Light Lifting Read Free

railway tunnel. It was one of those impossible dangerous things that only invincible high school kids even try: running in the dark, all the way from Detroit to Windsor, underneath the river. When I think back, I still get kind of quaky and I can’t believe we got away untouched. It didn’t work out like that for everyone. Just a few years ago, a kid in the tunnel got sucked under one of those big red CP freighters and when they found him his left arm and his left leg had been cut right off. Somehow he lived, and everybody thought there must have been some kind of divine intervention. The doctors managed to reattach his arm and I think he got a state-ofthe-art prosthetic leg paid for by the War Amps. The papers tried to turn it into a feel good piece, but all I could think about was how hard it would be for that kid to go through the rest of his life with that story stuck to him and the consequences of it so clear to everybody else.
    Burner and I used to race the trains at night from the American side, under the river, and up through the other opening into the CP railyard, over by Wellington Avenue, where all the tracks bundle up and braid together. At that time, before the planes flew into the World Trade Center, there weren’t any real border guards or customs officers or police posted on the rail tunnel. They just had fences. On the American side you had to climb over and on the Canadian side someone had already snipped a hole through the links and you could just walk. The train tunnel is twice as long as the one they use for the cars and I think we had it paced out at around two and a half miles or about fifteen minutes of hard blasting through the dark, trying not to trip over the switches or the broken ties or the ten thousand rats that live down there.
    We’d drive Burner’s car over to the American side, we’d hop the fence and then we’d just watch and wait for about fifteen minutes, trying to estimate how long it would be before the next train set out. We always went one guy at a time because there wasn’t enough space between the side of the track and the wall of the tunnel and you couldn’t risk getting tangled up. It was pitch black in there so we took these little flashlights that we wouldn’t turn on until we were inside and even then you could only get a quick look at where you were and where you were headed. Once, I remember that Burner tried to tape one of those lights to his head so he could be like a miner and see everything more clearly, but he said that the light wouldn’t stay where he needed it and that he had to rip it off after only a few steps.
    When you think about what could have happened but didn’t, it makes you wonder why we weren’t more strategic or careful. We should have timed everything right down to the second, but back then it seemed so easy. We’d crouch down in the shadows beside the tunnel and then if everything looked okay, we’d shake hands and say something like “see you on the other side.” Then the guy going second, the guy left behind, would count it down – three, two, one, go – and that would be it. The first guy would just take off.
    We were always good runners, but ninety percent of racing the trains is just learning to deal with straight fear and the sensation you get from that hot surge of adrenaline flowing through you. It was all about going forward and just trying to stay up on your feet. If you did go down and you felt your leg brush against that damp fur of a rat or you caught your arm on some chunk of metal or got scraped up against the exposed wall of the tunnel, there was no time to even think about it. You just got up as quickly as you could and even though you could feel your pulse beating through an open cut and you might have wrenched your ankle pretty bad, you still had to go on as if everything was working perfectly according to plan.
    It wasn’t really racing at all.