The phone rang 3 times before the secretary answered it. With each ring Elaine Moore thought that her heart would stop if she had to bear one more ring without an answer. Her palms were sweaty and she was frantically pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor. Her red hair, which hung past her shoulders, was a tousled mess. She had literally been pulling her hair out with worry. Her son Hayden should have been to school by 7:45. School started at 8:00, but he always got there at 7:45.
Seven days ago, when the rain had flooded Bale creek, she had allowed her son to take the shorter route to school which took him across the railroad tracks at 5th street. She had never allowed him to go this way before. Ever since he had started taking that route, she had called every 5 minutes to see if he was there. Everyday, when she called at 7:45, he had been there. She could relax and finish getting ready for work. Today was different. It was 7:50 and he had not yet arrived.
The phone rang once and she started tangling her hand into her hair. She was shaking and having trouble breathing. The phone rang again and she started pulling her hair and snarling it more around her hand. She paced faster back and forth from the refrigerator to the sink. The phone rang again and she pulled her hand out of her hair and paced faster. Just before it rang a fourth time and she was certain that she would have a heart attack, the line opened and the voice of the secretary answered.
Ryland Park Middle School main office, Carol speaking. How may I assist you today? the voice asked.
Its Elaine Moore again. Please tell me if my son is there yet, trembled Elaine.
Im sorry Mrs. Moore, but he hasnt checked in yet. He still has 10 minutes before he is late, though. I wouldnt worry about it just yet, maam.
Oh, God. Ok. Thank you.
She dropped the phone and tried to sit down at the kitchen table, but she stood back up immediately and continued pacing. Her eyes were fixed on the clock above the stove. 7:53. She would call again at 7:55. Just two more minutes. He would be there in two more minutes and everything would be ok. The time passed by slowly as time does when you are watching the clock.
At 7:55 she called again. This time the secretary answered after the first ring. Mrs. Moore? she asked.
Yes, is he there?
Im sorry Mrs. Moore, but
Fuck! she interrupted and slammed the phone down again. Now she was really beginning to be worried. Her hand wandered back up to her hair, and without realizing it, she pulled several handfuls out before the hands of the clock were at the 8 and the 12. She picked up the phone and dialed again. It was 8:00 and he was late.
Mrs. Moore, Im sorry, but, started the secretary.
Oh, please dont say that, she began to cry.
Im sorry Mrs. Moore, but he isnt here yet. Dont worry Mrs. Moore. You know how boys are. He probably just got distracted. Im sure hell be here any minute.
You dont know my son. He would never do this to me. Im going to go find him. Without hanging up the phone, Elaine Moore ran out of the kitchen door and started sprinting down the street. If anything happened to her son, she would die.
In her head was one thought, rather one image, playing over and over. She tried to think positively. She tried to tell herself that he was just being a kid, that she would find him skipping rocks into the Bale. She tried to tell herself that when she found him she wouldnt scream at him for making her crazy like this. But the only thought, rather the only image going through her head was her sons unrecognizable face smashed and strewn across the tracks. The thought, rather the image, made her sick to her stomach. She started to feel light headed. She started to feel the burning in her legs as she sprinted. She started to feel the cramping all over her body. She started realizing that she was 40 something (not 36 like she kept telling everyone), that she was borderline overweight, that she hadnt so much as climbed a flight of stairs in 5 years, that she was a run down, middle aged woman on the brink of a mental breakdown who was about to find her dead sons body ripped to shreds and bloody on the railroad tracks.
Up ahead, as she sprinted as fast as her fat legs would allow down 5th street, she could see the arches. She squinted, hoping to be able to see if her son was there. She ran faster, the same image in her head. The same feeling in her stomach. The same fat old lady who was about to lose her son.
As she got closer, she thought she saw something on top of one of the arches. It looked like someone was standing on top and hanging something over the edge. As she got loser she saw that someone was on top of the arch. She could barely it out, but the figure seemed to go from standing, to kneeling, to laying. She couldnt make out what was hanging, but it was pretty big.
Haddon, She screamed, Is that you Haddon?
She saw the figure look up for a moment and then slide over the edge, hanging by the hands. She was sure it was him.
Haddon! What are you doing? Get the hell down from there! Youre going to break your legs, for Gods sake!
She tried to run faster. What was he doing up there? Why was her son hanging from the railroad arches? Suddenly, she realized something she hadnt thought of until now. She was so worried that she would find her son dead on the tracks that she forgot to notice the time. He couldnt have been hit by a train, because the train doesnt come until 8:05. Because the train was coming down the tracks right now.
This realization seemed to give her a second burst of energy. She ran faster than she thought possible. As she got closer she saw her son begin swinging back and forth. She saw the other hanging object begin to slowly sway back and forth. The closer she got, the faster her son and the object would swing.
The train was getting closer and closer. She could hear the chug of the wheels. She could hear the screaming whistle getting louder. She looked and saw the engine moving faster than she thought possible, moving closer and closer to her son and whatever it was that he was swinging with from the top of the railroad arch.
(The train passed under the first of the arches) She was about to see her son get hit by a train. She thought finding him already dead would be bad, but actually seeing it happen and not being able to stop it was worse. No, it was more than worse. It was the worst thing that she could imagine happening. (The train passed under the 10th arch) She was going to see her son get hit, fall to the ground, and get run over by the speeding wheels. She was going to see his limbs getting ripped from his body. She would see the blood. She would see him getting torn to pieces as the train tried to stop, his fragile body being dragged under the seized wheels. (The train passed under the 20th arch) She would try to pull him out from under the train; his body still warm, his blood still pouring out onto the rocks.
(The train passed under the 25th arch) As the train approached Elaine stopped running and screamed at the top of her lungs. (The 26th) She could feel her heart tearing in two; (the 27th) her world was coming to an end. (The 28th) Her son was about to die (the 29th and final arch before the one her son would die hanging from).
Elaine fell to the ground tearing at her shirt in agony as the train rushed under the 30th arch. Her son was dead. What reason did she have for living? Without much though she stood up and began running as fast as she could toward the train. She could no longer feel her aching body. She was no longer aware of her age, or her weight, or her wasted life. She was numb. As she got closer to the train, she was numb. As she jumped into the air, she was numb. As she hit the side of the train and her legs were pulled under the wheels, she was numb. As the train dragged her broken frame 30 feet along the tracks as it came to a stop, she was numb. If her son was dead, what did she have to live for?

                  

When I was 6 I began passing out unexpectedly. I saw many doctors and specialists, but every test came back negative or proved inconclusive. It would happen almost exactly every 3 months. The first time it happened I was staying with my grandparents for the week. I had just sat down at the table to eat the goulash dinner that my grandmother had prepared, when suddenly I fell face-first into my plate. I stayed there for a second and then tumbled backward onto the floor, pulling the tablecloth and goulash with me. When I woke up, I barely heard my grandfather hollering at me to stop screwing around and I could hardly tell that my grandmother was rushing to my side to see if I was hurt. I say that I barely heard them because there was a pounding in my head that would rival the Michigan State drum line.

Like I said, this sort of thing would happen once every 3 months, almost on the dot. It happened once in the school cafeteria, several times while I was at home, on the bus, in class, at recess. It didn’t matter what I was doing. It was like clockwork. My eyes would slowly go black, I would usually say something like, “here we go again,” and then I would fall forward and then violently backward. It didn’t matter if I braced myself or not, the same thing always happened.

When I would come to, the cloudiness would slowly leave my eyes and my head would start to tingle the way your foot does when you sit on the toilet for too long. After about 5 seconds, the headache would start. It would always come slowly at first, just behind my eyes, and then move forward covering my eyeballs and quickly spreading outward to my temples and the rest of my skull. It was the worst pain that I had ever felt. It seemed as if my brain was rapidly swelling to 5 times its normal size and trying to burst out of every hole that it could find. My eyes felt the way grapes would feel (if they could feel anything) while being squeezed for wine.

All of that was nothing compared to the pain that swept through my head when I began to wake up. It came quick like a raging bull. Starting at the base of my neck it rushed forward between my eyes and shot out to my temples. I was nearly blinded by the pain as it surged into my eyeballs. I closed my eyes in a tight squint and brought my hands to my temples.

I lay there across the tracks in the fetal position for several minutes clutching my head and reeling in pain. If a train had run me over just then, I would have been relieved. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t put together any logical thought. So, when I opened my eyes and looked up, I didn’t realize what it was that was dangling above me. Through the pain my mind barely registered “Nike.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Everything around me was a blur. I closed my eyes again and tried to get some control over the rest of my body. I felt as if I have been taken over by some alien being which had miscalculated the proper connections with my brain in order to take control. It had control alright, just not any useful control. I was frozen; incapable of the slightest thought or movement. I twitched involuntarily. I was no longer human. I had lost the ability to reason. The only thought I could bring myself to have was pain. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain.

Luckily for me, the pain was only temporary. The swelled feeling began to subside and my brain seemed to return to its normal size. My muscles began to relax and move my body out of the fetal position. I lay there on my back with my arms and legs sprawled out, feeling as if my body had been finally released from a torturous prison. After several seconds my sight went from black, to grainy, to blurry, to clear. Again I registered “Nike” in my mind, but this time I knew what it meant.

What I saw above me as my eyes cleared sent chills down my spine. For a moment I was unable to move again, this time out of fear rather than pain. As soon as I could move I rolled off of the tracks and tried to get up. I scrambled onto my hands and knees. Before I could get to my feet a rush of heat came over me. The blurriness came back into my eyes and I vomited on the ground in front of me. I stayed on my hands and knees for several minutes until I was able to stand. I slowly turned back around keeping my eyes at the ground. I didn’t want to look back up, but I knew that I had to. My eyes rose slowly carefully registering everything that they saw. Nike. Denim. Flannel. Beard. Face. Hair. Rope.

As the full picture came into view I saw a young man hanging from his neck by a rope attached to the arch I was standing under. His shoes were covered with mud, his jeans ripped and soiled, his flannel shirt partly unbuttoned and stained with several years of hard life. His beard was untrimmed and thick. His hair was long and brown and looked unwashed. His face, though young, seemed as if it had seen more than most do in a lifetime.

I quickly recognized who it was that I was looking at. Two years earlier my first grade teacher’s son had run away from home and presumably hopped a train out of town. He was 17 at the time. He was now 19, but looked far older. I wondered where he had been, what he had seen, what had made him age so quickly, what had driven him from home, what had led him to this?

His name was Jacob Avery and there he hung.

                  

In 1880, Thomas Edison built his first electric rail system. He did not actually invent the electric railroad, but with a $40,000 grant form the Northern Pacific Railroad Co. he made vast improvements on the design. The grant specified that he build a system for long distance travel. On May 13, 1880 Edison piloted his first electric train. It went 60 feet and then broke down, needing to be pushed back to the starting point. He later built a 3 mile track for his electric train with 2 railway cars. Failing to promote his railways, Edison stopped research on the electric railroad. Much of his advancement went in to the creation of the electric streetcar systems that most major cities have, at one time, used for mass transportation.

At some point before Edison’s idea for long distance electric rail travel completely disappeared, a plan was made to build a working electric railway that would run from Detroit to Lansing. An existing track was used and large concrete arches were built over it to run the electric lines across. The process was slow, and the arches were only built where the railway intersected the local streets of the towns in its path. To make a long story short, interest in the project was waning and it was stopped before any electric lines were ever run over the unfinished arches; before any electric trains ever graced its rails.

As you may have guessed, the railway that passes through Ryland Park (the very one that I had passed out on) was part of this project.

In this small stretch of railway, there were three sets of arches built over the tracks. One set was were the tracks crossed over Maple street on the east end of town, the second set was were the tracks crossed Allen street in the middle of downtown Ryland Park, and the third set was were the tracks crossed 5^th street, on the west end of town near my house and school.

At each of these crossings stand 30 arches on each side of the road which are roughly 30 yards apart, and stand 30 feet high. Each arch is carved with subtle elegance and held together at the top by a large ornate keystone. Hanging from the underside of the keystone is a small metal bracket meant to hold the wire that the trains would be powered by.

All three sets were identical. If you were to stop in any other town which the tracks passed through, you would see the exact same thing.

These constructions are by no means marvels of ancient architecture, yet there is something wonderful about them. If you were to stand on the tracks and look through them, it was as if you were looking into a short transparent tunnel which could lead you anywhere in time. You could almost believe that if you ran through them that you would vanish at the end and reappear wherever you desired in your heart. Something about these arches was magical.

I didn’t actually know any of this at the time. At the moment I was unconscious and close to waking up with the worst headache of my life; followed by the biggest shock of my life. If you have ever experienced something that changed your life utterly, you will understand and appreciate the rest of this story for all that it is worth.

                  

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.