Tehachapi, California shook like a bedsheet rippling on a clothesline. Those Southern Pacific freight trains made the land feel like it was rolling over on itself.
In bed at night the little girl would always wake up when an eastbound freight rumbled through.
Her bedroom was upstairs. The way the house was angled, beams of light shot from the Big Boy steam locomotive splashed through her windows.
She liked to watch the way the trembling light made the wallpaper in her room briefly sparkle then quickly fade. If it was a slow train the sparkle lasted longer. But in 1947 trains pushed through Tehachapi, California just about as fast as they could.
America was booming, factories running full tilt. Factories filling up boxcars with steam irons and tubes for radios and everything people were buying at Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward.
Trains hauled barrels of colored ink for the comics in the newspaper. Bolts of fabric from North Carolina out to California for costume designers like Edith Head.
The little girl kept a small notebook by her bed. When a train rumbled through and patches of her wallpaper glowed, she wrote down what kind of freight was loaded on the train. She logged the time the train went through. Bills of lading in a child’s gentle handwriting spilled out of the flickering darkness into a notebook.
In the morning the little girl showed this to her mother. After a few weeks, on a whim, her mother sent the small notebook off to the Southern Pacific.
A few days later, the railroad sent down a man from the office in Reno, Nevada to talk to the little girl.
When he asked her how she knew what was loaded inside the boxcars, the quantities and the exact nature of items, she smiled and shook her head. She told him she just knew.
He pressed her, as politely as he could. She explained she actually didn’t see the radio tubes or the bolts of fabric. She could just tell they were there.
Then the man from the Southern Pacific asked her what else she could see that others could not.
She demurred.
Expressing what seemed to be regret beyond her years, but which was patently untrue, she said the only things like that she could see were on trains.
