sat on the corner of 5^th and Washington and Bale Creek. You could take 5^th street to the school or Washington to 5^th. Or, if you were feeling really adventurous, you could take a boat down the Bale. I chose to walk along the edge of the creek rather than worry about tying up a boat somewhere. I didn’t even have a boat, so the option wasn’t really available.

As the name of the school implies, I am from Ryland Park, Michigan. It’s about 30 miles east of Lansing. My town really doesn’t matter though. Other than the fact that it is were I saw the body, and were my obsession with trains began.

Seven days before I found it, it started raining. Now, mind you, it was April so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have a lot of rain, but not this much. That was the year that Bale Creek became known as just “The Bale.” It flooded so much that it never went back to its original size, so people just didn’t feel right about calling it a creek anymore. It wasn’t like it was big enough to be a river, but it was big enough that the bridge I normally crossed under had to be rebuilt to make it from one side to the other.

The flooding of the Bale made it impossible for me to go under the bridge, so for 7 days I had been taking 5^th street over the tracks. My mother, not surprisingly, called the school office every 5 minutes to see if I had arrived yet. She was especially frantic after the 7^th day of the rain when I still had not arrived five minutes after I should have actually been there. On that morning the rain suddenly stopped. The sun came out and shined brightly over the entire town, drying up all but the deeper puddles in only a few hours.

It was exceptionally cold that morning for April and I was walking with my hands in my pockets and my head tucked down low in my coat. I was starring at my feet and attempting rather futilely to not step in any more puddles. My feet were already soaked enough. As I jumped over another puddle I was nearly blinded by the reflection of the suddenly immerging sun. I landed rather clumsily on the opposite side of the puddle. Having my hands in my pockets, at this point, did little for my balance. As my right ankle came down, I felt it twist slightly. My body spun around trying to move with the twisting of the ankle so that I wouldn’t break it. My left foot landed on strangely uneven ground behind me and failed to steady my quickly falling body. I looked back and realized that my left foot had found the railroad tracks and that the likelihood of not falling was gone. All that I could hear was my mother’s voice in my head shouting, “Haddon Cole Morre! You better be careful crossing those tracks. All I need is to get a call from the sheriff telling me that my only son was decapitated by a train because he was too busy jumping in puddles to watch where his feet were landing.”

“For once,” I thought, “my mother might actually be right.” This was the last thought that passed through my head before it hit the ground and the world went black.

While I’m unconscious, I guess it would be a good time to tell you about the arches, which for the next ten years, would be the subject of my attention and fascination.