Train's Long Whistle Good Night

I was driving through downtown to make my observation Friday night and early Saturday morning. The Lincoln nightlife was in full swing. The neon lights were shining with magnificent brilliance. People walked the sidewalks having a good time, making their way between bars and other attractions. Many waited outside of popular bars or made casual conversation on the sidewalks. All in all the night was not dead and created a mood full of energy. I drove past seeking my destination, secluded back in the older parts of town. The buildings surrounding it were rundown or being newly renovated. The location seemed ideal for such a place, the train station. Knowing how much the trains have fallen out of favor, I knew it would be in an older part of town.

I looked around the train station and the first thing that caught my attention was the lack of life. It created a huge contrast between the nightlife of Lincoln’s downtown only a few blocks away. There was only one soul sitting bleakly on a bench. The trains sat as a backdrop to the courtyard and were only a display because of the brilliant colors of the rainbow on each car. Otherwise, it seemed a normal train station to me with place to board and places to buy tickets, which all looked deserted upon my first inspection. The water tower was the large domineering figure that held the courtyard its prisoner, but as I made way into the courtyard, I noticed the mural dominating the courtyard outside of the train station. It caught my interest and begged for a closer look because of its center piece appeal. So I made my way to inspect this masterpiece given as a memorial to the fading locomotive.

It was a dark, chilly night on the point of being cold. The night was barely lit by the sparse lighting scattered across the courtyard. The wind had just picked up and scattered leaves and unattended trash into the parking lot. The area was deserted leaving the feeling of abandonment. The trees rustled. I hear the trees swaying in the wind. The water drips from the water tower and makes a lulling, splashing noise. I sit on the bench and look at the stone mural. It has a three dimensional effect of the steam locomotive coming out of the wall with the rolling plains of the Nebraska landscape in the background. It looks as if the old times when there were less cities and the locomotive was at its prime in transportation. Now the mural is the only memorial given to this once great machine. The buffalo sit alongside in a world that they once knew as their home without fences or boundaries. The rolling plains are filled with wild grass. The ocean of grass stretches to the horizon and beyond to follow alongside the tracks from sea to shining sea. Although the bricks keep a generally tan color, the bricks change color to add to the effect and add depth. But the train has fallen from its former glory. So why do people even keep the train around?

The train is losing it usage, falling from the height it had once reached, becoming more and more a part of the age of extinction. I think of the history books in which the trains ruled the plains of developing America. The train tracks made traveling and shipping so much easier and more efficient, but now they are a thing of a time long forgotten. Seeing the train on the plains made me realize how much technology has been advancing. It has made leaps and bounds since the middle ages. We have to keep up with the technology or get left behind. People have adapted to the new technology like planes and cars to move and get along in the ever expanding system of roads and highways. The trains is slowly becoming extinct because of it inefficiency to get to places outside of the predestined railroad tracks. For instance, my friend said that this train runs to Denver, then to San Francisco, then up to Washington, then over to Montana, which would be a five day trip. This is ridiculous for him to go see his girlfriend because at most it would take him two days to make that trip in his jeep. Seeing the amount of people frequenting the train station only attributes to the dying life of trains. The amount of people there could have fit on a bus. For all purposes, the bus would be quicker and even faster as would be an airplane.

Seeing the deserted courtyard and the gloomy tracks reminds me of the chaos theory. The chaos theory states that the world and existence is slowly heading for destruction and chaos. No matter what we do we cannot change the future of chaos. For instance, someone cleans their room and it looks nice, but in a few days it is messy again. We cannot stop this or change this. Everything decays over time, even the toughest metal rusts and the hardest rocks wear away over time. I can see how cars break down when once they were in perfect running condition or computers become slow and outdated because nothing lasts forever. Not even our own lives last forever, which we may sometime forget our own mortality and the brevity of them. We deny the facts saying that it happened to him, but not me, never me. I see mortality as real, something that makes life so wonderful. It is the thing that gives meaning to life and makes is worth living because living forever takes away the quick-paced sense of time we have in which we must get things done before our time comes. The chaos theory applies to everything, without exception.

Everyone knows that they will die, but how they deal with that fact makes a huge difference. To waste such a precious gift as life is one of the greatest crimes I can think of in this world. Aristotle once spoke of telos, happiness. He said this is man’s greatest pleasure and main goal in life. In my opinion, he is absolutely right. So many people sit by just waiting for the end. They look like the trains that have made their once great treks across the United States in that now they sit by becoming older and more beat up. This should never be anyone’s life because everyone only has a set amount of time and should make the most of it. Anyone can find their happiness. No one is stuck sitting in a dead end job that makes them miserable day in and day out. That is not living. That is already dead in every sense except for the grave. I seek to make my life worth every second that I am awake because I know that everything will end, just like the trains will cease to be. We will end so people should not waste any of their precious seconds because we have so few to begin with. I know I am going out to fulfill my passion and achieve my happiness. The question is will you be stuck in that waiting room or will you make your life what it is meant to be?