Exciting Lunchtime

I left at twelve eight and went to the big box bookstore. Shelves had been rearranged since my last visit. Books and people filled the space. The books were on lines of shelves. The people were spaced evenly among them. Mostly women, schoolgirls, men of retirement age. Once I walked in I felt like leaving to go find a quiet space to write. But there is no such space, so I stayed.

I found a book in the section for 19th Century American history and took it to a deep and well-worn leather couch. I read about Theodore D. Judah’s career in the 1850s as a brilliant civil engineer. People thought him monomaniacal on the subject of a Pacific railway. Eventually he earned his fame by solving the problem of crossing the Sierras. I learned that as a side job, while in California between bouts of learning how to lobby for railroad funding in Washington City -- a place then obsessed with the looming problem of secession and war -- he laid out the railroad that briefly ran within a mile of my house. Nothing is left of it now but a short causeway in the park, and a cut in someone’s yard down near the old Lincoln Highway bridge.

I am fascinated by details and remnants. I examine the landscape as I pass it by for signs of changes made to its natural flow. An old weed-filled railroad cut excites me. So do the foundations of a long-gone bridge, or a long-forgotten roadbed scarring the hillsides above.

At the end of the chapter I put the book away and went outside. My car radio clock said it was one oh four. Time to go back.