Chapter 8: Riding the Rails

There I was sitting on the front porch. Cars rattled down Walden street. A couple passed by holding hands speaking Japanese: “Utsukusii hi da.””. Danny was by my side tossing a baseball up and down into his mitt. I was wrtiing in the Revrend Mary's journal about the old Concord Railroad. The next thing I knew, we were both sitting in a railroad car traveling along a bumpy track.

Danny looked over at me. “Am I dreaming, Nathaniel. Weren’t we just sitting on your porch?”

“If you are dreaming, we’re both having the same dream.”

“How did we get on this train?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. I was just writing in this journal the Reverend Anderson gave me. And the next thing I knew, we were here? The car was smaller than the train we usually rode into Boston. The seats were wooden and uncomfortable. There were only a few other passengers, mostly men, who didn’t pay much attention to us.

“Here. Let me see that journal.” Danny asked.

I passed it over to him. He skimmed through it. “Seems harmless enough.” he observed. “Wait a minute. You were writing a poem about the old Concord railroad. Now we are riding on an old railroad.”

“You can’t be serious. There can’t be a connection between that journal and this train..”

“Ok.” said Danny. You come up with a better explanation.”

Danny stammered, mumbled something about aliens and fell back into a strict silence.

I looked out the window. All I could see was farmland. Rich fertile fields. Any explanation I could think about flew out the window and got lost in the thick smole pouring out of the engine’s smokestack. There were farmers busy at work with teams of horses pulling plows cutting neat curving rows in the ground. When we roared by, they looked up and waved. It was strange to see the words I had imagined on paper a few moments ago come to life.

Just then, a man came into the car. He wore a blue uniform and a round cap with a tiny visor. “Concord,,, Concord Massachusetts he sang. Danny looked up. “Let's get off here. At least we can walk home and figure this out later.”

It seemed like a good idea. We could ask questions later. We rose from our seats when the train began to slow. There was a crowd of people waiting at the station as we stepped down from the car. We watched as they climbed aboard. The engineer blew the whistle, and the tiny train disappeared into the afternoon distances. We turned our backs to the rail and headed into town.

Chapter 7: The Concord Railroad 1843

From my journal………

Early morning

Before the sun

Roaring like thunder

Throwing  smoke and dust

Heating up the rails.

Folks came out of their houses

Stunned by the sound

Farmers stopped their plowing

Children stopped their crying

And rushed to the window.

The train ran along the ponds

Past the hills.

Folks watched it pass like a blur

Racing on

To the future.

Chapter 6: The Journal

The Reverend Mary Anderson was pacing back and forth, back and forth. Her hands were squeezed tightly together and she was whispering to the walls. I had never seen her like this. Usually, she was the picture of calm even when everything else was a storm of chaos.

When I came into the common room, she looked up. “Thank you for coming, Nathaniel.” I didn’t like the tone in her voice and began to speculate what sort of trouble I might be in. She stared at me for a moment and fell silent. I bowed my head so as not to have to look her in the eye. “I need your help,” she continued.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“I have heard you have the ability to locate lost items.”

“Have you been talking to my grandfather?”

“Yes. And Mrs. Langton whose glasses you found, and Mary Craft whose bicycle you located. You have built a loyal following. People call you the great detective. Now I am at your mercy.”

“Have you lost something?”

My Sunday sermon. I’ve lost the Sunday sermon. Nathaniel, I worked so long on it. It’s about charity to others. Twenty pages of notes. I can never redo that by tomorrow.” Behind her on the wall, a large portrait of the Reverend Peter Bulkely who founded the Church in 1636 stared down at me as if to say Go on son. Work your magic.

“When was the last time you you remember having it?”

She breathed a long, withering breath that made her face wrinkle. “Well, I keep everything in a manilla folder marked sermon notes. I know I was looking it over when the phone range. Then I took it into the Church while I watered the flowers from the window sills.”

“Did you set it down on one of the pews?”

“I looked all through the pews, unless someone picked it up by mistake and wandered out.”

I tried to imagine a disgruntled parishioner laying in wait for the opportunity to seize the Sunday Sermon and save the best part of a Sunday morning.

She continued:”I remember carrying the folder upstairs with me. I’ve been cleaning out some of the closets. They haven’t been touched for years!”

She told me all about how she was arranging the closets, how she spoke to a musician about a wedding service, how she prepared the garden beds along side the Church and in short any number of other jobs. I grew tired just listening, but I just didn’t hear any clues.

“Maybe I’ll just have a look around, and I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Thank you, Nathaniel. I know I’m in good hands.”

Her confidence scared me . I tried to retrace her steps as best I could, but I was sure there was something she left out. Something she did so often that she didn’t even have to think about it while she was doing it. If I could figure that out I would find the sermon.

I went around in circles for a while, and began to get dizzy from the repetition. Then I stopped and sat in a pew. Fingers of sunlight filtered through the plain glass windows. The church was so quiet I could hear the birds singing outside and enjoyed their music. Then it hit me. Of course, the Rev. Mary loves music and would often sit at the piano and plunk out a song. I could just see her stopping by the piano on the altar as she went about her tasks. She might stop. Set down her sermon folder and play. She would play without thinking and without thinking she would walk away from the piano without her folder. Sure enough, when I checked, there was the folder sitting invisibly behind the music holder above the keys.

Needless to say, she was overjoyed when I handed her the sermon.

“I knew you would save the day, Nathaniel.” She hugged me tight. “It’s true, you are Concord’s greatest detective. Wait here, I have the perfect reward for some one of your ability.”

I shook my head. “No need to reward …” but she had disappeared before I could complete my sentence. I imagined myself counting out the dollars, or eating the sweetest apple pie all by myself. When she returned she handed me something else.

“I found it in my closet. It is dated 1846. “ She handed me an ancient notebook. Its cover was leather bound, its pages yellow, and scribbles decorated the yellowed pages. Dust clouds erupted as I paged through it. I didn’t know what to say.

“You could write in it, Nathaniel. It’s historic. Probably worth a small fortune as an artifact.”

“You don’t have to give me anything.”

She pushed it into my hands. “Oh no. Thanks to you, we’ll all profit from my sermon on Sunday. I don’t know what I would have done. “

I thanked her with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. All I could picture was sitting in the pew for hours on Sunday thanks to my detection abilities. I was such a genius.”

“Don’t forget to write in the journal, Nathaniel,” she called.

Little did I know as I walked out the door how much those words would change my life. I did not forget to write in that journal. And my life was never the same again.

The Book of Trees

In these days of trouble we can still find hope in the little, unnoticed things. For me that hope resides in nature. In normal times, we often just take the natural world for granted. We put up with rain, snow and clouds. We know the sun will shine again, the clouds will part and the moon will glow. It is comforting and predictable. Nature teaches us to be hopeful if we pay attention.

In ancient times, people always looked to nature for signs. In Homer's Odyssey, the Heroic Odysseus fought for victory along side Achilles in the decade long war with Troy. He was triumphant on land, but found himself at the mercy of Poseidon, Lord of the seas, for an offense he committed against his son, the Cyclopes. The result cost him ten extra years to return to his family in Ithaca. These were adventures fraught with danger. Every time Odysseus sailed closer to home, angry Poseidon stirred up the waters and pushed him back away from his destination.

In an anonymous medieval ballad Sir Patrick Spence, Patrick was called the “greatest sailor who ever sailed the seas.” When his king wrote him a command to ship out to Norway during winter time, one of his sailors saw the “new moon with and old moon in her arms.” This was a sure sign of dangerous storms. It was warning he ignored. All travelers watched the stars, studied the flight of birds or consulted the bark of trees to gauge the wind. Ignoring the omens in nature brought disaster. The heroic Patrick Spence and his crew ultimately sank fifty fathoms deep where they met their final rest.

Later, in a more scientific age, we can still look for signs in the natural world. Henry David Thoreau branded himself as the “self – appointed inspector of snowstorms” which involved observing and documenting winter's dangers even down to the level of the individual snowflake. When it snowed, Henry called it creative genius in the air. Years later, the writer Robert Frost read meaning in bent, fallen birch trees and stone walls near his New England home. For the poet, a path in the woods became a meditation on the meaning of his life and the choices that created it.

Recently, my wife Meg and I went for a stroll down Mckinley Parkway to get some air and stretch our legs. The sky was heavy with clouds and the wind pushed cold against our faces. Along the way I found myself buoyed by the steady, silent trees standing sentinel on our route. At first glance, their slick bark and bare branches seemed dead on the outside. But on closer inspection, they were clearly alive on the inside. Walking these quiet streets, I could imagine their sap beginning to run while tiny buds were busy decorating their branches. It was a clear message that Spring and the promise of brighter times were on the way.

For me, these trees are a sort of book, and I read in them a story of resilience and strength. They teach us lessons and serve as bookmarks for the countless chapters of creation. Trees do not mark time by the ticks of a clock or the fleeting pages of a calendar. Rather, they stand strong while the harsh winds roar. And in this way they show those who care to notice, a steady path to the brighter future up ahead.