Steve West: There’s a slow train coming

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 9th. Good morning to you! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Most of us feel something when we hear a train go by. What is it? Here’s WORLD commentator Steve West.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: From my home it is nearly four miles to the nearest train tracks. Yet late on a clear night, when the wind blows from the southwest, I sometimes hear a plaintive whistle - even the faint clickety-clack of wheels on the tracks.

AMBI: [TRAIN]

“It takes a train to cry,” sang Bob Dylan. Train whistles provoke longings. Trains bring compelling visions of mountain gorges and lonely prairies and desolate, moonlit deserts that stir the wanderlust.

In a poem entitled, “Travel,” Edna St. Vincent Millay testified to her love for trains:

"The railroad track is miles away,


And the day is loud with voices speaking,


Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day,


But I hear its whistle shrieking."

Friends are wonderful, she concludes,“Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going.” Reading that, I nod my assent back across time.

Once our family took an overnight train from Jasper, Alberta through the fir trees and mountains of British Columbia. We were lulled to sleep by the hypnotic sway of our sleeper car and the rare and lonely station light. Another time we traveled across the high plains, from Montana to Minnesota. When would I next be in tiny Minot, North Dakota? Likely never, I thought, smiling–unless I came by train.

Once, I stood a mere ten feet away from another freight passing through Fargo, North Dakota, enjoying the snapshots of Main Street between the passing cars. Crossing bells clanged and lights flashed as the endless linkage of cars trailed off into the horizon.

When I was a child in Greensboro, North Carolina, I watched the Southern Railway trains pass en route to Atlanta. I wanted to jump aboard too–to see what could be seen, to get loose of my little world, unable to articulate my sadness when the caboose faded from view.

“Trains tap into some deep American collective memory,” wrote historian Dana Frank. “Trains seem timeless throwbacks to an earlier age, reminders that we are always moving.”

But Christians know we aren't just moving. We have a destination. “It takes a train to cry,” sang Bob Dylan, in 1965. But decades later, Dylan returned to the imagery of a train with Slow Train Coming. This time he focused on an apocalyptic vision of God’s reckoning. “There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend,” he warns.

Next time you hear a train, consider where you are and where you’ve been, as well as where you hope to be. The whistle you hear is longing. The power rushing past is reckoning. Yet as the last car rounds the bend it’s hope that with grace you too will soon reach your hobo home, where longing meets laughter, where all our wandering leads.

I’m Steve West.

CASSIDY: [:22] People get ready, there’s a train a comin’. Don’t need no baggage, you just get on board. All you need is faith to hear diesels a hummin’. Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.

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