By Harry T. Cook

7/9/10

For a considerable term of years, home was a small village
(pop. 150 in the 1940 census) in the lake region of northwestern Michigan’s Lower
Peninsula. It was there that my father, mother, two sisters
and I began to weave a fabric of traditions into a history.
Yet I could not quite be done with the distant metropolis in
which I had been born and where I lived to the age of almost seven. I missed its
24-hour cycle of light and motion, its high buildings, its street cars and seeming
endless grid of streets and avenues. They were the substance of many a subsequent
childhood dream. As much as I loved the new freedom to roam woods and
lakeshore, I sometimes longed for the sights, sounds and smells of urban life.
As it happened, a railroad ran through our little village,
its tracks having been laid down there in 1892, connecting our Nowheresville to
anywhere else trains ran in America.

The sounds of wheels pounding the tracks, the hoarse cry of
the huge, black locomotive’s whistle, its tolling bell, stirred a longing for
the city that early on had put its mark upon me.
My first trip away from home was an overnight journey to Detroit
via rail. It was to me what Odysseus’ voyage must have been in the imagination
of his creator: a momentous passage from the known to the barely remembered, a
promise of things beyond parochial desire.
To be settled in a lower berth of a vintage Pullman car by a
porter who clearly knew his nighttime business, to look out the window through
eyes heavy with sleep and glimpse the beckoning greens of railroad signals, and
to hear the staccato exhaust of the engine’s forward thrust was to know that I
was really on my way to a place of considerable consequence.

Come morning, I was awakened by the porter, now perhaps
sleepy himself, minutes before the train reached the great station with the
skyline of the city arrayed behind it. I stepped down from the train into the
company of an aunt and uncle who would see to my care in coming days.
What days those were, filled from morning until night with
city things to do and to see: riding streetcars skimming along thoroughfares;
lunch in a hotel restaurant with snowy linen and silver heavy to the hand,
baskets overflowing with every manner of breads, heaps of butter pats on beds
of ice, liveried waiters laying down and removing plates, music of what must
have been a string quartet coming round the corner from an adjacent room.

Much later that night, I was tucked between stiff sheets in a
hotel bed with room for four of me while the lights of a nearby nightclub’s
frothy neon sign played on the high ceiling. I could hear the muffled sounds of
elevator doors opening and closing somewhere along the carpeted corridor, and
of tipsy revelers stumbling to their adjacent rooms, the late-night cry of a
newsboy far down on the street hawking the first edition of the morning paper
– all were the auditory fulfillment of the city’s promise.
Yet my last waking thoughts of that night were not of the
city’s round-the-clock life that so captivated me, but of the somnolent village
250 miles and a whole night away and of the four people who lay sleeping in a
little house with one of its beds empty of me. That and there was home, not the
coveted city.

Back, then, an evening or two later, to the mammoth station and
its parallel ribbons of steel meant for the urban swarm’s entry and exit.
Back, then, into the Pullman and into the care of the porter whose demeanor bespoke the
lore of many a long journey, the knowledge of a great many places and who knew
what else.

The throaty shriek of the locomotive whistle and the sway of
the car as the train pulled away spoke to me of home. The smokestack flames of
a dozen factories along the way out of the city escaped my best attention as I
imagined what it would be to descend the steps of the Pullman into the arms of
my mother and father the next morning and to tease my sisters with hints of
what I might have brought them from the block-long, 25-story department store
down in the city.

So did the train steam on into the darkness, closing the
distance mile by mile, hour by hour between the splendid city and the hardly
existent village that was home.
Years later, I would go away more or less permanently, but I would
come home to visit from time to time as people do.

The way home I took on that first adventure no longer
exists. One who may remember that trains did stop in the village can no longer quite
make out where exactly the railroad ran. And no wonder: It has been almost a
half century since anyone could arrive or leave there by train.