THE WHISTLE OF TRAINS

Sketch by Billie Perkins

An artist gave the above sketch to me to accompany a little feature I was writing for The Daily Iberian back in the 70’s. It’s a rendering of the platform and partial front of the train station here in New Iberia, Louisiana, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The platform and tracks are owned by BNSF and have also been used by the Louisiana and Delta Railroad since 1987.

According to Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden,  the railroad’s development didn’t have any particular meaning for the southern states during pre-Civil War times because the South was enamored of a pre-industrial pastoral ideal which Marx claimed southerners used as a weapon against industrialism. However, the Civil War provided unexpected liberation for southerners to get on the road to modernity, and Georgia led the way in the performance of southern railroads. Railroads were soon established in the post-antebellum South, and by 1890, historian Edward Ayers observed that nine out of every ten southerners lived in a railroad county, “surrounded by an aura of glamour throughout the New South era.”

In Louisiana, depots became the sites of frenetic activity where one northerner related his privileged treatment at a Louisiana depot: “Here we are at the depot and oh, what a collection of porters, cabmen and Car men, Irish, Americans, and Blacks.”* Actually, New Iberia’s first passenger train from New Orleans didn’t arrive until 1879, and a few years later a spur was laid to Avery Island and Abbeville. The railroad became vital to the lumber business and was used to transport cypress from the swamp to landowners who built many of the handsome homes along the Bayou Teche.

In the early 1900’s, my Great-Uncle Ed Greenlaw laid a private railroad track leading from his property in Ramsey, Louisiana to my Grandfather Paul’s lumber mill in Franklinton, Louisiana, transporting long leaf pine logs approximately 28 miles. When he sold the property after he had denuded the forests around Covington, Louisiana, he had the audacity to pick up the rails and take them with him, according to the present owner of the property that is now a bed and breakfast destination.

I have no idea how many trains passed on those first laid rails to New Iberia, but today I look up numerous times during the day when I hear them whooing on the tracks. I also hear them rumbling through at any time I wake during the night. Their long whistles used to sound like lonesome wails to me, but when I wake in the darkness now and hear them, I think of mobility – of going places and having new adventures, of still being able to travel.

In A Lonely Grandmother, one of the books of poetry I published last year, the lead poem is about a train:

The Aging Express

The sound of so many journeys

passes in the whistle of a train

and little wonder

this master of navigation wails,

pushing through sleeplessness

and darkness without news.

Shut-in passengers urge it on

thinking it a boundary-less machine

traveling on an open frontier

carrying them past houses

with open windows

crying ‘welcome aboard'

and rumbling through the night

making connections

in desolate places…

but not stopping for long.

*Most of the information about the history of railroads in this blog was derived from Railroads in the Old South by Aaron W. Marrs, a book I used while doing research for my book, Redeemed by Blood.

COMMENTS ABOUT CONIFERS...

With winter blowing its icy breath everywhere in the U.S., I was amazed when I spied a tiny pollen cone on a tall slash pine in my front yard last week—a sure sign that Spring is imminent. The appearance of this male cone signals that it's ready to release airborne pollen to pollinate the female cones and cause seeds to be made. Botanists once believed that pollination was random, but research has revealed that the female cone is shaped to aerodynamically direct pollen to it when the male cone releases the pollen grains into the air, and that the pine tree's pollination is another part of Nature's grand design.

I'm partial to pine trees, and when I bought my present home in New Iberia, Louisiana, I was happy to see the tall, cheerful trees dropping needles in my front yard. As an adolescent, I lived in the piney woods surrounding Franklinton, Louisiana and spent many summers at a camp called Peter Pan, hiking in a pine forest. The resinous scent of pine needles has always invigorated me, and I cling to these trees even when tree cutters canvas the neighborhood and try to convince me to cut down the two in my front yard every hurricane season. It's true that Hurricane Andrew toppled a venerable one that fell a foot away from my bedroom window, but I shudder when I think of engaging someone to fell the remaining two stately trees.

Pines have long lives and can reach 1000 years old. When I discovered this, I thought of Great Uncle Ed Greenlaw who owned a prized longleaf pine forest near Ramsey, Louisiana, back in the early 1900's when the lumbering industry was at its zenith. He decimated the entire forest to benefit the Greenlaw Lumber Company, then sold the operation and pioneered the commercial motor vehicle transportation industry, introducing trucks and tractors to the transportation world and sponsoring a movement recognized as the impetus toward a good highway system in Louisiana. He was often referred to as the "Father of Good Roads in Louisiana" and obviously respected good roads more than pine trees. Great Uncle Ed managed the Louisiana Motor Transportation Association, as well as edited the Louisiana Digest, forerunner of a journal the Police Jury Association now publishes. His decimation of an entire longleaf pine forest was forgiven in the name of commercial progress, and he moved to West End Boulevard in New Orleans, away from the scene of his logging operation.

I suppose that the pleasant, clean scent of pine trees didn't have the same effect on Great Uncle Ed as it does on me, nor was he a collector of cones or other souvenirs of his business enterprise. Today, only the remnants of a kiln remain on the property at Ramsey, and his former home is a bed and breakfast where I once spent the night. The present owner of the home quickly told me how my Great Uncle Ed cut down so many trees that a person could stand on the front porch and see the town of Covington ten miles away. I could tell she was a lover of pines from the irritated tone of her voice when she related this story.

During the 90's, when we were on vacation in California, my botanist friend Victoria picked up a giant sugar pine cone in the Sequoias that we brought back to Louisiana and placed on the hearth. A few years later, following a vacation at Lake Tahoe and inspired by the discovery of that cone, we veered off course in search of the ancient Bristlecone Forest near Westgard Pass in California on a road that led toward the forest. The road was guarded by a giant sequoia planted in honor of Teddy Roosevelt in 1913 and meandered through high desert for many miles. We entered the road after reading a danger sign that told us not to proceed without water. Nine miles out, the car heated up, and we turned back, suddenly remembering Episcopal Bishop Pike who died in the desert of Israel following a car breakdown. We've never returned to search for the world's oldest living pine trees.

Some pine tree trivia: alternative medicine enthusiasts make a tea by steeping green pine needles in boiling water, and others have used them as a component in a Bach flower remedy, but there's no scientific evidence to show that these concoctions derived from the majestic pine tree prevent or control diseases.

Meanwhile, I try to exonerate Great Uncle Ed by maintaining the two pine trees in my front yard. I like to listen to them rustling in the winter wind, but I hope that I'll be in residence on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee if another hurricane blows this way 'come Fall. Pine trunks do snap easily!