Listen

The shrill whine that train wheels make when they grate slowly against metal tracks has always appealed to me. I first heard it, and became fond of it, in the mid 1990s in Germany, in the huge train station in Hamburg, on the small platforms near rural villages. It sounds like a deeply-felt song, a series of long, high notes that trail after each other, as if one note, with its hand out, were chasing after the one that came before it, which was in turn longing after the one before, each crying out a sound of un-anxious longing.

In larger train stations, where several trains are always arriving and departing, the shrieks and cries of many large metal bodies blend to make a chorus of sorts. The sounds blend to a hum, almost like a harmonica whose five or six highest notes are being played simultaneously. Here the trains can really show off because they are guided by slanting rails into specific slots, guided sharply at clanking angles that would send them, at higher speeds, cartwheeling free of their constraints. But here, crawling along at this pace, they can bump and shimmy and squeal without worry; these sounds let their charges know that, momentarily, they will safely be deposed onto the platform, where friends wait to embrace them after their long absence. Or these passengers might ignore the hugging crowds and hurry to another train to head in yet another direction; or to home to fall asleep on the velvet couch. The heavy wheels spin one way, stop, and then spin the other way, singing on their way in, singing on their way out.

Another place, besides stations, where this sound arrests me is underneath overpasses. While in grad school in Spokane, I often walked under such an overpass at night on my way back to my car. If a train passed over, I would stop and listen to its conflicted sounds: the heavy, rhythmic crashing that caused the concrete pillars to tremble and the ground to shake, contrasted with the lofty whine of the wheels--the whale song of the tracks. On these nights those high pitches were the sound of contemplation; they embodied emotionally my disembodied thoughts.

I'm not one of those people who love trains; I don't fantasize about being a conductor or an engineer. I've never owned a model train. But I do like how the metal sounds as it grates against itself. It is a high, straining, somewhat hollow, metallic sound that rises and falls slowly. It is the sound of longing, the sound of waiting, the sound of relief, the sound of understanding, the sound of being found, of taking leave, of regret and forgiveness, of lamentations and rejoicings, the sound of coming and of going. It is the sound of gray drizzle on centuries-old roofs, the sound of cracked concrete and soot-covered backs, of luggage wheels clacking over slotted concrete, the sound of pigeons pecking pea-sized chunks of cheese bread from frozen cobblestones, the sound of hog farms and grain bins, of obsolete ingenuity and inter-dependence, of never-coming-back.

Those high peals drag their fingernails over the chalky hearts of the hearing near-by, searching, awakening...something, usually. Unless the sounds escaping from steel ring out and meet with no response, become incorporeal, impotent shockwaves diminishing into mute, dampening space


(So, um, in other words, I like that high-pitched sound that train wheels make when they move slowly down the track...and, in the moment of composition, I was also feeling fond of alliteration).