Red Line, Shady Grove.\u00a0 An empty train waiting for me at the Silver Spring stop, the morning commute already hot and sweaty.\u00a0 On my way into Union Station, I take a seat on the sun-side so I can watch an endless freight train creep by.<\/p>\n
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Freight trains call up a mix of memories.\u00a0 From the lonely call of the night train through Kensington in my youth, to a 2003 trip along Route 66 between Tucumcari, NM and Needles, CA, with 3000 miles worth of side trips throughout New Mexico and Arizona between, almost always haunted by those impossibly long desert trains.\u00a0 Often in the hazy distance, their lights brighter than the sun, the miles of cars behind them a long black snake against that high desert, I\u2019d find myself mesmerized by their otherworldliness.\u00a0 Wanting to veer off the road and head towards them.<\/p>\n
My life has been marked by dead train towns.\u00a0 Kensington, where I was raised, was an early proto-gentrified village five miles from DC.\u00a0 Posh and soft, the train station still stood and serviced the woefully inadequate light rail commuter line.\u00a0 The old town, though, had been converted into Antique Alley.\u00a0 Historic buildings, of a design typical to train towns, done up in a deeply embarrassing kitsch-fest run by the type of people who always wanted to be hippies but, too late to the game, turned into cruel, idiotic, self-centered sadists.\u00a0 Even as a child, I harbored anti-social thoughts, typically manifested in petty vandalism, dumpster diving, and verbal abuse shouted at anyone not mounted on a bicycle.<\/p>\n
The family seat was Silver Spring, the neighboring suburb.\u00a0 Silver Spring is an unincorporated monster that has swallowed all of the little towns northwest of DC, in Montgomery County.<\/p>\n
Some even argue that Silver Spring does not exist and, for the old timer\u2019s especially, mail can be addressed and delivered to those lost towns.\u00a0 Forgotten tribes that still exist under the hegemony of Silver Spring:\u00a0 Colesville, Layhill, Cloverly, Hillandale, Forest Glen, Four Corners, White Oak, Kemp Mill, Montgomery Hills, and on and on.<\/p>\n
Some of those towns still have their signs up \u2013 a little \u201cwelcome to\u201d homage to their independence, though they are all Silver Spring now.\u00a0 A quiet battle between Wheaton, the neighboring suburb of any substance, and the encroaching waves of Silver Spring wages today.\u00a0 The post office has already conceded, and Wheaton addresses marked Silver Spring will be delivered.<\/p>\n
Strange to think of Wheaton as a dying suburb.\u00a0 In my youth, the draw of Wheaton Plaza and Phantasmagoria records and, later, the excellent scotch specialty pub, The Royal Mile, have made the town a frequent stop.\u00a0 Though old Wheaton has been uprooted.\u00a0 Most notably through the actions of Australia\u2019s Westfield Corporation, which added Wheaton Plaza to their crown and began a year\u2019s-long campaign to remove the location from the center of events.\u00a0 Used to be the best fireworks in the DC area on July 4th over Wheaton Plaza.\u00a0 You could head down there, get wasted at the Royal Mile,\u00a0 grab some of the best food around, then calmly climb to the top of the mall\u2019s parking garage for an ear-ringing, glittering, front row display.\u00a0 Parking was easy, the Metro station was 20 feet away.\u00a0 It was ideal, unlike the fireworks down on the Mall in DC, where you spent more time getting to and from them in a mass of idiot people just to sit on hard earth far away from food and alcohol.<\/p>\n
Westfield banned the fireworks, and so Wheaton lost their only venue.\u00a0 With the residents being priced out, and the old school businesses being closed, it\u2019s only a matter of time before Wheaton is an inconsequential forgotten town.<\/p>\n
Silver Spring\u2019s heart is the so-called Central Business District.\u00a0 Officially the CBD, though no one uses that term or acronym.\u00a0 It\u2019s Downtown Silver Spring, with a big fountain-sign on the corner of Colesville Rd and Georgia Ave.\u00a0 The downtown that the Discovery Channel built (the founder is a native son, and turned Silver Spring from long-dead post-train town into mini-empire in the course of about 10 years).\u00a0 Silver Spring the train town used to have character.\u00a0 Now, though it\u2019s received a new MARC station and is a busy stop for the weekday-only light rail, it\u2019s no longer a town about trains.\u00a0 It\u2019s a town about office buildings.\u00a0 The service industry in America run amok.\u00a0 And everything carefully controlled, as the predominantly black population is forced out in favor of imported yuppie hybrids.\u00a0 Even the spring itself, long since dried up, is run by a circulating pump.\u00a0 The filthy \u201cspring\u201d water constantly cycles through a huge fake rock next to the spring, and is turned off for the winter.\u00a0 A nearby sign proudly proclaims the spring\u2019s history.\u00a0 Twas here on this wee spot, etc. etc.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fitting that the worst elements of my family called Silver Spring home for so long.<\/p>\n
High School found me in Bethesda, where an old spur ran (in some cases beneath the town) just a block away.\u00a0 Today, that spur has been torn up and replaced by the popular Capital Crescent Trail, but it was a lonely wooded walk before.\u00a0 I often dodged the bus and walked the two miles home, stumbling over the tracks through forest, neighborhoods, the back end of a golf course, and over a stunning trestle crossing Rock Creek.\u00a0 Eventually, the line hooked up with Silver Spring, just after a boxcar graveyard and abandoned depot.\u00a0 My first taste of urban exploration, now long gone.<\/p>\n
Back in my high school days, you rarely ran across people on the tracks.\u00a0 The kids would hang out under the bridge by the school and smoke and drink, and the occasional reflective pipe smoker would walk by as if he had stepped out of some Edwardian dream.\u00a0 In those days, I very much needed to be removed from the modern world, and that walk home often prepared me for the abuse and hatred that would fill the evening ahead.<\/p>\n
Leaving Maryland for college in West Virginia found me following the train towns.\u00a0 Elkins, where the train was long dead, except for the occasional ghostly whistle of the vintage steam train that plied the remaining tracks through town with pleasure-seekers aboard.\u00a0 Though it is now, slowly, developing, the center of town was marked by a wide scar where the trains used to come in, the old station propped up against age and decay, the tracks only recently removed when I arrived for my freshman year.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m back, again, to Silver Spring.\u00a0 Commuting through the rapidly developing corridor that used to pour passengers and freight alike into DC\u2019s Union Station.\u00a0 Now given over to the Metro, the light rail system, and the ubiquitous freight train, with the occasional Amtrak sneaking along, ferrying people to New York, Chicago, and all those places that don\u2019t really call to me anymore.\u00a0 Every morning, I visit the board in Union Station before going to work.\u00a0 I keep looking for some westbound train, something beyond Chicago, back out to the long paved-over American frontier.\u00a0 Escape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Red Line, Shady Grove.\u00a0 An empty train waiting for me at the Silver Spring stop, the morning commute already hot and sweaty.\u00a0 On my way into Union Station, I take a seat on the sun-side so I can watch an …<\/p>\n