Rail Retreat, Chapter 4 -- Evening

Green forest-covered mountains stockaded the view around us. I hadn’t even noticed that we had progressed into territory completely blanketed with snow. In the far ground, an immense mountain face, etched with white, vertically ribboned pathways interrupting the trees. Betraying my frame of reference, I called attention to the strips and concluded, “ski area.”
“More likely,” corrected another passenger, “logging strips.”
Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, the Cascades and their log-wounds drew closer and more revealing. Surely business, those strips, not pleasure. Force moreso than grace.
For all my lament, I can’t really indict. I live in a house that depends on its lumber. I work in a building that, while more concrete than wood, employs more than a little bit of both. In our worship we sit, after all, on wooden pews. I can’t very well treasure my shelter and my livelihood while begrudging the loggers their own.
But still, the mountains wear their scars, and the clearcut paths, from our distance, look like streaks of tears.
Late in the afternoon, enjoying the Parlor car for its views, the tracks took us along the edge of a forest on thee left, the Willamette River flowing scenically on the right. Its beauty, however, was only visible for a moment. As we slowed to a stop – as if to afford us a prayerful moment to drink the magnificence in, a Union Pacific freight train pulled alongside us on a heretofore unnoticed neighboring track, blocking our view of anything but a long and seemingly endless series of box cars in need of paint – made perceptually even longer by the knowledge of what lay beyond on the other side.
“There’s something wrong,” I mused to a passenger sitting nearby, when a freight train occupies the track with a view, while the passenger train gets stuck over here.”
It didn’t take long, I’m relieved to say, before I remembered that this isn’t an amusement park ride, and that the freight companies own the rails. We passengers hardly have priority, and are privileged to catch any glimpse that pops into view between the freight. If anybody has a right to the view, those engineers, workers and what I have to assume to be an occasional hobo, do.