I have a thing for train tracks. A freight corridor bisected the center of my tiny upstate hometown, two gleaming lines with laddered wood horizontals between, conducting endless boxcar caravans over a rickety trestle and preceding them out of town between two tall walls of field grass. The tracks were something to do in a town with not much thereof; as a kid, I was in love with the smell of hot tar and diesel fuel, the chuffing breath of the powerful engines, the knife’s edge of copper pennies pressed flat underneath their roaring wheels.
I don’t play on the railroad tracks anymore, but I still like them. And yesterday, a ride through Bushwick yielded a surprise.
I smelled the tracks–the familiar scent of oil and diesel and dirt–before I saw them. The crossing appeared out of nowhere from behind a chain-link gate, locked with a heavy chain. Twin bumps under the wheels of my bike, and a hole opened up between the rows of low industrial buildings and Victorian rowhouses on either side.
How do the trains get through? And how often does someone show up to this gate-in-the-midst-of-nothing, just to admit one and then close the door again behind it? A mystery.
There was no way of knowing where the tracks came from, or where they went. On foot I might have wandered down, but loose gravel and broken glass aren’t kind to bikes, and so I had to keep going. Down one street, and another, weaving eastward until the lush green supergrowth of poisonous Newtown Creek was visible only a block away. I started back again, evading a patch of broken glass and turning onto a wide street where the pavement looked like it had been gnawed on.
And then, there they were. Twin bumps, two gleaming rails that crossed the road beneath my tires. There was another locked gate — the tracks were a corridor, barred at both ends and requiring two separate sentinels to let the trains through.
And on the other side, the end. Mystery solved. It’s a turnaround, not a destination — a place to be got to and then left again.
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