No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation XVII
A man died last week on the rail line near Anaheim CA. He stepped into a crossing in front of a Metrolink commuter train around 6am, stretched out his arms and waited for the train to hit him. The horrified engineer couldn't stop in time.
Nearly 100 miles away, I was getting on the first northbound Amtrak of the day, and read a message crawling across the information sign that the first southbound service was delayed due to a "passenger train trespassing incident". I didn't really think much about it; it wasn't my train, it was miles away. Maybe someone had gotten obstreperous with the conductor, or someone had been seen along the track. It didn't even cross my mind that those words were railway code for a fatality.
But as we left Oceanside at 7am, the man behind me got a call on his cellphone. "Well, then I'm screwed," he said, sounding annoyed. Then I got a call from a colleague who takes Metrolink from Irvine, the midway point. He told me what had happened, and that both lines, southbound and northbound, were blocked north of Anaheim. He went home to telecommute. I had meetings in LA, and even if I chose to turn around and head for home, there were no southbound trains getting through for me to take. So I sat it out, and my train kept going north. The lines reopened after about 3 hours, after the business of death swarmed around the tracks: policemen with yellow tape, railway workers in hard hats, the cleanup crew with bins and tarps. Once north of Anaheim, my train inched its way along with frequent long, sighing stops. Even so, we got to LA with only a 45 minute delay, cushioned by the distance we had to travel. Most passengers had no idea what had happened, and grumbled that we were late again.
This is the second death that I know of on the LA-San Diego corridor this summer; in June, a man was killed by an overnight freight train near San Clemente under rather creepy circumstances (at 2 am, it appears that a group of teenagers watched him get hit). Other lines in the region have also had a number of recent deaths; sometimes suicide, sometimes stupidity (like walking on the tracks, or trying to beat the gates). Deaths by train are depressingly common.
And I found it odd that despite the grimly public way of taking their lives, these victims are mostly invisible. Unless their travel is affected by the tragedy, most people probably never hear of this happening. It's a sentence on the evening news, or a tiny paragraph in the paper, gone in an instant.
I sorrow for the victim who suffered such despair, and for his family. I cannot fathom how anyone could choose such a horrible way to die. And I feel for the engineer, at the controls of his massive machine, who was made an unwilling accomplice and saw it all, and the conductor, whose harrowing responsibility it was to get off the train and inspect the aftermath. I hope they have help for the trauma of the experience.
I met some of the passengers from the train that struck the man, on the trip home that night. They cushioned themselves from the event with dark humor, or anger at the hurt done to the engineer and crew, whom they know by name. Those on other trains that were delayed complained about the timing. They didn't really address the event or the human life behind it--a natural defense mechanism, but still, jarring.
One of my other commute friends told me that in the 4 or 5 years she's been doing the trip, her train has killed 6 people, most of them suicides. The railway seems to draw the despairing, the way the Golden Gate Bridge does. I know that statistically, it is inevitable that one day I too will be an accomplice of sorts, a few hundred feet away from death, a passenger on a train that kills a person. It is a disturbing thought.
Susan Forsburg
Photo: The tracks reopen. Orange County Register
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