I've been walkin' on the railroad (part 2)

MILWAUKEE ROAD — The local people, wherever I went, were friendly and helpful, often doing me the best possible favor: an offer of bottled water.

“The Lord bless you on your walk,” said my first benefactor, an attendant at the Pizarro grain elevator, where I stopped to rest on the afternoon of the first day. Though I remember taking this blessing, rather ungraciously, as an allusion to the saying “The Lord protects fools and children,” it was meant sincerely.

At Marengo on day two, I stopped at what appeared to be the one remaining house in town. Finding no one at home to ask permission, I filled my bottles from the outdoor hydrant anyway and was sitting on the garage driveway imbibing cool draughts when two men pulled up in a pickup.

“Have you seen Willard?” they asked, one of the most unexpected lines I’ve ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth. No, I hadn’t seen Willard — or, for the last four or five hours, at least — anyone else.

I declined, with an acknowledgment of their kindness, an offer of cold water.

The party of jovial youths who descended on the picnic table where I sat at the Rock Creek boat landing kept pressing bottles from their ice chest on me until I had more than enough.

Near Tekoa on the last full day, having only two cups of water left, I approached an elderly man and two youths picking cherries on a hilltop. Gary Davis eagerly shared not only directions to the outdoor hydrant at his home — and cherries from the box — but a rich assortment of local history.

From where we stood, he pointed out the location of the livery stable, school house, and half-abandoned cemetery — which I later visited — of the former town of Lone Pine.

Finally, the corridor itself was a contradiction, on the one hand less used and maintained as a trail and historic landmark and, on the other, more complete and traversable on foot, generally, than the sections on my previous and subsequent trip.

The trestle across wide Cow Creek Coulee was gone and the one at Tekoa was sealed off by an upright iron plate, forcing me to pick my way down the steep embankments and then hike or climb back up again.

Coming to Watts Tunnel before Plummer after nightfall, I put myself through a harrowing half-mile walk — was that an animal’s low growling I heard right before entering or just the wind? — in order to get to a motel, only to lose the corridor due to a transecting road.

I’ve yet to identify the lone high-pitched wail that broke out as I set up my tent in the dark. There were also several padlocked cattle gates on this hike, necessitating the rather indecorous act of climbing over, like an honest-to-goodness trespasser.

Just before the former Lone Pine, the weeds stood up to my nose, even over my head in places, so that I had to proceed by hopping clods at the edge of a wheat field. Finally, unlike my first and third hikes, there weren’t any railroad museums, exhibition cars, bunkhouses, depots, or interpretive-trail information boards.

Still, I didn’t have to detour for a day on asphalt pavement due to closed tunnels like I did in 2011 or follow a parallel road for 13 miles because the corridor was now under paved highway, like last year. In place of historic preservation, there were artifacts and monuments with that dazzling veneer, better than Brasso, things acquire from lying where they were last used.

My favorite was two mangled, upended boxcars draped in a line partway down the steep ravine at Pine Creek at the northeast end of Rock Lake. Trying to take the bend over the bridge too quickly on an icy morning?

I later read that the derailment occurred on the last eastbound trip on the Milwaukee Road in February, 1980. Showing upside down on the wall of one of the cars were the words “safety first.”

Here was a contradiction within the larger one of the corridor. When I got my pictures of the hike back from Rite-Aid, the photo of this spectacle was upside down in the stack, having been “righted” by the unsuspecting printer.