John Pepin

By JOHN PEPIN

Michigan Department of Natural Resources

“This world can take my money and time but it sure can’t take my soul and I’m going down to the railroad tracks and watch them lonesome boxcars roll.” — Butch Hancock

I stood on the decking at the top of an old railroad trestle, leaning on the wooden railing and looking over the side.

It was indeed a long way down, but a fall to the bottom would take less than five seconds. If this had been the old days, the railroad days, there would have been no side rails at all here on this crossing over the wide and frothy rapids in the river below.

There would have been creosote-soaked railroad ties under the steel rails, that were spiked down tight through steel plates.

Back in those days, engineers of passenger trains traveling this route were said to have stopped while crossing the trestle span to afford their customers a chance to take in the view of the deep woodlands and wild river below.

This trestle was built when William McKinley was president, more than a decade before the RMS Titanic sunk and a generation after the Civil War ended.

I wish that train was still running. I’d probably ride it every week.

The railroad is long since gone and the tracks have all been ripped up.

I’m glad the trestle, with its steel deck girder spans and more than 400 feet in length, is still here. It allows people like me — not too much different than those train car passengers of old — to look over the sides at the view and daydream.

In my mind, I can hear the train coming down the tracks from a mile away, even over the sound of the furious rapids below. I move off the bridge and find a good spot in the white pines to watch the big iron horse roll past — easy girl.

I also picture myself sitting in a dining car, working my way through a piece of glazed kitchen ham with sides of buttered carrots and a salty baked potato.

I’m content to read my newspaper while I eat as the train stops on the trestle for the “tourists” to get their glimpse.

By the time we’re ready to move again, I’m almost to the editorial page. I lean my head back into the corner of the seat, against the window, and drift off to sleep for awhile, lulled there by the sound of the big wheels and the drivers moving underneath us.

Past the little mining towns, the train moves faster across the straight stretches of the sparsely populated countryside. I remind myself that these were the places Ernest Hemingway set his character Nick Adams out fishing.

I was told upon boarding, before the conductor punched my ticket, that I could bring a trout fishing rod aboard, but it would have to be stowed away to not be in the way of other passengers.

There are many days when a reverie like this helps me try to put my arms around the passage of time, trying to better understand the devolution of things and the ravenous gnawing of obsolescence.

It all leaves a hole cut right through me somehow.

So many things that were incredibly cool have gone by the wayside, burned up in an old town fire or were flattened in the name of progress for that new stretch of highway.

Walking around the old railroad beds, which are now trails for hikers, bikers, snowmobilers and off-road vehicle operators (the ones they built the wooden trestle railings for), I often see old houses, barns and other structures.

At some point, they were abandoned. They stood where they stood until they couldn’t anymore, and then they collapsed — kind of like people.

With the windows all broken, the shingles worn or blown away and the beams collapsed, a ghost probably wouldn’t even live in these old houses today.

However, in their time, some of them would have been simple and quaint and quite suitable, while others would have been grand farmhouses or big barns, all kinds of coolness.

The hornets will still build their nests among these ruins. I hear them buzzing with the grasshoppers making their twitching noises as I sit in the tall and hot summer grasses by the grown-over railroad tracks.

I don’t know exactly the things I’m looking for in these forgotten settings, these remnants from bygone eras, and things once so big and wonderful and now just gone. But I do gain a sense of peace in being at these places.

I get a similar feeling in antique stores where I can still find dishes with the print from my grandma’s kitchen, toys I remember from very early childhood or endless shelves of kitchen utensils and old workman’s tools.

I am somehow comfortable with and connected to all these old-timey artifacts. I remember even feeling this way as a kid. I had a subscription as a boy to a magazine that featured stories about a wide range of yesteryear topics.

I don’t get it, but it’s part of who I am.

This isn’t the only railroad trestle on this old South Shore line, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with. I intend to visit some of the others this summer. I hope to fish more, hike and bike more, camp more, all kinds of things.

The springtime I knew was coming sometime is finally opening itself up across the North Country. It gives me the feeling of wanting to do everything all the time and never sleep until next winter.

On the downstream side of the trestle, I test out the railing for leaning and find it to be just as comfortable as the one on the other side. It’s just as far to the bottom, too.

Along a ridge, secluded in the trees, is a home or a camp I can scarcely make out.

I imagine the view from that place is just as nice as the one from up here.

It’s a warm, overcast day today. The outline of the sun is visible behind the clouds, looking like the yoke of an egg that was cooked over-easy.

I can see that there’s still a lot of snow in the woods, which will eventually make the big river even bigger and louder in the continued snowmelt days ahead.

There are deer along the former railroad grade. They’ve stepped out from the snow-packed woods to feed on anything green they can find along the south-facing parts of the landscape.

They look thin and ragged. The winter was severe.

I point my boots toward the end of the trestle and start walking.

I am surprised to see something flitting up from a tree alongside the trail and floating on the lifting breeze. It’s a mourning cloak butterfly.

Their brownish-black wing color, with blue windows and a creamy border, makes them such beautiful creatures. It seems so out of place to me this early in the season, with snow still abundant all around everywhere.

So when I get home, I head for my bookshelves.

I discovered that mourning cloaks overwinter as adults in crevices or under tree bark. They are one of the first butterflies to emerge in the springtime.

This is the first time I can ever remember seeing one with snow still on the ground — in all the years I have been outside in the springtime. Wow. That’s cool — to see it, to learn about it, to enjoy learning about it.

They are one of my favorites, so I am always on the lookout for them.

If I hadn’t hiked up here to this trestle, I would have never seen it and had this experience today. Another thing I don’t really understand is how and when life will decide to reveal, or not reveal, any number of things to us.

I grew up thinking that once we die, all is revealed to us about anything we ever wondered about or wanted to know.

These days, I have my doubts.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.