Laying Tracks

The beach house my wife and I rent is unique in several ways. For one thing, it sits right on the sand, so the ocean is only 70’ away on the west side. About 70’ away on the east side, are a set of Metro Link train tracks. Therefore, we are smack dab in the middle of two extremely noisy activities that would keep most people awake at night. However, a month after we moved in it didn’t matter. The noise of the ocean may be loud, but it’s calming and wonderful. The noise of the trains going by, however, is totally obnoxious. But after a while your brain checks out and you just stop hearing it. That is until last Thursday night.

Let me clarify, it wasn’t a train going by that woke us up at 1:00am. It was the sound of loud banging and clanging. I went outside to see what was going on and spotted temporary spotlights set up on the tracks and several men working feverishly underneath them. I couldn’t tell what they were doing and I sure as heck couldn’t sleep either. The loud banging, clanging and beep, beep, beep of a machine moving on the tracks made sleeping impossible.

The next morning, in the bright sunlight, I could see they were replacing sections of the tracks. There was a man in an orange vest operating a huge machine that beeped as it moved back and forth along the tracks. The machine appeared to be “smashing” something into the ground, but I couldn’t tell for sure what it was. Behind him was another man in an orange vest swinging a 10lb sledge hammer, driving stakes into the ground. It reminded me of a picture in a book, way back in my junior high history class, that depicted men laying railroad tracks in the early 1800’s. In fact, if you take the machine out of the scene, it was exactly the same picture… a strong burly man with Popeye sized forearms swinging a 4’ long 10lb sledgehammer over and over again. The difference was that there was also another man, sitting in a comfy chair inside a glass enclosed air-conditioned compartment, smoking a cigarette while he slowly pushed buttons. When he stepped out of the machine I could see he was overweight and out of shape in sharp contrast to his partner.

And that got me thinking… As much as things change, in a lot of ways, they also stay the same. Today we might have a lot more machines that can do fantastic things, but we are still human beings made from flesh and blood. And if we don’t get off our butts and away from our computers, I-phones and TV sets, and start doing more physical activity, someday machines might just smash us!

Then...

Now...

If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart,
some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.~ Joey Adams