True love, taters and trains
Zach Hively - 01/23/2025In the middle of a hundred things the other day, the girlfriend said to me, “I’m a trainwreck. I don’t know why you love me.”
This was no trap. This statement was a healthy expression of adult emotions. And I, bringing decades of relationship experience, picked up on the most essential component of what she was vulnerable enough to share. I responded with the magic word: “… Trains?”
It worked. She had no words to say in return. I, being in general terms a man, was pleased to have fixed something. Doing so freed me to stop worrying about her problems and start reminiscing once again about trainwrecks, unrelated entirely to anything happening in the country or the wider world.
One train wreck in particular.
But I didn’t get to witness the wreck, which is really the dream, if you ask people like me.
Its mere existence, though – that such things as train wrecks like this have happened – means that one day, I might get so lucky. The girlfriend should know by now that I love her because she is a train wreck. I could love her more only if she were an actual, literal, non-metaphorical train wreck … with potatoes.
OK, so a lot of longtime Durangotans will know this one. But the girlfriend didn’t, so this meant I got to recount the story in great detail, relying on thorough research I conducted during an obsessive month or three after I moved to Durango more than a dozen years ago, research that I may or may not remember accurately.
I even went so far as to draft a book about the event for young readers. It didn’t succeed, owing largely to my lack of exposure to young readers and their tolerance for footnotes. It had 115 of them. I’ve learned from that experience: I will not test your tolerance for footnotes, either. Just know that I COULD have footnotes, if I wanted.
It all started when I was wandering the railroad museum because trains. An offhand comment on a display referenced the “Great Spud Truck Trainwreck” of ’87 and never have I ever, anywhere in the world, wanted to know so much more from reading so little.
The wreck in question involved locomotive #473, and until my current relationship, I had never fallen so hard as I did for this rolling disaster. When she was 28 – young for a train, before the DiCaprio Rule was in place – the summer heat bent the rails and she jackknifed into the Animas River. But the good people of the Denver & Rio Grande fished her out and got her back on her wheels, probably hoping their bosses wouldn’t notice.
She saw some successful days in the meantime, including film appearances after years of failing to land so much as a soap commercial audition. But she became an unsuspecting hero in 1987, when a semi-truck – the very innovation that had spelled the end of most of her kind – lost its brakes.
I mean, it didn’t lose its brakes per se. But its brakes lost pressure, and owing to how truck brakes work (which I don’t understand, because I never obsessed over trucks), and how long and steep and so very downhill the highway is from Hesperus to Durango, and just how heavy 47,640 pounds of potatoes is, the truck went fast.
[Footnote: Kids, much like adults, are really bad at contextualizing big numbers. So how many potatoes is that? It’s as much as four African elephants! Enough to make little potato chip bags for more than a million packed lunches. Uh oh, that’s another big number.]
Long story short, because if you’re interested in how steam locomotive boilers work and why T-boning one with a semi-truck is such a bad idea, you probably already know and don’t need me to spell it out for you. Ol’ 473 (by now nearing three times Leo’s age limit but as gorgeous as ever) valiantly, if unsuspectingly, parked herself between a bunch of loitering tourists and the oncoming spud truck. She took the brunt.
As for the driver who kept the runaway truck from squishing old ladies, ducklings and the like? He survived. The taters? They rained down upon the people of Durango like prizes in a Roald Dahl game show.
[Footnote: The older I get, the more I relate to the adults who collected the free spuds and took them home.]
And that heroic 473? The steam engine once again got her renovation on. Which I think is a lovely way to think about those we love. We don’t dismiss them because they are trainwrecks; we invest tens of thousands of dollars in them, because we’re never going to find another one at this point in life.
Especially not one who, now that I think about it, makes me pierogi for special occasions. All my favorite trainwrecks really do come with potatoes – and without casualties, to date.
– Zach Hively
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