In our later years of high school, Charlotte’s and my friend Terri started hanging out with another crowd on the weekends. Charlotte and I were still the good kids, the ones at home watching Saturday Night Live and then reinacting the skits in homemade videos. The ones who had boys over to play Spoons with, not to spoon with. Terri started to go to parties in our classmates’ cornfields, where she would steal cigarettes from boys’ mouths and take her own drag. Jeremy Mason’s back forty was the preferred party spot for our small class, although from time to time, the melee would move over to Madison Prewett’s pasture pond. And sometimes, as if they were begging to be stereotyped, the group would convene for indiscretion at the railroad trestle just outside of town.
Charlotte and I got Terri about every other weekend at first, then about once a month as we entered senior year and she started to date Craig (with whose child she’d be pregnant with shortly after graduation). I was stuck in my own paradoxical world—worrying that God wasn’t real, and that because I thought so, He would send me to hell—and so had no time for petty crimes like underaged drinking, which would only muddy my already-soiled “record.”
The one time I made it out to the trestle was on a Sunday afternoon, the day after a party where half of my class had been given minors. Terri had shirked the police, but she’d dropped her cell phone while running from the scene, so the next day, she asked me and Charlotte to help her look.
The site had an abandoned, makeshift fire pit and empty cans of Coors Light scattered all around like eggs at an Easter hunt. The fire pit had a few hay bales around it that someone or another had brought out in his pickup truck, and all this was at the base of the western hill. From the top of that hill, the trestle bridge ran out straight to the eastern bank, at least 120 feet high in the center of the bridge and about a quarter of a mile from one end to the other. It looked rickety and ominous, like the oldest rollercoaster at the amusement park, the one that you’re certain will cause at least four deaths each season.
“Call my number,” demanded Terri, as we started to climb the western hill. “I ran this way, just trying to get into the trees.” As I had no cell phone, Charlotte obliged.
We were nearly at the top when we started to hear the old Nokia ring. Terri found it behind the thick trunk of a tree, picked it up, wiped it off on her jeans. “Good as new,” she pronounced.
The three of us turned around and looked down the hill, then across the long stretch of tracks with the support frames branching out beneath them like Tim Burton’s grotesque version of gothic giraffe legs or the Imperial walkers on planet Hoth. “Let’s go across it,” said Terri, her eyes shining.
“Oh gosh,” said Charlotte. “Really?”
“I’ve done it before,” said Terri. “It’s really not that big of a deal.”
“What if a train comes?” I asked.
“That’s the point,” said Terri. “It’s scary because you don’t know if a train could be coming just around the corner. I mean, it probably won’t, but you don’t know that. If a train comes, then you have to run for it.”
“Oh gosh,” said Charlotte again.
“Okay,” I said, and the words shocked me as they left my mouth. I felt as if someone had bumped into me and I’d accidentally burped them out.
“Really?” asked Terri.
“Yeah, really?” asked Charlotte.
Now my stomach was reeling as I looked down the side of the hill we’d come up. It was a long way down. I moved over to the tracks and stood in the middle of them, facing the bridge. It was such a long way across, and so terribly narrow. I wondered briefly if we could somehow climb down the support beams if the worst came to the worst, but I didn’t let myself think about it for long. “Let’s just do it,” I said. “Let’s get going. It’s going to be fine.”
And so we walked across the trestle then, a quarter mile from safety to safety, and the whole time we marched across those wooden slats, none of the three of us said a word but Terri, who said, “Whoa,” in the middle of the bridge, when she looked over the edge. She said, “It’s actually worse in daylight,” and then we continued on, a silent march, ears tuned for any shrieking whistle just around the bend. I felt as if I were bent over with tension, as if my shoulders were knotting up the way water boils in a pot. My stomach felt hollow and greasy.
It’s nothing, I told myself. Nothing is coming. You’re worried for nothing.
But it didn’t calm me. My heart must have beat a hundred times each minute, a steady roll on a snare. It was one of the most terrible and memorable experiences of my young life, and my mind was ravaged with images of three bodies in fall coats lying still in the rushes below. Every step felt like sheer panic flowing up from my toes to my chest, rattling my heart then moving like a laser beam to my head, where I manufactured nightmares.
When I stepped off the tracks onto the western bank, I felt such relief that I would have cried had I been alone.
Now, all these years later, this describes exactly how I’ve been feeling, an absolute terror from morning til evening, only this time, there is no safety in sight. It is just the feel of walking on an endless, narrow trestle, listening, straining for the sound of destruction on its way to meet me.
