Listening for the Train on a Lonely Country Road

I was driving a lonesome road a few weeks ago, a few miles from where I grew up, when a familiar sound called out in the distance, cooing like a hoot owl, plaintive as a wolf.

It was a man-made noise, but as identifiable as a creature’s. I couldn’t recall the last time that I had heard this sound in California, but there in the Midwest, illuminated by nothing but beams of moonlight and rural highway headlights, I could hear it most every night.

I came to a railroad crossing and tapped my rental car’s brake as I eased toward the tracks, exactly the way it had been drummed into my head ever since I’d been old enough to cross a street on two legs: “Stop, look and listen.”

There was no locomotive light to my right or to my left, no sign of anything down the line. Just that distant whistle, the one that blew more like a horn than a reed.

Just as I crossed the tracks, the bell began to clang. Red lights flashed and the crossing gate came down.

I remember thinking, “What if my engine were to stall, right now?”

My imagination had pictured me fumbling to unbuckle the seat belt, scrambling to get out of the car, then standing on a country road by myself, watching a Super Chief passenger train or a southbound freight--bound for, hell, beats me, Miami maybe--smashing through my poor Ford Taurus as if it were made of tinfoil and continuing on its way.

Then me, calling Hertz from a farmer’s phone to try to explain.

*

It doesn’t work that way, as I now know. In real life, the train doesn’t keep on roaring down the line, its engineer oblivious to having just obliterated something in its path.

For on the night of March 15, maybe five weeks and maybe 15 miles from where I was driving, near my childhood hometown, an Amtrak train came barreling down the tracks and collided with what we used to call a “semi”--a big-rig truck driven by a man who might have ignored the warning signals and tried to cross.

Eleven people were killed.

It happened in Bourbonnais, a village 60 miles south of Chicago that we pronounced “Bor-bone-us” back when I lived nearby. It has been jarring to me of late to hear the town referred to on television as “Bor-bon-ay,” my having forgotten that townspeople took a vote in later years to restore the original French accent. (Similarly, there is a Marseilles, Ill., where most people pronounced the name “Mar-sales.”)

On the ill-fated Ides of March, a big-rig driven by trucker John R. Stokes stretched across the tracks and was hit by the City of New Orleans, the same train Arlo Guthrie sang about with a lyric that included “ . . . train pulls out of Kankakee.” On this trip, Kankakee was the next town down the line, not the previous one.

The train was indeed bound for New Orleans, filled with college kids on spring break.

Investigators say they are trying to determine whether Stokes caused the crash by attempting to go around the crossing gates, an assertion his attorney denies. Stokes also has a long history of traffic violations, and was driving on a 60-day probationary license that night.

I have seen this so many times in my life, a gate down, a driver sneaking across, unwilling to sacrifice five minutes of his life.

One of these days, I always said, a driver like that is going to sacrifice a lot more than five minutes.

And the crossing in Bourbonnais was even one with a signal. According to figures in U.S. News & World Report, there are 96,000 unguarded rail crossings in America, with neither gates nor lights. More than half of the 3,446 train accidents reported in the U.S. last year occurred at unguarded sites.

Trains are dangerous, and you don’t have to be on some blue highway in the sticks. Last week alone, five tanker cars derailed in Cerritos, carrying hot asphalt. No one was hurt, at least, which was not the case in Kenya, where a runaway went off the rails and killed 32 people en route to a safari park.

*

I always thought of train whistles as romantic, like the boy in the film “Hud” who hears one and tells his uncle, “Boy, I love that sound. Goes right through me.”

“Scares the hell out of the cattle,” Hud says.

“Know what trains always make me think about?”

“No, but I got a strong feeling you’re gonna tell me.”

Says the boy, “I guess I just like ‘em, that’s all.”

We don’t get to hear that sound very often out here. For the time being, I can live without it.

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com