The Swamp of Death and Train Tracks of Doom

[fbhjr]

Thinking of going to the one football game I ever attended 35 years ago makes me think of the Swamp of Doom in the town where I grew up.
When I was young, we went to visit my mother’s parents often. My father had determined the shortest route between our house and theirs, even though it involved a lot of small back roads, so we almost always went that way.
On the other side of town from where we lived was a large swamp that we’d drive past on these trips.
“Don’t ever go into that swamp,” my mother would tell us. “It is full of poison gas. Birds that fly over it pass out, fall out of the sky, land in the water and drown.”
At five or so, the idea of a poison swamp only a mile or so from your house is pretty scary.
There was a closer swamp, behind the house across the street from us, that I played in all the time as a kid. But, I was not worried because it was not “The Swamp of Death” on the other side of town.
When I was a senior in high school, I took a college level biology class. Part of the class was to walk through the swamp behind the high school and catalog the different types of plants and animals found there. When I looked at the map the teacher put up on the board, I realized it was the same “Swamp of Death” my mother had told me about when I was young.
“What about the poison gas?” I asked my teacher.
“What poison gas?” he asked me.
“The one that makes birds pass out as they fly over the swamp,” I said. “They fall in and drown.”
He stared at me trying to figure out what I was talking about.
“There’s no gas like that in this swamp,” he said. “I go out there each year with this class and no one has ever had a problem.”
I went home and asked my mother why she had told me that.
“To stop you from playing in that swamp,” she said.
“Why would I cross town to play in a swamp when there was one across the street?” I asked her.
“I didn’t want to take the chance,” she said.


In a similar way are the “Train Tracks of Death”.
Driving along route 9 toward Worcester there is a train crossing in Framingham.
“Someone from our town was killed there,” my mother used to tell me. “He got too close to the train as it crossed and it sucked him under the wheels and killed him.”
Given the whole swamp thing, she probably told me that to keep me away from all train tracks. But, as a kid, it made me think there was something about those particular tracks that let them suck people in.

I still drive across them every time I’ve got to go to Framingham. I still think of them as the “Train Tracks of Death.” I did once, out of the dozens of times I’ve crossed them, see a train on those tracks. It didn’t suck anyone in. But, maybe we all got lucky that day.
And, like the swamp, making me think that one particular instance had special danger did not make me think that all train tracks were dangerous. In junior high my friend Jack lived near a different set of train tracks and we walked along those all the time. Even after someone we knew was hit and killed by a train on those tracks. Given where he was hit you can see either way down the tracks for more then a mile, which gives you a good amount of time to get out of the way, we thought it was his fault, not the tracks.
And the TTOD were 14 miles from where I grew up as the bird flies, so I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been playing there under any circumstances anyhow.


But, maybe she had a point.
I look both ways before going over the “Train Tracks of Death”, even now.

Comments

[palusbuteo.livejournal.com]

method to the madness

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

But, not a good method. That's my point.
She didn't teach me it was unsafe to play in swamps or walk along train tracks.
She taught me that specific swamps and tracks were bad and the others were OK.
She knew I played in the other swamps and walked along other tracks and didn't stop me.
So, I don't think it worked well...

Well, she may have had good intentions, anyway

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

.. but everyone knows that the Legion of Doom is hidden in the swamp..

[cissa.livejournal.com]

*blinks* That all strikes me as odd.