Coda Peter Friederici
TRANSMUTATIONS
I
t begins with a plaintive, minor-
key whistle in the distance as a freight
works its way up the side of the mesa
toward our house. It becomes a solid rum-
ble, an onrushing vibration, then culmi-
nates in the deep thrumming of the big
diesels that pass only a block away, three
or four or >ve locomotives hauling a hun-
dred cars. Burlington Northern Santa Fe:
we get used to the noise, even miss it
when we travel elsewhere.
What I miss, I think, is the way the long
whistles point the mind so e=ortlessly
toward old black-and-white movies and the
romance of Pullman-era travel: enforced
leisure, new companions, witty ?irtations,
and waking to new lands in the morning.
But at night I lie awake sometimes,
and I remember that these are freight
trains, not passenger, and begin to dwell
on what they are hauling: coal or chemicals or enough new automobiles to >ll
entire subdivisions. Or, as is more and
more the case, boxes. Big boxes, that is,
the stout crates o<oaded directly from
container ships at Long Beach or Seattle,
labeled Hamburg-Süd or Hanjin or Lloyd
or Sealand, the durable steel corpuscles of
global commerce.
We live in a small house in a small city
amid a huge and arid western landscape.
The middle of nowhere, some would say.
But the long freights pass through town
24/7, a hundred and more a day, and
make it very clear that we, right here, are
in the heart of the whole shebang. Those
are new Saturns going out to LA; this is
corn syrup from Nebraska going into soft
drinks somewhere; these are plastic gimcracks and assembly-line clothes from
Taiwan or Indonesia or Sri Lanka, headed
for a Wal-Mart near you. This is good
Chilean wine and Australian beer, too.
This is global warming and the homog-
enization of our food supply and the misery of poorly paid laborers in sweatshops,
all passing just a block away. Who knows:
hidden in one of those containers could
even be one of the nasty surprises the
Department of Homeland Security warns
us about, a red-alert >recracker crafted by
maniacally pious hands of the sort used to
justify our new Age of Fear. It’s the sad
transmutation of the modern era, the
equivalent of an alchemist’s turning gold
into lead: the romance of the other and
the enchantment of travel have become
dull fear, pure and simple.
It’s a lot to think about, during the
night, so sometimes when sleep has
drifted farther away than the next distant
whistle I think instead about how a few
summers ago I loaded my old pickup
with a bunch of heavily used wooden pallets, free for the taking outside our local
newspaper’s print shop. They’d carried
newsprint or cases of ink, and before that
who knows what, and they’d reached the
end of their lives in global commerce.
We’d just bought the house and knew
the garden needed good dirt. I brought
the pallets home and spent a few weekends sawing and hammering in the early
summer sun. The three bins turned out
pretty well, rough but durable. The doors
and lids hinged. I lined the insides with
chicken wire to keep out the skunks.
When I was done I >lled the bins with
our cast-o= onion peelings and co=ee
grounds and melon rinds and leaves from
the yard. I wanted those old pallets to hold
a sort of cargo once more, to transmute
cast-o=s into something rich and full—
not romantic exactly, but just what the
chard and beans and pumpkins need.
Now we lie awake at night sometimes,
with the windows open, and hear the train
whistles ?uting up the mesa, and if the
wind is right perhaps catch a soft whi= of
compost or of pea ?owers. Sometimes,
drifting o= to sleep, the mind opens a bit
and reminds us that things don’t move
just one way in the world. Change doesn’t
happen just once. Waste becomes vegetables becomes waste becomes vegetables
again, on and on and on. From where we
live, the tracks run both ways, and we can
choose which way we’re headed. a
