22nd
You see all of the worst parts of America from a train. Between the back alley construction sites and wearhouses lay piles of scrap and other debris carelessly left to rot. There are no nice homes near the tracks. The closest you get to viewing an upscale neighborhood is when you pass through a city or are high up on a hill, and faintly, in the distance, you can see a gleaming area of economic prosperity from which the tracks are just barely visible. You pass abandoned industrial areas and train yards, stretch after stretch of long forgotten land, left as the country moved from industry by rail to industry by truck. Silently you curse the teamsters and their boss, Jimmy Hoffa, for making the real estate next to the tracks the least prime land in the country. Sure, it was never the best place to build a residential neighborhood, but there were times when railside properties were of value to people looking to start their own businesses. Times when you could throw your factory or warehouse right next to the tracks and get your wares easily and cheaply from coast to coast. Times when the view from a train was one of prosperity and ambition.
Now there are merely slums and poor neighborhoods where broken down factory workers and their families live paycheck to paycheck, trying to make it to the next month or the next meal. There is no keeping up with the Jones next to the tracks, because the Jones probably have less than you.
Ocassionally though, as you pass scrap yards or the relieving stretches of train-exhaust polluted forrest, you see a troop of kids, trudging towards the tracks, and your mind starts cogitating wildly. What are they doing out here in this all but forgotten wasteland? Are they simply trying to get from one side of town to the other, or are they after something more? What drives someone to risk life and limb heading towards active railroad tracks? What drives anyone to go near the tracks these days?
The possibilities start whirling as you pass an old maintenance yard, long since closed, where old broken trains cars sit, disused and covered in indiscernibly many layers of graffiti, the top-most a cutting image above the faded and running colors underneath. All along the cars the glass is broken, and holes are appearing everywhere as the pools of water, collecting here and there among aging aesthetic accouterments and collapsing controls, rust the aging metal, and spill down, brown to the soiled ground.
What were those kids doing way out here? What, for that matter, am I?
