Deliberate Abandon

This past Wednesday, my charmers and I joined the swarm hopping the 449/194 Amtrak train out of Syracuse going to Chicago. There we switched trains and headed to Texas to visit my mom.

Some Amtrak facts: every day, more than 300 trains roar across the country at speeds up to 150 mph, and, with 21,200 miles of track, thousands of passengers can go to 46 states and three Canadian provinces. Train travel is booming again with 30 million riding the rails each year. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

We traveled 1,159 miles and covered eight states. A prime opportunity to see and meet the folks making connections … an eclectic mix of America on the go. College kids. Single moms. Mentally challenged. Elderly. Alcoholics. Photographers. Itchy chain-smokers. Actors. Working class heroes. Little-known pulp writers. But that’s a book or, at the very least, a post for another time.

It’s the American landscape that captured my imagination.

The countryside flickered by in a treasure trove of still-lifes -- countryside once shaped by Norman Rockwell paintings now crumbling into a beauty of deliberate abandon.

I snapped more than 1000 shots in all, creating a pictorial record of our journey that would otherwise never have been remembered. Along the steel rails, five sights/points of interest appeared more in my viewfinder than any other:

Roll it up and smoke it.

The writing is on the wall.

Crumbling down.

Meaner than a junkyard dog.

Final destination.

Epitaph

I’m researching the oldest profession for a western short that I'm working on when I came across this epitaph from a headstone in Pioche, Nevada...

Here lies the body of Virginia Marlotte,
She was born a virgin and died a harlot.
For eighteen years she preserved her virginity
That's a damned good record for this vicinity.

It may be made up, but it certainly gave me a chuckle.

Rayne

Cemeteries have always fascinated and frightened me with equal zeal. When I was a kid, my dad would take me on genealogy hunts which quite often included excursions to cemeteries throughout upstate New York. At a graveyard near Ithaca, we found a headstone that read:

"Kind reader as you pass by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now so you must be
Prepare for death & follow me"

I remember that was pretty heavy for a ten year old, and it certainly stuck with me. That day, the information collected by my father cultivated my passion for history and the poetic verse imparted an early inspiration to write.

Continuing in the graveyard vein, Little d and I read in a newspaper of a famous cemetery in Rayne, Louisiana that faces the ‘wrong way’. I must admit, I never realized there was a ‘right way’ to lay out the dead, but apparently bodies are customarily buried in an east to west orientation. However, this particular cemetery made Ripley's Believe It Or Not! because it’s one of the only known Christian cemeteries where the dead are buried north to south. This little tidbit made it interesting enough for us to check it out. Local folklore about the cemetery's misalignment has been passed down over the years, but no one really knows why it doesn’t follow tradition. With my ace photographer in tow, here are a few pictures:


Next to the open 'vaults'.



Christ on the Cross, rising from the east.



St. Joseph's Chrurch on the north end of the cemetery.



Renovation notice.



Walking the narrow path.


Pictures originally posted on the Axiom Report on 4/8/2008.