This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
One of the great teachers of writing in the Rock Island area is no more. Now, would-be writers must sit in other classrooms on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and do their assignments.
There used to be a more natural way of becoming a writer when the Rock Island Lines railroad was still carrying passengers across the Midwest prairies. It was a method based not on tuition, but intuition; its classroom was the passenger car.
What was it about trains that made every passenger a storyteller? The conductor cried "all aboard." Friends left standing on the platform facing us moved past our window like a row of sunflowers disappearing. And even before we realized we were the ones moving, we passengers began to imagine each other in stories.
Who was that silent antique couple sitting in the far corner, opposite each other? Notice how from time to time he would make the slightest gesture with the index finger of one hand, and she (her name was very likely Alberta) knowing what he wanted, would pull out a soda, a thick sandwich, a magazine, for him. That gesture was the story of their lives.
Closer by was a young couple just out of their teens. She cried every so often. He looked out the window and pretended he did not hear. They were on their way to tell her parents that she was pregnant. The parents would forgive her, and the grandchild would become their joy.
The car was full of stories. Were the two prim women with their hair in buns (schoolteachers of course) going on vacation? Would that man whose wife complained and complained really get off the train in Omaha and never come back? Stories of pilgrims, saints, escapees.
Other passengers were busy making stories, too. Stories about me, that funny little kid whose ears stuck out.
An invasion of privacy? Hardly. It was by stories like these that the passenger car became a community by trip's end. What more terrifying fate than to be part of no story? How else do we live in this world except as characters in stories others tell?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
