Chapter 3: Trestling

https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2019/04/26/crows-vancouver-middle-way-biophobia-biophilia/

     “Did you tell your mom we were going?” I ask Robbie when we meet at the bridge on Friday after school.

“Si si, senor,” he laughs, slipping under the bridge on the muddy slope. “I told her we were going down the park.”

“Good thinking, my friend,” I call, scrambling after him down a packed dirt path along the Middlebrook toward the railroad trestle.

“She still treats me like a little kid,” he complains, picking his way up the rocky scree to the tracks.

“Enjoy it while you can,” I advise, squatting down to place a hand on the rail. “Diay, it’s coming!”

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     Trestling had been a dare for Bound Brook kids in pre-internet generations. It was scary fun to stand beneath the tracks with fingers in ears as a freight train rumbled overhead with cathunk, cathunk, cathunk, cathunk. For Ernie and Robbie scrambling into the darkness beneath the tracks, it was a novel concept that they discovered accidentally, not wanting to be seen by passengers on the Raritan Valley Line.

     No one knew exactly how, but by the end of the twentieth century the little central Jersey town wedged between a bend in the Raritan River and the Watchung mountains had become the most densely populated place in the United States for Costa Rican immigrants. Downtown shops and restaurants, school sports teams, construction and cleaning jobs, and even the Codrington Park pool had become peopled with names like Hernandez, Hidalgo, Quesado, Vargas, and Zamora from the central highlands around San Jose.

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     “My mom takes that train,” I shout above the rumble. “She works at Minuteman Park.”

“What about your dad?” Robbie yells back, leaning back into the wall made of railroad ties.

“Some golf course in Bedminster,” I answer as the clanging and clacking subside into the distance. “He gets picked up by a van before dawn and doesn’t get home until after ten.”

“Jeez, you must never see him,” he proclaims as we jump back up the bank to the tracks.

“What about your dad?” I shrug as we step across the ties trying not to look at the brook down below. “Guys around town are afraid of him.”

“Yeah, he was some kind of football and war hero,” he calls back, picking out the remnant of a path heading toward the river as a stream of big black birds flaps far overhead toward First Watchung. “He never talks about it.”

“Well, he knows his way around these woods,” I exclaim as the sun dips behind the trees to the west. “There’s that fisherman’s trail he told us about.”