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Railroad Grade

It was odd to walk there, knowing that once, it had been a railway bed.  The rail lines were gone, and the "road", which was really only an almost straight way through the trees, was indicated mostly by the fact that no trees grew there; not yet.  That came gradually, later.  


We knew who probably once had owned the trees.  Our three-room, eight grade school, was "Weyerhaeuser No. 303".  We assumed that Frederick Weyerhaeuser--see how easily I still can spell it?--once had owned the old timber where we lived.  Only a few "snags"--old trees not worth cutting down, now dead, hinted at what once had been everywhere.  We grew up wondering when the brown snags, peppered with woodpecker holes, would fall, and hoped we would not be near.  There was hardly a chance!


Once the railroads had run there where we walked, in the middle of what seemed nowhere, because the old growth timber, after ten thousand years of crowded competition and easy cooperation, had covered the land like giant moss, and it took a railroad to haul it all away.  When the trees were gone, the railroad companies reclaimed their steel rails, and the railroad ties, and almost every steel spike, and left the roadbed to resist the trees.  The trees eventually won.  


As children, we were free to run the roadbeds as far as we dared, knowing we could not become lost because all we had to do was to turn around and make our way back again, although the longer we ran, the more clearly we heard--off to the sides, in the trees--what were lurking, dangerous sounds.  Years later, I could scarcely find where the roadbed had been.  The trees had won.  


Such a right away also ran down through my grandfather's farm, where he had trimmed the second-growth trees that came to reclaim what was theirs, so that as high as he could manage, the lower trunks were without branches.  Decades later, in Norway, I saw such trees again, and understood, for the first time, what he had done.  He was managing knot-free timber, as high as he could reach.  The timber is there still, but probably not for long.  


I walked down that right away, once, years ago, wanting to see where my memories were, but not wanting to get too near the neglect that had been his life, and his farm, and my childhood.  There were young trees growing in the railroad grade, and dead trees across the road.  The small gate at the county road was wired shut.  

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