The CSX rolls through Decatur

I have always loved trains. Some of my first memories drawing were of endlessly figuring the curve of tracks around a bend with curly plumes of smoke. I believed the only real trains were the old steam locomotives; diesels turned me off: where was the romance? The opening credits to Petticoat Junction thrilled me with the smokestack puffing along the rails. At that age I thought nothing about the health issue of people swimming in the water tank. As I grew up I rode trains at theme parks, where fake soldiers and card sharks played out "19th century class struggle scenarios in some locale dissonant with even the slightest historical connection to the purported events" - as I reported in one eighth grade essay on what I did over the summer. Jami and I both have photos of our sojourns in these parks: Maggie Valley and Panama City and I have memories of this happening at Stone Mountain - an unlikely confederate vs yankee shoot out. What would have made sense might have been a KKK vs FBI shoot out - being Stone Mountain and all. When I think about it I am amazed at how much of the history I encountered was reified, preinterpreted, homogenized, and packaged for consumption. Amazing too is that these are the criteria for deconstruction - that is, these states of affairs make deconstruction necessary. When I hear people decry deconstruction for removing certainty from the text, I am reminded of instances where the last thing a text needed was certainty, a stamp of approval, because to give such approval would be to participate in a lie. So let us deconstruct away.
And hence, as I've grown up, I have become less fond of the steam locomotive - at least the old conical smokestack, bilging smoke, while laboriously chugging, chased by Indians, wild bunches, desperadoes, soldiers, and other trains, while gentlemen with derringers jumped from car to car. There is something to be said for the sleek, art deco, streamlined engines of the 20th century, smashing their way across the Scottish moors or the Canadian shield.
I remember when my dad began work at Southern Freight and Tariff Bureau (later called Railroad Publications and referred to as Southern Frightened Giraffe Bureau by those who worked there), when there was still passenger service: how excited I was about the possibility for a family trip on a train. But we never went. Shortly after dad took the job, passenger service was discontinued. The old stations in Covington and surrounding counties became derelict, only decades later being reborn as restaurants. Old tracks have been torn up and the right-of-way has reverted to nature. And now I love these old diesels. When I lived out in New Mexico and I drove between Roswell, NM and Lubbock, TX a lot, I would come up alongside trains or come upon trains, as the road often paralleled the tracks: great long trains traveling fast and I could feel the energy come up through the ground.
Now when I work in my studio trains are just outside my door. Here I've stopped to stand near the edge of the tracks to capture the passage of a freight train from the crossing at Chandler Road past the Carpe Diem restraunt. When the light filled up the lens it took my breath away. I had to check and make sure that I was a good ten feet off the rails. And there was one shot of exactly that, which the shutter didn't cooperate on: the light filing up the lens. And how do you take a shot of thunder? Painting sound is a real challenge. I want to paint thunder.