Now that I've turned 50 I've decided to open a painful letter
I'd written at 19. I had never mailed it because I'd written it to
myself or at least to the self I imagined I would someday become, a person
strong enough to bear that young man's confusion and wise enough to give
it meaning.
I have not become that exalted being. I don't expect to.
Nevertheless, it is time to read the letter. I have come across
it a few times during these 30 odd years. Very odd years, I'm
sure from the viewpoint of that nineteen-year-old. Especially, after
the disaster in the mountains.
This time I hunted for it. I found it in a box of mementos, sealed
in a dusty envelope with a red letterhead, Canadian Pacific En Route. I
hesitated. Did I want to confront the nineteen-year-old I used
to be? Or want him to confront me? I set it on my desk.
The boy I used to be was restless, self absorbed and hungry for
a kind of knowledge far beyond the reach of his parents and teachers, a
knowledge that seemed to be accessible in only great literature and philosophy.
He was at a dangerous age. It was his summer before university and
he was working in the kitchen of a CPR passenger train travelling through
the Rocky Mountains. As it turned out, he was in a dangerous place.
I leave the envelope on my desk for the next few weeks. I tell
myself to keep it as it is, unread, a talisman that holds a vital moment
of my youth, painful, confused and utterly honest. Better to leave
it sealed like those ancient murals I had read about. Those paintings of
members of a Roman family had stayed brilliant for two thousand years until
they were unearthed and exposed to air. In minutes they faded away like
ghosts.
Rather than read his letter, I try to remember what he wrote.
He must have described the shock of the four ton boulder rolling off
the mountain and striking the train, the awful lurch as the train was nearly
knocked into the gorge, the engineer accelerating to derail against the
mountain, the steel track torn up and twisted like ribbons, the hissing
of ruptured air hoses, the ground gravelled with broken glass. Afterwards,
as he headed to the crew car for bandages, he entered the gutted day-coach
where he had been only minutes before the wreck, calling out that breakfast
was being served. Most passengers had followed him out but not everyone,
not the university student from Ontario. She must have turned back to sleep.
The day-coach was unrecognizable, merely bands of metal with
a few seats at either end. There was nothing like a floor, wall or ceiling.
He had tried to think where the girl had been sitting. Then he tried not
to.
He might have written about people's reactions, how the chef
who had a tattoo that read Death Before Dishonour, began to tremble. How
Jackson, the waiter, kept jabbering that they were lucky, so damned lucky
the boulder didn't hit the couplings, splitting the train so they'd fall
into the gorge, lucky it didn't hit a second earlier and get the dining
car with them in the kitchen and the urn full of hot coffee, the grill
steaming, knives, glasses, cutlery everywhere. Lucky, they weren't tossed
dead on the track like that girl, who was all mangled and headless.
Till the chef screamed, "Shut up! Shut up!"
The boy might have described how he looked for some message:
he thought the world was like a book full of symbols waiting to be interpreted.
All he found was a pack of cigarettes misplaced in his locker. So
he took up smoking with grim humour, sucking in a black and dirty truth.
That night, after they were rescued and transported to a hotel
he smoked and drank with the crew and became sick to his stomach.
He felt righteous because he had escaped something. Not death.
Not at all. He had escaped the complacent, safe and increasingly
unreal world which kept him a child. The reality of death seemed to have
freed him and he would never be the same. He was frightened and elated.
Remembering all that, I realize that I have no right to hold
him back. I open his letter.
He wrote from home three days after the wreck. He has barely
slept or eaten. The sun was rising "in a cold haze." "But my mind, my soul
is growing," he said. He recalled omens. The night before the
wreck his dog had been terribly agitated. The chef kept waking with nightmares.
He described the crash and the aftermath in vivid detail and
how the day-coach was like "an animal with its guts ripped out and hanging
along the tracks".
He described freeing a girl pinned between two seats, the sobs,
the rush of people. He recalled the young womam who had died, how he'd
served her coffee the night before, heard her speak about her holiday,
learned her name, thought she was pretty.
"The rest is detail," he said, "gory, ironic, grotesque."
He couldn't talk about it but he couldn't stop thinking of it. "What is
the meaning?" he asked. "I can't feel relief or fear or even repentance,
just sorrow."
And no one understands. "How could they?
They weren't there, they never saw her, they know only the words."
"I must be changing," he said. "I will be more reckless with
everything but my compassion ... and not allow anything to make me bitter.
I will find my heart in the hearts of my friends."
I return his letter to its envelope. Why did I think he needed
me to explain anything? He seems to know as much as I know and things
that I've forgotten. Yet he needed to write to me, even though I existed
only in his imagination. No, that's not true. I also existed in his
heart. He reached out to me and now, here I am, reading his words
and writing these words back. Reaching out to him.
Sheldon Oberman
822 Dorchester Ave
Winnipeg, Manitoba
soberman@mts.net