Poteat
From the Main Street crossing in downtown Drexel to the Zion Road Bridge is just over a mile.
The trains don’t run much anymore.
The Norfolk Southern railway, the tracks of which are at most 60 yards west of my house in Drexel, are mostly silent these days and nights.
My current home was also my childhood home, and both that railroad and its trains were intricate parts of my life as a lad growing up there.
Local histories report that the railroad reached the little community that was then known as Baker in 1888, just a little before my time.
The establishment of Drexel Furniture Company came 15 years later, and my grandfather, John Poteat, was one of their original employees.
The reason Mr. Samuel Huffman and his partners chose to locate the new industry in the tiny, unincorporated hamlet? Its proximity to the railroad.
The railroad was 67 years old by the time I came along in the summer of ‘55; Drexel Furniture was 52. The Town of Drexel, not incorporated until 1913, was only 42, younger than Rutherford College is today.
In my early childhood, those tracks served as a line of demarcation.
The woods on the south side of the tracks, those nearest to my house, were a safe and acceptable place for me to play, and really, they were all a little boy could want.
There were several established paths, there was a creek – too little to drown in but big enough to dam up, to splash rocks in, and to hunt for the elusive crawdad.
There was even a small swampy area around the spring where the creek was born, and it took only a little imagination to believe that it was home to alligators, crocodiles, and pythons.
Perhaps most importantly, my mother’s voice, calling from our front porch, could be heard throughout those woods.
Eventually, however, those woods proved too small for a growing boy, and I began to venture not only into the woods on the north side of the railroad but up the tracks as well.
Today, it is strictly illegal to walk on or alongside active railroad tracks in North Carolina. Railroad tracks and their rights-of-way (typically extending up to 100 feet from the center of the tracks) are private property.
Under North Carolina General Statute § 14-280.1, entering and remaining on a railroad right-of-way without the company’s consent is classified as a Class 3 misdemeanor.
That must not have been the case back in the 1960s, because my brothers, my friends, and I were certainly neither renegades nor rogues, but we walked up and down those tracks all the time.
And while mother knew all about our walking the rails, I can’t remember a time she ever objected to it. I reckon she figured we had sense enough to get out of the way of an oncoming freight train.
To our west, about a quarter of a mile beyond the Zion Road bridge, one of my brothers discovered a creek that was two or three times bigger than the one near our house.
This creek featured a waterfall and a pool at the bottom large enough to sit in on a scorching summer day. One of the older siblings dubbed this little spot of nature’s perfection “The Pretty Place.”
Can’t remember a single close call with a train as part of those expeditions. They were mighty loud. But I can testify that there ain’t no place on Earth hotter than the middle of a railroad on a blazingly bright summer afternoon.
Been decades since I walked on a railroad; can’t say as I miss it.
What I miss instead are sounds of the nighttime freight trains as they passed so close to our house.
On a quiet and cool spring evening, with the windows open, you could hear the first rumble of the rails when the train was still miles away.
I distinctly remember one night, when brother Johnny and I were lying in our beds, chatting in the dark, and he said to me, “Hush up, we got a long freight coming and I want it to put me to sleep.”
For that is indeed what a long freight and the sound of its wheels could do, put you right to sleep, even if the engineer chose to give the whistle a blast or two before crossing Main Street.
Twenty years ago this summer, my bride and I moved back into that house. That move was like rediscovering a treasure. We fell in love with the privacy, the quiet, and the woods which surround us.
We fell in love also with the sound of those nighttime freight trains. The sound of those wheels on a quiet night could lull us to sleep just as effectively as they had two young boys 40 years before.
We spend much of our lives believing that memories live in photographs or old letters. I’ve come to think they live just as often in sounds.
The laughter of children. A screen door closing. A mother’s voice calling from the porch. And somewhere near the top of that list for me is the low, steady song of a freight train rolling through Drexel on a summer night.
Some lullabies never really leave us.
