The world burned, and everything kept going.

The night I drove into my hometown, I'd lost an extra hour navigating detours through bombed-out historic districts punctuated by mysteriously glowing chandeliers in long-shuttered music halls, classically "shitty" pizza I'd kill a kitten for on most days, and eddies off the Ohio upon which bobbed decommissioned stern-wheelers repurposed into houseboats, lit in a magic hour that comes freakish early in the mountains.

Time is something I feel I have more of, when I’m home. So I'm more late, always.

At one point, before I’d even pulled into the Airbnb I'd rented (which feels so weird in a place you know so well), I parked my rental and scrambled up a near-feral cemetery outside Martins Ferry, where a dizzy path had been mowed in spots. The more diminutive graves—dating back to the 1870's and earlier—remained swallowed by knee-high grasses and early summer flowers.

I’d hoped to get an angle of the riverside, stories-high coal pile viewable only in flashes from the high-speed main-drag leading from Weirton and Steubenville, south to Wheeling, Moundsville and beyond. As the sun ducked behind the hills, I poked along breaks in the trees until a train blared its whistle below. At the second horn, I took off running for the car like a crazed animal.

***

My mother dated a conductor immediately after we'd left Wheeling. Part of me thinks we left West Virginia for him, considering they met during a summer vacation via Amtrak the year before that whole “move to Oregon” ball really got rolling.

We'd called him Mr. Conductor. He had a degree in poetry. Their first real date was to go see wild bison herds… by train. Years later, he'd buy her an evening gown as an apology gift after a big fight, the crux of which I never found out. She scoffed at it, going, "Thanks but where will I wear it?" which is code for: "Who do you think I am?" and also, "Where will you take me in that?"

He didn’t last much longer.

Before that, Mr. Conductor came home from work one day, rattled, explaining someone had thrown themselves in front of his train. That this happened more than you'd think. That there's rarely any hope. That it takes something like a half-mile to stop a moving train.

I’m certain I remember the wrong things out of that conversation about suicide by train–not enough feeling, too much practicality–but life is hard and chaotic, while physics is constant. An old friend would, years later, choose to die by train, and then I’d think of the poet-conductor she must have rattled, and which useless, glimmering beauty hid just on the edge of all her darkness. What a slow disaster that must have been.

.***

By the time I reached the bottom of the hill, the train had already passed. It was a small hill, and even shorter train. Down the tracks, Norfolk and Southern’s stallion reared in defiance back at me as it trudged toward the next bend, wailing at each house along the way. There had been no collision, of course. My gleaming, hours-old rental car was fine. No great crash had sounded up the path before I got there.

Yet still I wondered: How close had I come?

***

krishna's peacock in the wind, 6/5/2018.

I know where to find peacocks. I knew where to find them as a child, and I know where they moved them as an adult, when the rules changed.

As a kid, the peacocks roamed around a city park. The lesser of the two parks. The one that was surrounded on two of four sides by giant cemeteries. Only a chain link fence separated the peacocks from wandering into a field of graves.

Now, as an adult, stalking peacocks has become one of my greatest pleasures. They jangle against the landscape in their new home, up with the Hare Krishnas, all pride and ego tucked on a country road, fed by those who came to forget. Roaming around McCreary’s Ridge before being called home to feed, the peacocks are less than a quarter mile from a vast gash in the earth cut by a brand new pipeline, laid in the last year.

At first it seemed normal: everyone had peacocks in their lives, right? Then I got it: Nope, they're immortal baubles, hidden in the hills, always on the edge of a threat.

***

I spent my last day at home doing the most mundane things possible. Passing a proper day in my Not-Life. The life I wish I could have, but will have to settle for moonlighting.

Going to a diner for breakfast, I found my favorite waitress, who recognized me despite hair color changes and too much time. Heading to the post office, I eavesdropped on a gussied-up regular, known amongst the staff for a prodigious and fastidious correspondence that heeds no national boundaries. Walking at the park, I ran into a troupe of my past-selves, who played capture-the-flag across poison ivy- and ground hornet-infested terrain. Swimming at the pool, I chatted with a natural gas executive’s wife—whom I’d met only once, years ago, yet remained curious about my career then introduced me to her children.

Bizarro Life Me was thriving as I flicked a deertick off my mostly naked body, tipsy from Yuenglings sold at the snack stand.

Ticks, to me, are a sign I'm doing it right. You can't get ticks sitting on the internet, my dumb ass thought to myself, as a text came in, from a friend in Pittsburgh. We’d planned to meet on the way to the airport.

“Try to avoid any pipeline explosions.”

That's a plausible, if tired joke, I thought, for someone from the area to make.

“Ha! I always try to stay out of the fray as best I can.”

***

We pack light, in my family. A single messenger bag can get me through a wedding, Death Valley, and Vegas. While I stood in my hometown’s pool locker room putting on the same shirt I’d worn the last four days straight, WOVK concluded its broadcast of some chick threatening her cheating lover and broke for the news. The disc jockey sounded 100% casual when he spent ten seconds mentioning an early morning natural gas explosion near Moundsville—“No one injured. Flames under control.”—before dropping back into the newest Keith Urban song, I think?

“Try to avoid any pipeline explosions.”

My friend wasn’t kidding.

I had no service on my phone where I stood. Out in the parking lot, I found an hours-old article in the Post-Gazette reporting how a newly installed pipeline had ruptured early in the morning, sending flames into the sky that could be seen for miles:

The explosion woke him and he found the sky ablaze with colors, “almost like a rainbow.”

Right away, Mr. Martin said, he knew two things for sure: A natural gas pipeline had blown up and he was in no danger.

So he went back to bed.

“It’s happened around here before,” he said ticking off other pipeline explosions in the region in recent years. “They [also] had a well out there catch fire and it lit up the sky.

“It’s getting to where you look around and it’s like, there goes another one.”

[…]

In the morning, Mr. Martin’s wife asked him why he hadn’t roused her to see the flames.

“What for?” he said. “You would have asked me, ‘Why did you wake me up?’”

I was sound asleep, a county away. But all day, I'd heard no mention of this. Everywhere I went. All the eavesdropping and life chitchat, which is more substantive around here than in the Midwest. Either the news was just trickling out in the immediate community, or this stuff didn’t move the needle anymore.

So he went back to bed.

I wanted to ask the people around me what they knew about this, but who? The teenager handing out towels? The natural gas exec’s wife, and her kids? To what point?

To what point? “So he went back to bed.”

I drove out of town, lost in my head, thinking mostly about the peacocks.

***

On that first train trip, the one where Mr. Conductor appeared in our lives, somewhere west of Spokane, long after dark, I’d wandered from our coach seats to the observation car. As we plowed onward, patches of smoldering orange and crimson punctured the black, smoke rising into curls of nothing. We were passing through a brushfire at night. Trains can do that. It was spectacular, and sad.

Somehow I'm the only one who ever mentions this part of the story.

Everyone looked up for a minute, then went back to playing cards and getting drunk, maybe falling in love.

The world burned, and everything kept right on going. It was the first time I'd seen anything like it.