rail fracture in the right rail of eastbound track he reported last December. How important this work! Thank God for the track inspector.
Naturally, his job required keen senses. In a noisy diesel locomotive pulling twenty-two thousand tons of taconite from the Hibbing, Minnesota, plant down past Kelly Lake terminal to the Superior dock, sometimes a railroad engineer can also sense discrepancies in a track. But Joe Rubin was supposed to be first to identify when a track sounded off. He was regional Employee of the Month twice during his fourteen years. The award meant much to him, for unlike many employees, he lived for the railroad. Mornings, he cleaned his BN hardhat of grease or dirt, whispering absent-mindedly to himself about a section of track he had to examine. Friday evenings, in the kitchen of his apartment by the railyard, he reviewed his week’s performance. The work week over, he was likely to talk aloud to his parents’ pictures on the walls of his rooms. On the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month, he got a haircut. All of these were solitary activities, for he wasn’t one to say much to a barber.
His week, his life, was made solitary in other ways. He’d had very few girlfriends over the years, which meant no one to telephone about meeting for a drink or going to dinner. He was probably the only Jewish track inspector in a vast BN-SF railroad network stretching from here to Fort Worth, and he drove the truck eight hours a day through such long stretches of uninhabited country that he might as well have been in Siberia. BN section hands called him the Wandering Jew. Wanderer or not, this was lonely work. The tracks ran through miles of speckled alder rising black against the snow—through aspen and pine forests, past tamarack bogs and cutover hayfields, out over trestles where you saw frozen rivers meander below. Here and there appeared farmhouses and railroad crossings, but once he had his track warrant on a winter morning and was passing under Tower Avenue westbound on Number 1 main track, he pretty much said good-bye to everyone but the dispatcher. When he was stopped at a crossing or off on a siding while a 170-car taconite train came highballing down Saunders’ Grade on the mainline, he’d wave to the engineer; but there was no talking, no laughing with a fellow employee, just Joe Rubin in freshly pressed work clothes standing on the shaking earth or sitting alone in his truck as the brown rail cars thundered past, trailing steam from taconite so hot from the mill that, even parked in the yards, unloaded boxcars steamed for three days.
With the last cars flown by, blinking safety light gone out of sight around a curve, quiet returned to the track inspector. Chickadees sang in the aspen trees. Crows circled above. A flock of snow buntings in a quiet cloud rose out of the stark gray branches of a mountain ash. After the train’s passing, which probably disturbed Joe Rubin less than it did the wildlife, he called the dispatcher. “What you got going west? Number ninety-two BN-SF is by me now. Can I get a warrant to Chub Lake?” To which the dispatcher might reply, “I’ve got a tac train coming out of Allouez dock. I’ll be holding a coal train at Chub Lake. You got an hour. Get coffee if you have a place nearby.” More often than one might imagine, track inspectors have time between trains.
Though from certain mileposts, Joe Rubin could have raised the flanged wheels and made it to a country café and back, he generally brought a thermos of coffee and a sack lunch to eat. With his windows rolled down, what things he saw on mild winter days as he waited dreamily for the through freight: a spider made its way over the snow by his front tire; an ermine popped its head from the white earth; a snowy owl perched atop a paper birch, looking at the curious world. The delicate, beautiful bird and animal tracks he saw after a fresh snow reminded him of his own work on the tracks. When Joe Rubin drove his truck into the silent void after a train passed, it was as if it had never been there—no shrill whistle frightening deer, no diesel smoke—just the smooth gliding of the track inspector on his way to Chub Lake.
Early one year, he decided he’d become too committed to the railroad. Through his heavy boots, his legs, even up into his heart, he sensed the slightest problems with tracks. Nothing was too fine to escape the inspector’s attention. He took good care of the truck; he worked late; he reported problems before they occurred. He wanted so much to be Employee of the Month again, that week after long week he thought of nothing else.
After work on Fridays he would stop in a place where he could be less vigilant of the railroad for an hour. Seeing Joe Rubin, someone would yell to Ogy, the bartender, as he rang up a cash register sale, “Play that Jewish piano, Ogy. Make the Jewish piano sing.” The track inspector laughed as was expected of him, for he wanted to get along. But what some wiseguy yelled to the bartender coupled with “the Wandering Jew” nickname and other small slights made him feel that he might just as well go back out to inspect the tracks again. Listening to the sound of rails wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He might as well spend the weekend in his truck on a siding, maybe at Milepost 8 or M.P. 12.
At M.P. 15.9 lived a woman who wished she were less solitary. Alone most evenings, this Sofia had done well in life, at least for Superior. She was a teacher in an elementary school outside town, eight miles east of her home. “Mrs. Stepan,” the children called her, though she was a widow, and her married name now had a hollow ring to her ears.
She lived at the four corners where South Irondale Road crosses County Trunk Highway C, then winds through thick woods down into a river valley.
Sofia’s house was the only building at the corners. Across the highway and the BN-SF tracks was the wooden M.P. 15.9 sign and the gray railroad masts that told east- and westbound trains to hold or proceed. In midsummer when everything greens up, the area is unremarkable, unnoticeable. In other corners of the intersection were ditches dug out of the clay, a few scraggly alder and hawthorn bushes, and miles of fields that ended in the woods where, forty years ago, her father hunted rabbits. Twenty times a day trains passed—every five minutes a truck or automobile on the paved highway came close to the house, but nothing slowed, nothing stopped except once in awhile a train on Number 1 track being held until the eastbound line was clear. Otherwise nothing, no reason to stop, though sometimes a truck driver speeding by might wave if he spotted Sofia staring out her bedroom window on the highway side of the house. At least there was something to see that way. Her other windows looked out on empty fields.
Five days a week during the school year she was at school—and then there was summer school in June and July. Sofia loved her third-graders; but after teaching them and reading to them, correcting arithmetic and penmanship, escorting them to the playground, coordinating milk breaks, meeting parents, taking care of the small and large responsibilities of a teacher’s day, she found the job growing more tedious every year. For twenty-five years she’d done the work. During the January that Joe Rubin fully realized the extent of his commitment to his job, concentrating on railroad tracks to the exclusion of everything else, Sofia stared from her bedroom window and wondered where the years had flown. Her husband, Jerry Stepan, had been dead ten years, she had two women-teacher friends she saw socially once a month, and she lived alone in her house with shiplap siding at a boring crossroads in a flat country above a river valley. With a class of eight-year-olds clamoring for her attention, Sofia had less time than the track inspector for introspection. Still, as much of her time as they took and as much as she delighted in the children, she knew her life was passing.
As she daydreamed out at the fields, sometimes her life seemed so empty, but then she would snap herself out of her reverie and return to her pupils’ work or listen to records as she reheated coffee in a pan on the stove. Maybe everyone feels this way in winter, she thought. Sofia had a few moments in the evenings to think like this, or on weekends after finishing the dishes and preparing her school clothes, but the track inspector, during every long season, had plenty of time to worry over where his life was going.
Though neither knew it, they traveled parallel tracks. The highway runs beside the tracks (except for the ditch between) until “Shortcut Road,” where Sofia turned down a dirt road to pick up
