Coyote Congregations & Train Engineers

The summers growing up in my hometown were always hot, still are. The sun baked down at the peak of the afternoon, sending most of the creatures into the shade and softening the asphalt on our street. The yard dogs panted beneath the cover of the broad-leafed mulberry trees while their owners stayed inside seeking cool, humid relief from their swamp coolers. The kids in the neighborhood usually tramped from each other’s houses, barefoot, sprinting across the scorching streets, sharing swimming pools and slip n’ slides. Come to think of it, I believe the only things that didn’t seem bothered by the triple-digit temperature were the “red” ants that jittered about their tiny little hills between the sidewalk cracks and along the dirt roads. We would stomp around their dens or disrupt their food-gathering caravans and soon the whole colony would be pouring out of that sandy mound like lava busting out of a volcano.

We lived on the outskirts of town next to an orange grove, an alfalfa field and farther on down the road, a plum orchard. The heat settled into the dirt and pavement and as soon as the night and moon would allow it, it radiated back up into the evening atmosphere, creating this amazing smell of crops and earth, composting plants and irrigation-ditch water. In the middle of the night the farmer's sprinklers came on in the groves, soaking the soil beneath the trees and giving the possums and jackrabbits something cool to drink. With the evaporating irrigation water this agricultural aroma would linger heavy and low throughout the entire valley floor. I could smell the bitter scent of the waxy citrus leaves and from over across the street, behind our neighbor's house, came the musty smell of the green alfalfa.

The nights are very still during the summer. There is rarely a breeze. I would lie awake in my bed with the windows open sometimes and let that thick summer air drift into my room. A heavy darkness looms through the whole neighborhood at that hour. The black sky would drape itself over the tops of the redwood trees in our yard like a circus tent, dangling its millions of little bright stars down so close, it seemed, that if you jumped high enough you might be able to grab one and pull it down. There is a street light near our house but it doesn’t seem to do any good. It flashes on at dusk every day, but it lost its fight against the night so many years ago that it just hangs its head and shines down only because that’s what the city pays it for.

Two of my favorite sounds in the whole world are the sounds I could hear outside at night while waiting to fall asleep. They are distant sounds, both, and to this day I haven’t heard better. Way off in the middle of the groves I could hear the laughing and crying and carrying-on of coyotes. They would congregate on one of the narrow, dirt, truck roads that divide the rows of orange trees. There may have only been ten, romping out there under the moon, buy they sounded like a hundred. I would sometimes see only one or two of them during the day, lanky and wire-haired, trotting along the side of the road with such indifference. And every so often, while my brother and I would be playing in the groves, we would see one and try to chase it as far as we could. This never went too far, though. The “hunted” coyote would slow it’s gait for just a second to let us catch up then would break from the turnrow, into the trees and disappear. But several hours after sundown it seemed like every one of them had gathered for the coyote social event of the year. They would raise their voices together and bark out an eerie song that sometimes sounded like choruses of children yelping out in the dark.

On other nights, the heavy, metallic boom of train cars being linked together echoed into my room. The freight yard, with it's intersecting tracks of the short-line San Joaquin Valley Railroad and the Union Pacific, was planted right between the big fruit-packing house and Filbert St. It was about a mile from my house and the coupling of those boxcars sounded like the distant report of cannons being fired. During the day the freight yard wasn't much more than a dry, dusty lot to ride our bikes through after school. Occasionally, we would hop up into the idle, graffiti-covered cars and pretend we were hobos. But it wasn't until the middle of the night, that the train yard really came to life, and the blast from the train’s horn as it crept out of the yard, could be heard from miles around. As a kid, I used to imagine myself riding high up in the engine's cab talking with the engineer about the load of oranges and lumber we'd be towing; laughing, telling stories and drinking hot black coffee from thermoses in the dark morning hours (it's funny because at that time I was too young to have been drinking coffee. I just knew that’s something that adults and movie cowboys did. So of course, I wanted to).

Things have changed a lot since those summer nights of my childhood. When I come back home I can't hear the coyotes as much anymore. They stopped hosting their canine parties when the farmer who owned the groves retired. In fact, his son sold much of the land away and the orange trees next to our fence became houses. The plum orchard was turned into another neighborhood and the alfalfa field got plowed under to make way for an elementary school. But nowadays, when I’m visiting, I open the window of my old room at night and just before sleep overtakes me, that same pungent, valley air drifts in through the screen, inducing faded dreams of coyote congregations and train engineers. My breathing slows and as I turn on my side, I can still hear the freight cars rumbling in the distance like thunder.