Young men who think they’re smart tend not to make straight, linear plans, but to engage in ingeniously crooked schemes and maneuvers, just to try things out. Just to test the world. That’s their job. Our job.
Our crooked plan was to walk along the tracks and jump out of the way as trains came howling around the far headlands, through a cut in the Del Mar hills—passing behind Torrey Pines State Beach. We paid attention and walked the tracks and jumped out of the way as the engines and bright cars streaked past, though a few engineers were provoked to let loose with that impressive horn and glare at us as they flashed by in their long steel monsters.
But then we came to a bridge over the tidal inlet, a creosote pile kind of thing that might have been fifty or even seventy years old, just tracks, no cars, no clear path for a pair of reckless kids bent on a crooked lark.
We were halfway across that bridge, looking down through the ties at shallow turquoise and gray water lapping against the piles, enjoying the ocean breeze as seagulls wheeled and screeched. Joe was grinning like a bandit, walking ahead of me, teeth on fire in the lowering sun, glancing back and raising his arms as if he were a tightrope walker—brown hair rippling, brown arms reaching—when about two miles back we heard a train blat out like an angry dinosaur.
The engineer had glimmed across the low tidal inlet flats and with his sharp eyes discerned two scrawny figures in the middle of the bridge, with about a hundred and fifty feet left to finish gingerly walking, tie by tie, balancing, trying not to step through the spaces between—and the engineer had no doubt, given the train’s speed and our steady, careful pace, that we had to speed it up, had to run along the ties like circus performers or cartoon characters…
And then he knew what we knew.
We still wouldn’t make it. The train would be upon us before we could finish the crossing, and the water was at least thirty feet below, with a two-foot shoal over sand and gravel and eelgrass to break our fall or our necks.
So we did what we had to do. We laughed like loons. The fear was amazing. We ran, no, we danced along the ties. We ran and stumbled and recovered and ran. We slipped—Joe dropped his leg between two ties—I came down off a rail, one foot in the air, and somehow, we both scrambled up, unhurt, to keep running, all the time crowing and shouting and screaming—Move, fucker! Speed it up! Speed speed speed!
I managed to mostly balance on the left rail, stepping foot over foot, the toes of my shoes catching my pant cuffs, like my own legs would kill me if they could—
And my friend cried out, his voice breaking shrill, “It’s right behind us! Fuck fuck fuck!”
I did not look back. I knew what I had to do—this was adventure, scary but chock-full of living, the height of everything I’d experienced until now—it was us versus the monster, and the engineer was leaning on his awful horn and the air filled with the most intense, gut-vibrating noise I had ever experienced.
I knew that I had to jump and break my legs.
Or die.
Joe screamed again, looked back at me with the face of a maniac, and dove off the tracks. His legs splayed as he flew a yard out from the bridge and then straight down, arms wheeling. I lost sight of him when I jumped, but I didn’t fall—I clung to the left rail with my fingers, feeling the polished, sunwarm steel sear my fingers, hot as a steam iron, while I nearly bit through my cheek—legs and feet dangling, maybe a second before the train’s thousand tons of pressure pulped my hand and I fell anyway—
And my toes came down firm on a board. A crosstie. I could not see it but it was there—I could feel it. I let go of the steel rail and hugged a thick black piling, smelling the pungent tarry heat of creosote, just as the train roared over at forty or fifty miles per hour, wheels a few inches from my face, my feet trying to keep their purchase on the crosstie someone had so thoughtfully hammered between two pilings, but angled at a crazy slant, the soles of my running shoes hot and slippery from the steel ties, splinters driving into my palms—the entire bridge alive with weight and motor noise, rattling my guts and bones and suspended thoughts, rattling my skull and teeth while blood streamed from a corner of my lips.
The train took forever.
It was by me in less than a minute.
The horn stopped its insane howl.
The engineer probably thought we were both dead.
No matter.
All my muscles had locked. I wanted to throw up but there was still stuff I had to do. I punched my arm and leg to release their lock, then edged forward along the crosspiece, which angled down to intersect another piling, and then along a lower piece, balancing briefly between pilings, shoes still slipping (I never bought that brand again) until I was within ten feet of the tidal flow, and I just gave up and fell back, closing my eyes—
Dropped and dropped.
Splashed down hard in the bath of the brackish stream, the shock spread evenly along my back and hips and legs. Water filled my nose. Eelgrass grabbed my hips and tried to hold me under, but I thrashed and broke free, found the mucky bottom, and shoved up with water streaming. The air brightened with diamond spray.
Only then did I look for Joe. He stood about twenty feet away, soaked and covered in mud, eyes and teeth golden through the muck. Both of us laughing. We had not stopped laughing since we’d seen the train, except when we were screaming.
“Fuck! I SAW YOU!” Joe shouted, turning the expletive into a buzz saw. “You were like RIGHT UNDER THE FUCKING ENGINE and I could see you fucking vibrating like a GONG and then—you… you…” He’d swallowed a lot of water and was spewing it up, saying between shuddering heaves how foul it was. We pulled our feet from the muck and finished crossing the lagoon, then stumbled through saw grass to the gravel bank of the highway. There we sat on the margin and leaned our heads back in the last fiery glow of the setting sun, suddenly quiet, laughter spent.
“Nothing better,” Joe said hoarsely. “Nothing ever so great.”
We sat beside each other for long minutes. The sun slid behind the far edge of the Pacific. Mud dried and stiffened our pants. The chill of evening made us shiver. We didn’t care. We talked about trains and bridges, then about girls and drinking and movies and parties, then about cars and how we were no longer alone in the universe, all that stuff, like we were adults, old wise men, until the only lights we saw came from cars rushing north and south and a high scatter of stars washed gray by the electric glow of San Diego and Del Mar. Mist from the lagoon cloaked everything.
By then we were so cold we had to move. We got to our feet, shoes squelching, and walked into Del Mar—miles away, not hitching, just walking, drawing out our time of being alive after what had happened, clinging to that feeling that we had survived something amazingly stupid and really, really great. This had just happened to us.
This was Adventure.
Walking backward ahead of me, Joe looked up and raised his hands to the dull orange-black sky.
“What’s it like out there, Vinnie?” he asked. “We’ve sucked this planet dry. Nothing better here, just more stupid stunts.”
“Great stungs,” I said. I had bitten my tongue jumping from the bridge.
“Great what?”
“Great stunts,” I corrected.
“What’s waiting out there? What’s way out there waiting to happen to both of us?”