Just a taste to get started. This 5 a.m. shift makes me forget myself. I walk the tracks in the long dark pre-dawn, holding a stick before me to cut the spider floss, the tracks of their nightly flights. Just the rails guide me with their steady rhythm. I lumber, reaching for a sure step, to match the ties and my legs to a stride I can forget myself in, holding my stick out as if I were collecting silk for a ghostly flag.
My walkman goes three days on its batteries before it starts to slow and stretch the melodies, deepening the voices. I've listened to every tape a million times: Pink Floyd, INXS, Bob Dylan. When I get paid, I raid the bargain bins at the grocery store. I've dropped the player enough times that it only works if I hold it at a certain angle, almost squeezing it.
The volume doesn't work so well either. If I try to tweak a little more sound from it, my ears will ring with static until I can settle it into something bearable, always too soft to block out the world.
Certain tapes have been chewed in the gears though I've carefully unwound and taped them back together. They sound remixed with cellophane in certain spots. The lyrics grow garbled as if the band has been sunk beneath the water to drown, but rises again unmoved by the experience. I'm attuned to this arrangement of rhythms.
I know every tie coming up, every turn toward the trees, at what place dawn will rise and at which site a dog may bark, where a deer once crossed before me having never seen me, where an opossum waddled on the rail awhile till my passing made him tumble down the embankment.
I've tried to walk the whole way home on the rail. It took hours, and for what? Roger Waters' voice losing its passion like a tired balloon.