This train done need a good scrubbing, oh, this train... (Sealed... Pt. IV)

The human brain is an amazing machine. It oversees the day to day operations of the human body like a giant supercomputer, only considerably smaller and squishier. From the moment there are two neurons present in an embryo, they begin communicating, trying to make sense of their environment and the body's place in it. "Hey, what's all this?" "I don't know." "Me neither." "Where's everybody else?" "Oh hey, here's another one. Hi." "Say guys, what's that sound? ... Is someone vacuuming?" And so on.

Inherent in this search for meaning is a need to learn what things feel good and what things hurt. Most human beings, when they realize that something feels good, want more of it. Similarly, most humans will strive to avoid anything they identify as a source of discomfort. (The few exceptions to this rule are big Marilyn Manson fans.) This desire to avoid pain is key to the effectiveness of criminal punishment; we punish criminals in the hopes that they will associate the pain of punishment with their criminal behavior, and choose not to do it again. (Or at least, that's what we ought to do with criminals. Commentary on that issue will have to wait for another blog.)

As a reasonable facsimile of an adult, I am a firm believer in the punishment part of "crime and punishment." It should be swift and should fit the crime. Given that our crime involved vandalizing a garage, the authorities couldn't exactly simply vandalize us in return. (Though my step-father thought it appropriate.) Even in the hinterlands of Upstate New York in the mid '70's, they had some standards for what you could and could not do with kids (unless you were their parents or clergy).

Jim and I were ordered to appear downtown at the courthouse that following Saturday morning, dressed in work clothes and ready to work. Mom picked the most ripped and stained jeans from amongst our supply of ripped and stained jeans, we donned t-shirts and sneakers, and Dad gave us each a pair of work gloves, which he assured us we would pay to replace should they be lost or damaged. We hopped in the family truckster and headed downtown. At the courthouse, the police took custody of us from Mom, and told her when she could reclaim us. We took it as a good sign that they assumed she'd want us back.

The Pullman Sleeping Car was invented by cabinet-maker turned industrialist George Pullman in 1857. The Pullman Car parked on the railroad siding next to the court house, was probably one of the first to roll off the assembly line, and—if its condition that day was any indication—saw the hardest, dirtiest use during its day. Apparently the city or the county or the state had bought this hollow, crusty wreck of a thing and had plans to fix it up for use in bicentennial celebrations. The first stage in the car's rehabilitation coincided nicely with this first stage of ours; we were to clean it.

There we were, two teenagers with a fairly spotty record of cleaning something as simple and small as our own bedroom, and we're handed a train to clean. Looking back, I give them an "A" for creativity, but a "C-minus" in forethought. We were certainly likely to learn our lesson, but were they likely to get a clean train? Doubtful. Doubtful, at best.

The cops (we felt we knew them well enough by now to call them cops) gave us buckets, hoses, brushes, soap and a hose that ran all the way from the side of the court house. I imagined that they used this same hose to delouse prisoners, and so resolved not to drink directly from it. We started by filling the bucket with water, adding soap, soaking the brushes and sponges, and then picking an area to begin scrubbing. This was slow and fairly ineffectual work, so we eventually hit upon the idea of just hosing down the whole interior of the car, using the force of the water pressure to dislodge the crustier bits of the train's history.

Before long the car and Jim and I were thoroughly drenched and more than a little sudsy. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to tell you that water + soap = slippery. There we were, soaked to the bone, sliding all over the inside of the Pullman car, doing our best to scrub anything and everything that slid by. After a couple of hours we were surprised to see that the train was noticeably cleaner than before we started. The hot sun streaming through the broken windows and playing off the puddles and soap bubbles began to look more and more like a light at the end of this particular tunnel.

In the end, we served our time, and the train got clean. We were wet and exhausted, but we'd had fun. I don't think they'd bargained on that, but we did. If I sat down with a calculator and a calendar, I could compute the number of days in my childhood, and hazard a guess as to how many of those were days during which I had fun. It would be a big number, yet looking back, so few days stick in my mind. But that one did.

Did we learn our lesson? It's hard to say. We certainly never got into that specific brand of trouble again, but I'd be lying (and more so than usual) if I suggested that we were angels from them on.

Time and geography have frayed the bonds Jim and I once shared. When you grow up in the same house with someone who is the same age as you, you can't help but spend most of that childhood stumbling through the good and bad together. I like to think that the paths we each have taken since then were the right ones for each of us, that they diverged because we each needed to go where the other could not. But most of all, I like to remember that there was a time when we stood together, soaking wet, looking down a set of railroad tracks, and thinking that, like those two ribbons of rusty steel, we'd run side-by-side through the world forever.