I’d heard all kinds of things about Berkeley before actually moving out here from Maine last fall. The University. The student protests. The street people. The Grateful Dead. The astronomical house prices – and just-about-everything-else-in-the-known-universe prices. Even the weather. So I thought I knew what I was in for.

No one said a thing about the trains.

The hootin’ from the long freights of the Union Pacific starts around ten at night and doesn’t stop until six or so in the morning. Or maybe it doesn’t stop even then, but gets drowned out by the drone of the freeways. The rail lines are near the shore of the Bay, while the house I’m living in (with those geriatric cats) is near the base of the hills. But it still sounds like those locomotives are about to roll through the bedroom window. On and on the railroad chorus goes while I lie awake in bed, listening.

It’s the novelty, not the noise. Where I grew up in eastern Massachusetts, all that was left of the iron horse was the dirt path we used to walk and ride our bicycles on. Long before steam locomotives ceased to run everywhere but American Flyer Lines (I still have my set after all these years), they were gone from the cranberry bog country. So anywhere I moved where the railroad left the toy box and joined the nocturnal noises of the owls and whippoorwills and pizza drivers and drunken partygoers, I would lie awake in bed, listening. Especially Ohio, where the coal trains would announce their coming and then spend the next hour rumbling past, ponderous and deliberate, on their way to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or the power plants on the Ohio River. Berkeley is about the last place on Earth that I expected to get reminded of Ohio, but that’s where I go when the lonesome horns of the big diesel-electrics sound at two in the morning.

By dawn, Ohio is gone. Most certainly, Ohio in January is gone. Or Maine. Last year in January, I was fighting with a series of nor’easter snowstorms to keep a path clear to the barn – and our store of firewood. And losing. It were a propah Maine wintah. For awhile, we thought we’d have to use the second-story windows to exit the house, the first story being buried. At least the snow kept the water pipes from freezing in the below-zero cold snaps. This year, I leave the house in a light jacket and walk down the path fringed with blooming bougainvillea and rosemary to the garage, where I get out my bicycle and ride to work. Under the bougainvillea, the first daffodils are about to open. People wonder why there’s a million people in Maine, but 46 million in California.

Ah, but every point of refuge has its price, and Murphy, He of the Law, is still ruler of the universe. So this year, I’m not shoveling snow in January. I’m raking leaves. This is doubly ironic, because most plants native to this part of California are evergreens. You don’t have to worry about “fall", because they don’t. Not all at once anyway. But some idiot, probably an Easterner who didn’t see his way clear to leaving well enough alone, got some Eastern trees and planted them willy-nilly in gardens and along streets. Especially the sweet gum tree. The thrice-cursed sweet gum.

Now I’ll concede, the sweet gum, which is native to places like West Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee, is pretty in the fall. It’s almost as good as a Maine maple. But – when it’s growing where it’s supposed to be growing, it knows when fall is and gets rid of its leaves all at once, in October and early November, like a good and sensible deciduous tree is supposed to. You enjoy the colors for a week or so, rake for a week or so, and you’re done. In Berkeley, the weather in January is scarcely different from the weather in July, so the fool tree has no clue when fall is supposed to be and acts accordingly. Confused. We have some sweet gum trees in our block that are bare, some that still have red leaves on them, and some (I’m not making this one up either, Dave) that are still green! I started raking in November and I’ll still be at it in April at this rate. Raking with one hand and pulling the weeds, that are sprouting all over the place like it was late spring around here or something, with the other. Sheesh.

So I get all this done, and it’s getting towards evening and the sun is going down. I’m leaning on my rake, making sure it’s safe to quit for the day and put the tools away, thinking about the next gardening chore, and feeding and medicating the geriatric cats, and oh yeah when am I going to get those 14 scientific manuscripts written, when the horn from the first Union Pacific of the night rises above the evening commute. And I’m taken back to Ohio, and to all the other places I’ve been where there were active railroads, and the urge comes back again to do what I’ve always been too damned good a do-bee to do. Hop a freight. See where it takes me. Just because.

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.