MAYBE DEATH STILL WALKS THESE RAILS & RIDES THESE MIDNIGHT ROADS: A Ghost Story, Of Sorts

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Our travels through this world are not ours alone, not merely the logical paths of our construction crews and civil engineers but also the ethereal inspirations of those which man-made things such as logic and reason cannot touch.

In this world, there are things that are natural and things that are supernatural. It's as simple as that, if you accept such things.

But choose to believe at your own peril. This is, after all, the New Postmodern Millennium. To most postmodern men and women, such talk falls into the realm of ancient superstition, religious naivety, or even blasphemy.

As a 21st century man, raised in a resurrected, desegregated New South, I'm probably not supposed to believe in the mythology of my supposedly less-cultured ancestors, either.

You know. Old ghost stories and whatnot. But some of the things I've seen in this world, at crossroads...

* * * *

I'm still not sure who that old black man was, the one who scared the living shit out of me one night, while taking a midnight stroll along the property line of my family's farm in Virginia, away from a clandestine party in the woods.

I'd been drinking and partaking in other illicit substances with friends nearby, well out of sight of local law enforcement and parents. An afternoon of shooting a an old abandoned car full of holes, fishing, and playing Marlboro Fucking Man had taken its toll, that's for damned sure - I was annoyed with the petty late-night boy brawling and cursing and needed, yes, a quiet moment by myself.

He'd wandered out from behind the pines and brambles, from my family's side of an old Virginian Railway access road, from where that red clay road intersected the old timber road.

He made no noise as his feet crossed the earth, as he moved between the rows of thorns and into the open night. Not a sound. In fact, if I hadn't seen the movement in the bush, hadn't seen him step out of the shadows myself, well, I wouldn't have known he was there.

In my part of the country, well, when a strange old dude -regardless of color - sneaks up on you from the woods, even beneath a full moon, you're probably going to level the business end of your shotgun his way when you holler. And that's just what I did, instinctively.

The black face showed teeth and raised his black hands, hollered back. He hollered back that he'd been lost in the woods a whah, boss and couldn't fin' he whah backa' quittin' whenna boss holla'd. He kept looking at the ground, old rag of a hat in hand, asking me the way back towards the railroad tracks so he could get back home for the night.

I pointed due west, back towards the rail bed. I remember laughing and thinking that the guy was merely drunk; a moonshiner lived a few miles away and, well, it's not like his customers only showed up during daylight hours.

I mean, c'mon - boss? In Virginia, by the 1990s, even the oldest black folk had quit staring at the dirt and calling random white folk boss. And hell, one of the Virginian's successor railways had yanked up the last of those tracks when I was a kid.

Figured the guy was one of the numerous retired, half-senile old railroad workers who lived in the area, still stuck in the glory years, and, yeah, just wandering back from a white lightning ride towards home.

The guy just smiled, thanked me for my help in his Gone With the Fucking Wind manner of dialect and disappeared off into the night, feet moving without a sound, walked back towards where the rail bed had been.

I remember staggering back to the campsite, telling a few guys about how I'd run into Uncle Fucking Remus's cousin out in the woods.

Everybody thought it was pretty funny. Even I thought it was funny, back then.

* * * *

More than a decade later, while visiting my home state and the town of Keysville, I met the most interesting elderly gentleman at the lunch counter at one of my favorite restaurants in the Old Dominion.

A retired railroad worker, one of the last of the Gandy Dancers. Older than sin, skin like spotted brown leather, white woolly hair. We started talking about all sorts of things - about his dead wife, his having grown up as, well, a second-class citizen in a segregated United States, his grandchildren, his oldest granddaughter's fondness for downright fugly-sounding white trash guys...

And, eventually, we started up a conversation about railroads, old work songs... and superstitions he'd heard as a young man working the tracks.

Funny thing, those old railroad legends.

Ever hear the legend of the Ol' Joe Gandy?

Neither had I.

* * * *

Apparently, the Angel of Death was once said to take the very human form of a lost railroad man - Joe Gandy. Death would walk the rails, looking for souls to test, strangers in the night who could be judged as either kind or cruel, depending on how they answered his questions.

If the strangers he met in his journeys along America's rails passed his tests - the measure of a human soul is in its capacity for kindness, after all - he'd leave empty handed. If the strangers were treacherous, belittling, or, well, just plain ol' racist pricks, Death would extract a payment in misfortune and doom.

Not that I believe in such things, mind you. I mean, it's not like I grew up hearing my great-grandmother's stories about Louisiana Rougarous and Hoodoos, or ever went witchhunting in the wilds of Lunenburg County or anything...

But now, every time a memory of that childhood experience pops into my mind...

Let's just say that I'm on my best behavior when I happen across an old dude near the train tracks at midnight. I think I've already used my Get Out of Hell Free card once - no sense in tempting fate.

* * * *

"... So I was waiting for the Blue Line out to O'Hare. And it's late, right? Like really late and kinda empty, you know?"

I'm wondering where she's going with her story. She's just finished telling me everything she's been doing with her life for, oh, the last year and a half. And, out of the blue, she interrupted my story about a rather abysmal, tiring week at work here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

"And I get in the car and there's, like, only, like, ten of us, right? And this old, like, black guy in a CTA hat - Ohmygod! he smelled like something DIED! - like sits down next to me, right?"

I'm getting annoyed. I'm tired. I've got the cell phone plugged into the charger and on speaker, so I can respond to late-night emails and chat simultaneously.

"So... okay. Couldya hurry it up here? Not to be rude or anything, chica."

"Oh. RIGHT! Well, this guy just sits down beside me and starts, like, asking me about flying and telling me that he's never flown before and asks if I'd tell him how to find the Northwest terminal --"

"Yeah. So? Did you help him out or just make fun of him for smelling like ass?"

"DUDE! No... I helped him. But you remember that creepy-ASS story you told me about that Black Gandhi train demon or something..."

I hung up on her. It's two o'clock in the morning, Saturday.

I've a few beers in me and the last thing I need to have nightmares about is an old railroad legend.

Crazy-ass chick, really.

But I pray she hadn't given him bad directions.

You know. Just in case.

* * * *

Hell, maybe Ol' Joe Gandy's flying the friendly skies these days, riding Chicago's L lines, New York's subways and in Los Angeles taxis. Maybe he's traversing European rails and African buses, South American roads and Far Eastern high-speed lines, testing the men and the women of the world by just asking for directions.

Angel. Of Friggin' Death. It's not like he's stuck as a black dude. Hell, every human culture on this planet has a personification of that creature...

But imagine Death as an elderly Polish Jew, sitting down on a train in Berlin, maybe next to the great-grandson of some forgotten Schutzstaffel sturmbannführer, striking up a conversation, like old men tend to do. Say the kid blows the man off, intentionally gives him bad directions to that hotel at the next stop, simply because, well, the guy's Jewish...

Or imagine that angel appearing as a beautiful middle-aged Lakota woman in a truck stop somewhere in Montana, sitting down at a meal counter next to the semi-driving descendant of an Indian Wars veteran and asking for directions to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Say that trucker not only gives her directions but ends up so smitten that he picks up her coffee...

Not that people in the 21st century, us modern folks, should be worried or anything. These sorts of mysterious occurances are long behind us, stories our grandparents heard from their grandparents, stories that became the basis for our movies and television shows and horror novels.

It's not like you, reader, are reading this very essay on an Information Superhighway - a veritable electronic railroad of knowledge, built megabits at a time by hundreds of millions of random strangers every day, each one gandy dancing their way into Facebook profiles and MySpace pages and Wordpress accounts.

Surely, Ol' Joe Gandy, that dancing Angel of Death, isn't capable of navigating the World Wide Web?

I mean, why would he bother with testing our travels upon tracks made of fiberoptic cables?

Right?

Heh. Sleep tight tonight.

- # # # -

SAVAGE STEW AND AMBROSE BIERCE FROM ACROSS CYBERSPACE: More Baseball, Yakking Cats, and How Communication Technologies Shape the World

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She said she was just bored.

I'd wondered about the text message she'd sent, one of about five from the infamous 323 Area Code Thursday morning, a strange Happy Turkey Day!!! Gobble-Gobble, Jason! :P sent at exactly 4:48 a.m. Pacific Time - arriving here instantly, in Ohio, just after breakfast.

Bored outta my skull. If you're still alone today call me.

Bored in the City of fucking Angels, right smack dab in the middle of striking Hollywood and fire-riddled Malibu, a freeway away from Pasadena and an afternoon train from Santa Barbara.

Her boyfriend had flown back to his parents' house for the holiday, back to the rugged confines of the western Rockies. Her own family was on the road, somewhere, plans made long before an unavoidable work stoppage shut down Tinseltown.

A nice brunch in Beverly Hills would be her only holiday feast, with a girlfriend and an out-of-work set painter.

* * * *

It's funny how Americans like to pretend that the third Thursday in November somehow means something to the rest of the goddamn planet, how we pretend for a day that the Pilgrims and Native Americans really did get along in peace, liked watching football, and traded guns for corn until the advent of shopping malls 400 year later.

Chatting online earlier in the week, my texting actor managed to make Los Angeles sound like the loneliest ghost town in America on Thanksgiving, as if the city would shut down like some rural Wyoming village of a few dozen people.

Very melodramatic, but, well, she's in the drama business...

* * * *

I'd planned on spending the day by myself, reading and watching movies. I turned down several offers to dine with other people's families, in fact, to enjoy the solitude.

I even cooked myself a monstrous pot of turkey sausage stew, put some Calexico on the stereo and settled on a collection of Ambrose Bierce stories while the Limas and kidney beans melted into the meat, fresh sage, onion, and dill weed.

Calexico gave way to some documentary on public television as the stew reduced, public television beget dinner and a DVD, dinner beget dishes to the soothing sounds of Wendy O. Williams, NOFX, and Bad Religion. I cleaned up the stove and countertops to the tune of the Warren Zevon's "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner"....

Just chillin'. Thursday, I was just thankful to be alive, alone, and without any sort of drama in my life. And I just chilled away an entire day, happy as a clam.

Just as I finished rereading the Bierce's anti-war classic, "Chickamauga," she sent yet another series of texts - again, bored in L.A. after brunch and already halfway through everything stored on her TiVo. Reading the last message, an apology for bothering me, I finally got around to at least beginning to make those follow-up holiday calls I'd been putting off all day.

Starting with the first text of the day, I called back a poor, not-so-starving actor trapped out in the 323, a thespian with nothing better to do on a Thanksgiving in Los Angeles than to subtly hint at the fact that she'd like to chat with a certain librarian/blogger/loner in Oxford Fucking Ohio...

* * * *

We spent the first two and a half hours talking mostly about baseball.

Yes, baseball. Off-season stuff.

Joe Torre, the new Dodgers skipper. Do the Chavez Ravine boys stand a chance, now that L.A. has once again stolen something from old Gotham, a Bronx manager to accessorize their former Brooklyn ballclub? And of another Joe, Cincinnati's Joe Nuxhall... did I get any feedback from the local Reds fans? Did anybody in Oxford Fucking Ohio say anything about it?

Besides being bored, she wanted to verify that, yep, the Zenformation Professional Jason was indeed the same Ohio Jason who'd finally sent his number - discreetly - through a mutual offline acquaintance. And to say she was shocked that we'd met once, at a Central Coast bistro a few years back, through that same acquaintance, would be an understatement.

"You know, dude, you go on these mini-rants where I have no clue what the hell you're talking about. You sound a lot like I imagined you to sound, like you write...

"...And I can tell you used to be in radio. You should try XM or something."

I tried to be entertaining, tried to be a good conversationalist. I've been slipping a bit, having spent a good portion of the last two months in serious dental agony, unable to even speak clearly without slurring or drooling for two weeks.

But, for the most part, I listened. When you're not accustomed to solitude, being alone on a silly holiday can make anybody feel as if they're the last human being on the planet - it's easy to forget things like telephones and the Internet when one is down on themselves.

And, yes, And she just wanted someone, anyone, to talk to her, like an real human being and not some - ugh! - girl from TV! One of her cats has been ill, hakking and yakking up scores of hairballs. Some creepy hippie at the organic market where she shops followed her to her car and almost got pepper-sprayed for insisting that the Burning Man must be followed, at all costs.

She needs a new stylist, one who doesn't yap like a chihuahua about customers behind their backs. And her new Hybrid car doesn't sound right...

And her sick cat ... he yakked up something... while she was driving the I-405 freeway ... in the passenger seat... Oh God, the smell...

* * * *

Only non-relative I talked to all Thanksgiving Day, not counting an interview, via Skype, for a very un-librarian job in Glasgow, Scotland, at just past 2:30 p.m. GMT and an unscheduled online chat with an ex living just outside of Paris.

Hell, my sister was in Southern California herself when I called, my parents six hours up the coast, and my grandmother, back in Virginia and once again able to drive after her near-fatal accident, was making her way through Downtown Richmond traffic to dine with her boyfriend's kinfolk.

Small world, really. Damned thing just keeps shrinking like a wet sweater in a hot dryer.

But at least through our ability to adapt to our situations, to adopt and explore new technologies, and to look inside of ourselves, into our own abilities to share our experiences and to listen to the experiences of others, we're never really that alone in this brave new world.

Thanks to all the changes in our global information infrastructure over the last hundred years, we've witnessed changes so dynamic that the very fabric of humanity has become intertwined with the crackling pulses of electrified airwaves and the miles of cable beneath our feet. Not for everyone yet, sure. But for hundreds of millions of people, the greatest experiment in information-sharing the world has ever seen has already become a way of life.

Rarely are we ever as alone as we feel. When we feel the walls closing in, when we feel abandoned, when a solitary holiday seems like a prison sentence, there's almost always a good book waiting to be read, a community park open, a mountain to climb, a film to watch, or -

- Or somebody to talk to when you're just bored, even if they're on the other side of the world.

We should all be thankful for that.

- # # # -

DISPATCHES FROM THE ROAD: Of Navajo Girls and the Great White Wannabes, Sixty Acres in Paradise, I-40's Culinary Treasures, and Other Things

PINE HILL, RAMAH NAVAJO RESERVATION, NM (ZP) -- It took me a few seconds to figure out who, exactly, was yelling at me, a few seconds longer to figure out why they were yelling in the first place.

A young Navajo woman, a Ramah Band local, wanted to know if I had an extra cigarette. As I sat on the hood of my mother's jeep, waiting for my father to return from the inside of the reservation market (yes, a regular ol' quickie market, smack dab in the middle of one of the most independent states in the Navajo Nation), the woman waved me over to what was apparently her older brother's pickup.

At the window, she said that Big Brother didn't mind her smoking, but, well, he didn't like her talking to Anglo boys.

And she didn't want just a cigarette - she wanted information. I was a strange, white face in a land reserved, in theory, for her people - she just wanted to know if I was new to the area, if I was looking for things to do...

Besides, she added, I somehow looked cool, in cowboy boots, Levi's, and my white tee shirt, almost like a character from Grease - Grease, as in the John Travolta film, her favorite movie...

...And she wanted to know what the hell I was doing in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, on a tiny little reservation, far from anything remotely cool.

I bummed her a fresh Marlboro, lit the tobacco for her, and asked her what she did for fun, what local folks her age (we're talking high school kid here) did during the summer, while school was out and the New Mexico sun burned holes into the asphalt.

Just hang out, She said. We, ya know, watch movies, play video games, go to parties, drive to Gallup (70 miles away, the closest town of more than 20,000 people)...

Before she could finish, the sound of Brad Paisley's hit song, "Ticks," bellowed from inside her shirt. She politely excused herself, reached down the front of her white tank top, and pulled a mobile phone from between her breasts.

The sucker was held in place by the tautness of cotton stretched across boobs - an ancient Navajo trick.

God. It's _____. I don't want to talk to him right now. He's, oh my God, such a hick...

The Ramah Navajo teenager hit the End button on her mobile, sending the caller, poor Hick Boy, plummeting towards Voicemail Oblivion.

Another ancient Navajo trick.

The woman thanked me for the tobacco, wished me well on the rest of my trip, and politely excused herself once again, this time to call some female friend and to tell her that, yes, the Hick Boy had just called her and left a voicemail...

And, yes, some Navajo teenagers have cell phones, just like their non-Navajo counterparts.

* * * *

I returned to my perch on the jeep, watching as others, mostly tourists like myself, entered and exited the mini-mart.

An older white woman, clad in a monstrosity of a Easter-style hat, climbed out of an SUV with a Kokopelli bumper sticker in the back glass. A sandal-clad, bearded gentleman strolled the parking lot on WASPish white legs, truckstop turquoise dangling from his neck, along with one of those "Made in China" medicine bags, the kind more likely to be found in a Head Shop than around the neck of an actual shaman.

I even spotted one of those notorious Fake Indians, a regular Ward Churchill type, sunburned lobster pink, obviously dyed black hair, reading some guide to Navajo spirituality.

The bumper sticker on the back of his sedan? Yep. Another Kokopelli, this one blowing its flute next to a marijuana leaf and "tribal" artwork, inscribed with the phrase Rocking Primitive. And beside it? An Ivy League window decal.

Fascinating, this Native American magic.

A whole group of white people, through some sort of sorcery, turned into Indians - just like the ones they'd seen in the movies, the ones played by all of those Italian and Greek actors in all of those John Ford westerns, like ol' Sicilian-American Iron Eyes Cody, the famed "Crying Indian" anti-litter pitchman.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that I was the only Anglo tourist to talk to an honest-to-God, bona fide American Indian at that mini-mart that day, to ask about things more substantial than Do you have any organic cornmeal? or Do you know where I can get buy real Navajo blankets? or Do you sell magic crystals like they do out in Sedona?, to simply have a conversation with a actual Ramah Navajo teenager about nothing in particular.

The mysticism just doesn't seem to work on me. I was just glad to see a Navajo-owned business thriving, to see a rural teen with access to mobile technology and being, well, a teenager and not some Hollywood stereotype.

I dunno. Maybe I've just known too many Indians, good people from all sorts of tribal backgrounds.

Nothing in the United States screams Culture War quite like a trip to an Indian Reservation.

- MORE -

NEAR EL MALPAIS NATIONAL MONUMENT, NM (ZP) -- I flew into Albuquerque on the Fourth of July, at my parents' request, to visit their piece of paradise.

My father picked me up that afternoon, and we traveled long and hard across New Mexico, drove for three hours, down Interstate 40, down winding state highways, down red dust county roads, across cattle guards and over ancient, tire-shredding lava flows.

All so I could see sixty acres of land, sixty acres of paradise that my parents recently purchased, sixty acres that I may one day inherit.

Sixty below endless Western sky, land enveloped by fire ants and high desert fauna, bright red dust everywhere, nothing but the pines and afternoon thunderstorms to keep you entertained in the evening. Sixty below the stars and loaded with antelope and elk, home to a reclusive badger and a pair of wild horses.

And that sixty acres is, indeed, paradise.

- MORE -

SELIGMAN, Ariz. (ZP) -- Westside Lilo's Cafe is one of those hidden treasures of the Not-So-Old West, a throwback to the days when getting from almost anywhere in America to Los Angeles meant a trip down old U.S. Route 66.

A German-American diner in the middle of goddamn nowhere Arizona, in a town of less than 500 people, a place where even the BLT sandwiches surpass most urban five-star restaurants in terms of excellence.

I've stopped in every time I've passed through Seligman - I've sucked down gallons of coffee there, put down at least a farm's worth of bacon-and-egg breakfasts, and savored every bite of their authentic, homemade German potato salad. The roadside diner has probably taken years off of my life, simply by offering delicious, artery-clogging fare.

For some reason, Lilo's makes just about any trip down I-40 bearable, more homey and hospitable.

And it's strange, too, the number of folks I've met in my life, from all parts of the country, who've savored the pancakes, who've chowed down on the biscuits and gravy or the bratwurst.

There's a secret society of us out there, the Lilo's Faithful, folks who'd rather drop a few extra dollars in a tiny, rural town than wait for the whizzbang discounts offered by the fast-food chains in cities like Kingman or Flagstaff. And there's a rival group out there, somewhere, tourist regulars of the cross-the-road competition - the original, almost infamous Roadkill Cafe.

One day, we'll have to rumble, old school, right in the middle of o' Route 66, getting our kicks in below the belt and above the knees, once-a-year road trippers and senior citizen RVers, truckers and bus passengers and occasional celebrities. It'll be a ferocious battle, I'm sure, a western Arizona version of West Side Story...

There's a reason folks are willing to pull off a desolate stretch of interstate and wait, at times, as long as 20 minutes for a table.

And I think it has something to do with what the folks at Lilo's (and, yes, the Roadkill folks, too) put into the food, their secret, addictive preservative -

Love.

- MORE... LATER... -