About ten days ago, in the last mile of a four-mile run, I loped along the asphalt shoulder of U.S. Highway 14 west going into Walnut Grove, my breath a faint cloud streaming over my left shoulder in the thirty-degree air. My blue stocking cap — the one I’d found a couple years ago in the Walmart parking lot in Buckhorn, PA — was damp against my forehead, and the long blue sleeves of a Dri-Fit shirt stuck out from under a gray sleeveless shirt I’d pulled on over it. I wore blue mittens and black shorts over Nike tights. The sun had already sunk behind Walnut Grove’s trees and two-story buildings when an eighteen-wheeler swept by me on the highway, its wake buffeting my face and chest.
Fifty yards to my left on the tracks that run parallel to the highway, a mile-long freight train rolling slowly through town pulled tanker cars destined for the Lamberton ethanol plant ten miles east and brown round-bellied cars bound for the towering concrete silos of area grain elevators swollen with the new corn crop. The engineer blew the horn as he approached the crossing where 1st Street, a broad gravel road, entered town. And that’s when I saw the six-foot-tall black letters spray-painted on the side of one of the cars in the middle of the train: “RU!N.”
At first it seemed an encouraging exhortation from some graffiti artist in a dark, distant railyard, a coincidental call for me to pick up the pace, to hustle through the last mile, to RUN! But then I couldn’t help but see it as something more ominous — a blunt declaration about the state of the country or perhaps a warning or, even worse, a prediction of what’s barreling down on us like a runaway train: RUiN.
I know a bit about ruin. Like most people my age, images of national ruin are burned into my memory: the Challenger rising into a blue sky and then breaking up in an orange ball of fire; Los Angeles burning after the Rodney King verdict; the Twin Towers collapsing and sending a shockwave of smoke, debris and sorrow through Manhattan’s canyons and across the country; and puddles of blood on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in LA, on a balcony in Memphis, on Jackie Kennedy’s dress, on a classroom floor in Newtown, CT, on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan apartment building forty years ago last month. There’s no end, it seems, to the ruin people inflict on people, only brief reprieves between catastrophes. Of course, it can be tough to recall those reprieves when we’re in the midst of a pandemic with no clear end in sight and we’re bombarded with news of the endless litigation that encourages a large part of the population to deny the clear and inevitable result of the election.
I continued west past Hoyt’s gas station and Nellie’s Café before turning south on County Road 5 as the train rumbled east carrying RU!N with it. If only it were that simple — that the ruin and conflict and lies and denials could all be hauled far away, unloaded in some impenetrable vault with reinforced concrete walls deep underground, and buried like nuclear waste. If only the half-life of people’s faults was shorter than that of plutonium. If only.
But we’re all human, which is what we should remember. Human, first and foremost, and both capable of wondrous kindness and invention and prone to despicable wrongs and violence. We’re also bound to one another by blood and providence as parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, partners and friends. And we devote ourselves daily not just to being but to becoming: teachers and preachers; nurses and artists; plumbers, farmers, fire fighters, and writers. And finally, beyond all that and whether we want to admit it or not, we are Americans. And it’s this part of our identity and the impossibly complicated and contradictory perceptions of what “American” means and includes that has set us against one another, that has put us on the track to this ruin, the scale of which is yet to be determined.
After turning the last corner to the house, I walked up the driveway to the garage, and pulled off my damp stocking cap and mittens. Beyond the quiet town and now moving through Lamberton, Springfield, and Sleepy Eye was the long train and, I hope, the diminishing rumble of ruin.
