As I write this, a pumpkin BNSF GEVO pulls 116 gondolas of subbituminous about 100 yards from my window.  A pusher brings up the end. Did that make any sense to you?  It wouldn’t have made any to me a year and a half ago, but in 2008 I moved right next to the railroad tracks in Bemidji, Minnesota and began seeing orange Burlington Northern/Santa Fe locomotives push and pull long strings of coal cars.  These trains start their journey somewhere in Wyoming or Montana and head for Cass Lake, Ball Club and onto Duluth.  They pass so close they make the house shake.  When they blow their horns, they wake me up at night or scare the living lights out of me in the day. 

And I’m grateful for it.  (Ok, maybe not so grateful for the horns, but still.)

The trains remind me of the distance of the country, but also how we’re all connected:  in a day of hard driving, I can be in eastern Montana or on the battlefield of the Little Bighorn, also known as the Greasy Grass.  The trains remind me that plenty of people work jobs that don’t involve a desk.  And fears about global warming and pollution aside, I like to see the black coal mounded in the cars.  The jet heaps make me think of growing up in Pennsylvania and my Grandpa Gibb, who earned $5.74 for one day of work at the Kingston Coal Company in 1939, and my great-grandfather David Gibbon, who also worked in a mine and was union president of the Edwardsville charter of the United Mine Workers of America in 1900.

I’ve mined my life and the world for my writing.  Once I finish a piece and send it out, it has to generate enough heat and light that someone wants to stay near.  So this year for Christmas, put me down for black stuff in my stocking.  Or get me a coal train with a heavy load and a horn that says, I’m coming through.