Gone To Walnut Grove

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So pay attention now, my children,
and the old story I will tell,
about the jungles,
and the freight trains,
and a breed of men who fell.
-Virginia Slim

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--A letter written while taking a rest on the Feather River Route--

5/24/1998

The train rolled into Portola from Winnemucca this morning, after a long, winding journey over the Sierras and through the Feather River Canyon. This one isn’t going any further south, and it’s due to be broken up soon, so we’ll have to jump the next one that comes through, which won’t come through till about ten. There’s still time.

Still plenty of time.

To rest.

To wait.

The old Western Pacific's all but gone now, but remnants of it still linger on, in the form of what few boxcars which the UP hasn't bothered to paint over. The rusted over, once proud, yellow heralds are fading away, just like the railroad itself, scraped away by the grit of travel and the spray paint of trustafarians marking their territory. Soon they would be meeting the scrapper’s torches.

Home…to the little Victorian on the outskirts of Sutter's Creek, is, I guess, half a hundred miles away to the southeast. I would have to finish the ride down, transfer to the Espee in Sacramento and then get off and stick around the little depot at Ione for the Amador Central local freight to show up. There's talk that the old Amador Central is soon going to suffer a worse fate than the Western Pacific- being abandoned, its tracks becoming overgrown, ties splintered, spikes torn up by local scavengers, forged into cheap beer openers and bbq forks in backyard furnaces….

But I’m getting ahead of myself, am I? There’s already a line like what the Amador would soon be, running down the river, south of Sacramento that I’m going to pay my respects to when I get there.

It’s the old Espee branch line down to Walnut Grove, careening away from the old Sacramento railyard, whose silent tracks were once lit up like a spidered Christmas tree from the mainline, winding onto the levee, the rushing forms of the cars and trucks of Interstate 5 on one side, the still, stippled waters of the Sacramento River on the other.

A guy told me once, in the last remnants of a jungle near Bakersfield, that I should go down to Walnut Grove. Said something about uttering a phrase at the final milepost at

Normally I wouldn’t trust what folks say, especially about superstitions and whatnot, but this guy was different. His eyes had this vitrification to them, as if he truly wanted me to go there and do it.

My watch shows ten.

The next train’s coming through now, all four power units spewing darkened wisps of oily diesel exhaust into the overcast skies. The freight cars, boxcars, hoppers, gondolas, all trailing behind, squeals of a thousand steel wheels in motion cutting through the air. You can take any car, really, but they don’t call a boxcar a “Palace on Wheels” for nothing. I see one that’s just about right-a old Western Pacific one, its fawn brown blending into the trails of neglect, sides coated with streaks of grime and hastily drawn graffiti just like the rest of them. To most it’s just a sad-looking boxcar, lumped into the rest. To us, though, it’s our way of moving about in a world that has left us. Left what few of us modern Wanderers behind.

The motions come easy. Hours, days, weeks of hopping trains across the Golden State prepared me for the moment.

And we’re off.

And we’re gone.

Gone to Walnut Grove.

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Tales From the Consolidated Tome of East & West

Sing For Me, Grandmother
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4/15/1952
I could hear the anguished cries of the North rolling across the Yalu, Grandmother. They're begging…begging us not to leave them behind.

Middle Yanji Road
-
5/23/1995
My grandfather is long gone now…taken by the very people he had fought for in Korea. The doctor visited my father two days ago, in our little apartment in the Walled City. He told me that it metastasized too much…that there wasn't anything we could do now. It was only then that my father began to open up.

Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed
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3/25/2003
Some days when I wake up, I cast my eyes to the morning fog and drizzle obscuring the oak outside my window and wish that the weekend would come sooner.

A Dance Between Flesh And Steel
-
5/20/2008
The sounds of thousands upon thousands of pounds of rolling steel rent through the air.

Ramblings Of A Retired Tramp
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6/5/2015
Who knew that stumbling across a dead Mack in the middle of Sonoma County would bring out such memories of the road?

An Architect's Notions of The City
-
315 Sygens
This calls for a glass of champagne, my dear.

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"My apologies for the curt approach, miss. I would like to see the head of the navy, for I got a pressing matter regarding his warships intruding on my domain."

Ramblings of a Modern Wanderer

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So pay attention now, my children,
and the old story I will tell,
about the jungles and the freight trains,
and a breed of men who fell.
-Virginia Slim

The landmark 1981 US Supreme Court Case Warren V. District of Columbia ruled that police had no specific obligation to serve and protect the people.

Police, at its core, exist solely to serve and protect the interests of the state.

PCP, or also known by its pharmaceutical name: Phenylcyclohexyl Piperidine, was first synthesized in 1956 as a medical anesthetic. Mainstream medical application on humans was dropped almost a full decade later due to the successful synthetization and mass-production of ketamine. The drug exists in pill, intravenous, powder, and oral liquid form.

The Tower is classified as an Major Arcana Card, preceded by The Devil. In divination, the Tower represents crisis. Upheaval. Destruction.

An abrupt and total change.

PCP is classified as an disassociative anesthetic.

PCP is highly addictive.

PCP triggers delirious hallucinations.

⟡

As her feet dangled loose from the tiger-striped body bag, the rest of the beats were congregating in the kitchen—rifling through the junk drawers, the liquor cabinet padded with miniature bottles of distilled fiver agave and chardonnay, fiberglass nightsticks swinging low from their hip. The antique rotary phone perched above the oven had been used for target practice, its disemboweled receiver tied the blade of a ceiling fan. You sit on an overturned milk crate in the den, sorting through her music collection as their shadows lumbered back and forth, back and forth—across the tiki wallpaper.

⟡

+ Your meager selection:

An 8-Trak tape—hand labeled: unfurl a nicotine dusk | Side B: 'cause they are watching.

An 45 RPM vinyl record—etched with two palms and the figure of a lone surfer padding across Venice Beach. | Reverse. Side B: Around the corner---beneath an Wegman’s sign---a Cadillac series sixty-two convertible goes up in flames.

Playing on the AM frequency | "Funny how time slips away...

Playing on the FM frequency | ...just take it further."

Playing as a subsidized placeholder for the auxiliary comms on the police radio, queued and broadcast—thinned with intermittent static—-from some battered Gibson Stratocaster hooked up to an WWII surplus radio receiver tied up to some farmstead beyond the sandstone buttes.

⟡

+ What is an Volare? What exactly is an Enforcer?

The Plymouth Volare is a compact car manufactured by the Chrysler Corporation from 1976–1980 for its Plymouth and Dodge divisions, the latter being simply rebranded under a different moniker and sold under the Dodge Aspen. The law enforcement package of the Plymouth Volare, along with its counterparts from Ford and GM—would go on to participate in the numerous shootouts, homicides, and street chases that characterized Reagan’s failed War On Drugs.

This wasn’t the first instance of Chrysler rebranding its consumer-grade cars for police service—the company had been manufacturing beat cop cars since its very inception in the 1920s, but struck gold at the beginning of the 1960s with the Chrysler Enforcer—the police package of the Chrysler Newport (back) the first generation of which (1959-1961) signified the final hurrah for slick, BOAC Comet and Roswell style design before cars rounded out into matchboxes and grew afterburners with the world's attention gripped fast on the Apollo missions. No-knock tetraethyl leaded gasoline, the fumes spit directly out with no middleman with an screen. Terrible mileage. No airbags. Ineffective seatbelts, if any at all. You had to shell out extra for power steering. Crash protection? Nonexistent. But the tailfins sure look gorgeous.

⟡

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Heya.

For those of you just coming in, I'm lzhoudidion, and I'm an WL author and experimental prose poet with interests in history, railroads, classic automobiles and the aesthetic of suburbs.

It's been an long road, isn't it? Whereas much of the pieces I've posted before on the WL were the equivalent of taking an short drive at 3AM to the McDonalds in the next town over for an couple cheeseburgers and several glasses of Coca-Cola, the time behind this one was long. Exceptionally long. Like taking an road trip across state and international lines with nothing but an ferry ticket, several changes of clothes and the copper bust of Sun-Yat-Sen strapped in the backseat. It was originally written in December of 2022, in one flashpoint of an weekend wracked with dry-cut hallucinations of klaxons and lead sleds skimming around tight corner and revised continuously while in storage over the course of 2023. Mental health issues and burnout since, for a lack of a better term, consumed the better of me, but I'm incredibly happy with the end result. I hope you enjoy.

Thank you so much to Tyumen for graciously hosting and coordinating Anthology 2023, Stygian Blue, Tyumen, and my offsite friend Vince for crit, syuzhet for her beautiful reimagining of the 'ol Tower tarot card, and EstrellaYoshte for devising the theme. All the best.

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