When I was a boy in the Florida Panhandle — where the heat made any breeze that cut through the pine trees feel like a gift from heaven — I used to press my ear to the railroad tracks and wait.
For what, I wasn’t sure. A rumble. A tremor. A sound that confirmed something was coming. Trains moved through our coastal town, carrying paper from the mill. They moved like ghosts, urgent and unbothered, and I wanted, more than anything, to be the one driving them.
That was the dream: steel, speed, the illusion of control.
And now here I am, fifty-two years old, riding in a single-car light rail train into Hillsboro, Oregon, cloaked in the dark hush of a December morning. I am the one pulling into an empty platform, the one with hands on the lever. My left brings her into braking. My right taps the bell. The train stops clean.
“You don’t need to have a death grip,” Jorge tells me. “Be gentle with her.”
We were halfway through our training program and on the overnight shift. There are nine of us left, split into three teams. Jorge, all Cuban warmth and exacting calm. James, slower, quieter — Los Angeles cool, but alert beneath it. They don’t teach you how to handle the machine as much as they teach you how to be with it.
“Relax, take your time,” Jorge advised. “Do each step individually and it’ll all tie together and become natural.”
Sage advice. Slow your roll, essentially.
Before the yard-to-yard test — the one that moves you from theory to real track — I got sick. A stomach virus that left me wrecked and sweating through nights I couldn’t remember. I missed one day. James let me make it up. Another trainer might not have. I passed. Just barely. I passed.
“Watch your intermediates,” James told me as we walked through the Beaverton yard.
Signals, I learned, are prophecy. Intermediates tell you what’s coming — when to slow down, when to stop. Ignore one and anything can go sideways. Signals, switches, speed. There is no room for sentimentality out here. Only precision.
Oregon’s light rail system is complicated. Beautiful, yes. Ingenious, even. But also dangerous. Tracks run through intersections, weave alongside bike paths, share spaces with cars, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooters and dogs on leashes. You are constantly negotiating with chaos.
After the test, we entered line training. Three weeks of shadowing operators who knew too much, but said very little. They spoke in glances, in warnings you felt more than heard. This was no longer the dream. This was the reality.
You learn quickly: revenue service is where romance goes to die. Where you stop seeing yourself in the story and start seeing everyone else — angry passengers, lost time, bullying supervisors and the thousand ways things fall apart.
Still the horn cuts through a sleeping city, something stirs in me. That boy on the tracks, listening for the future. He never imagined what the job would cost. But he’d still want it.
So do I.
Slice of Good Ol Boy Life 
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