вторник, 13 марта 2012 г.

A woman's rail odysseys, both physical and spiritual

The news that the University of California Press was publishingBoomer: Railroad Memories, by Linda Niemann ($19.95), whetted my railbuff's appetite.

Here was a memoir by one of the first women to go to work forthe Southern Pacific Ry. as a brakeman, the quintessential trade ofAmerican railroading. (Not brakewoman or brakeperson, please; inthat tough and muscular profession, "brakeman" is genderless.)Throughout its history railroading has been an utterly masculinepursuit, and this book, I thought, was bound to offer a fresh pointof view.

It does that and more. Boomer, it turns out, is aboutrailroading the way Moby-Dick is about whaling. Locomotives andboxcars and marshaling yards and ribbons of high iron are just thegraveled roadbed under a grander adventure.

And that is the oldest one in literature: the spiritualjourney, an exorcising of personal devils and the discovery of self.

When Niemann went to work for the SP in 1979, her life was in ashambles. She was, she writes, an "intellectual who looked like anall-American bimbo." (She holds a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley.)Divorced and unemployed, a bisexual with a collapsing lesbianrelationship, she was increasingly plagued by her mother's battlewith mental illlness. Niemann was also a heavy drug user and wellstarted down the long slide into alcoholism. Why did a person sothoroughly screwed up choose to become a brakeman, one of the world'sdirtiest, most difficult and dangerous jobs?

"The railroad transformed the metaphor of my life," she writes,in one of many graceful and often moving passages. "Nine thousandtons moving at sixty miles an hour into the fearful night. I nowwould ride that image, trying to stay alive within it. I know thatlater when I sat behind the moving train in the darkness of thecaboose, window open and the unknown fragrances of the land fillingthe space, the blackness of the night was my friend. It felt good tobe powerless and carried along by the destiny of that motion. I felthappy and at peace. I was where I belonged."

Brakemen, it seems, tend to be misfits of one kind or another:drunks, dopeheads, psychotics among them. Perhaps only such erraticscan stand a life of "booming" - a "boomer" is an old railroad termfor an itinerant brakeman who follows the rush periods of labor indifferent parts of his railroad's far-flung empire.

The rough-and-tumble work is extremely dangerous. At all hoursin all kinds of weather, brakemen must hang with one hand on sideladders of free-rolling cars, lanterns in the other hand. Frequentlythey must dart between moving cars to pull uncoupling pins, all thewhile keeping an eye out for perils on the adjoining track. If theyget hurt or killed, their employers, who take "almost a terroristattitude toward their workers, couldn't care less."

Because bums, addicts, muggers and starving Mexican illegalswash up in freight yards all over the Southwest, brakemen often carryhandguns, although the dangers are sometimes illusory for males.Thanks to homophobia as well as the attractions of their gender, theperils are real for female boomers, and it's the rare one who isn'tpacking.

But then there is the "brakeman's reward." The job puts thebrakie way out on the line in the desert at those magic times ofmorning when you can "smell the dew on everything before true colorscan exist - the red spectrum just waking up." As trains meet thereis rhythm and peace on the land.

When "Gypsy" Niemann discovers those things in her stormy life,you'll cheer. As she struggles out of her self-inflicted hell ofdrugs, booze and stormy love affairs, she emerges as a thoroughlylikable and intelligent human being.

She is so blunt and honest about herself that the reader isbrought up short when she drops, well past midpoint in the book, thestunning news that she once "helped raise some kids" - four with herex-husband. But she never mentions them again. What, we want toknow, has happened to them? Are they her natural children? (It turnsout, her publisher tells me, that they were her ex-husband'soffspring.)

This is the worst stumble (and there are not many others) in anadmirable book. It is attractive not only for its candor but alsofor its lore. Though she is most concerned with her ongoing journeyto sanity and stability, Niemann never forgets that she is a "rail,"and offers a good deal of wisdom about the changing life of thebrakeman.

They're a disappearing species, now that the caboose is on theway out and the three- or four-man freight crew has shrunk to two inthe locomotive: engineer and conductor. There are fewer pairs ofeyes to watch for dangers, Niemann writes, and no ears to listen atthe rear of the train. (This isn't just a self-serving complaint of aunion stalwart against depredatory management. She has a point.Cabooseless trains may be the longtime norm in Europe, where runs areshorter, but whether they won't be hazards in American-stylerailroading - long, slow freight drags over beat-up tracks - is aquestion only time can answer.)

Boomer is inspiring, provocative, engrossing reading, and afine addition to the annals of both industrial and feminist history.

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