True Love, Taters, and Trainwrecks

Rejected titles include "Spud Muffin" and "Coo Coo Ca Choo-Choo"

By Zach Hively

In the middle of a hundred things the other day, the girlfriend said to me, “I’m a train wreck. I don’t know why you love me.”

This was no trap.

She was not baiting me. This statement was a healthy expression of adult emotions. And I, bringing decades of relationship experience to bear, picked up on the most essential component of what she was vulnerable enough to share.

So I responded with the magic word: “… Trains?”

It worked. She had no rebuttal, other than being immediately, unspeakably happy. (As in, unable to speak.)
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I, being in general terms a man, was pleased to have fixed something. Doing so freed me to stop worrying about her problems and start reminiscing once again about train wrecks, not metaphorical ones like you might think considering the state of the union right now, but actual locomotives coming off of actual tracks.

I was not fortunate enough to survive this train wreck myself, personally. I mean, I survived in the sense that it didn’t kill me. It didn’t kill anyone at all, in point of fact. It hardly even scathed anyone who was present. Which means you survived it too, or your forebears did. But I didn’t get to survive the wreck firsthand, which is really the dream, if you ask train people like me.

Its mere existence, though—that such things as train wrecks like this have happened—means that one day, I might get so lucky. Because oh, how I love train wrecks. The girlfriend should know by now that I love her because she is a train wreck. I could love her more only if she were an actual, literal, non-metaphorical train wreck.

A train wreck … with potatoes.

The girlfriend didn’t know this story,
having never lived in Durango like I once did. So I got to recount it in great detail, relying entirely on comprehensive research I conducted during an intensely obsessive month or three right after I moved there, research that I may or may not remember accurately after a dozen years or so.

I even went so far at the time as to draft a book about the event for young readers. It didn’t succeed, owing largely to my lack of exposure to young readers and their tolerance for footnotes. It had 115 of them.

I’ve learned from that experience: I will not test your tolerance for footnotes, either. I won’t use more than three. Just know that I could have more footnotes, if I wanted to, and most of them would reference existing sources.

It all started
when I was new to town and wandering the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad museum because trains. An offhand comment on a display referenced the Great Spud Truck Train Wreck of ’87 [footnote to read: “my words, not theirs”] and never have I ever, anywhere in the world, wanted to know so much more from reading so little.

The wreck in question involved locomotive #473, and until my current relationship I had never fallen so hard, or so thoroughly, as I did for this hot mess of a steam engine.

473 was a rolling disaster. When she was 28—considered young for an engine, before the DiCaprio Rule was in place—the summer heat bent the railroad’s eponymous rails and she jackknifed into the Animas River. But the good people of the Denver & Rio Grande fished her out and got her back on her wheels, probably hoping their bosses wouldn’t notice.

She saw some successful days in the meantime, including film appearances after years of failing to land so much as a soap commercial audition. But she became an unsuspecting hero in 1987, when a semi-truck—the very innovation that had spelled the end of most of her kind—lost its brakes.

I mean, it didn’t lose lose its brakes, per se. You can’t take me at my word all the time. But its brakes lost pressure, and owing to how truck brakes work (which I don’t understand, because I never obsessed over trucks), and how long and steep and so very downhill the highway is from Hesperus to Durango, and just how heavy 47,640 pounds of potatoes is, the truck went fast.

[Footnote: Kids, much like adults, are really bad at contextualizing big numbers. So how many potatoes is that? It’s as much as four African elephants! Enough potatoes to make little potato chip bags for more than a million packed lunches. Uh oh, that’s another big number.]

Long story short
—because if you’re interested in how steam locomotive boilers work and why T-boning one with a semi-truck is such a bad idea, you probably don’t need me to spell it out for you like I spelled it out for the kids in about 3,000 words—and if you’re not interested, you likely stopped reading about five minutes ago--

the semi-truck, doing its darndest to one-up Harry Chapin and his bananas, soared downhill, flailing like an adult trying to do everything at once and managing to stay more or less on the road and sideswiping, you know, just a parked car here and there.

Ol’ 473 (by now nearing three times Leo’s age limit but as gorgeous as ever) valiantly, if unintentionally, parked herself between a bunch of loitering tourists and the oncoming spud truck. She was heated up, full of steam and pressure, and ready to roll.

The truck sailed across a highway interchange, up a small embankment, and straight into the side of my girl 473. She took the brunt.

The driver who kept the runaway truck from squishing old ladies and ducklings and the like? He survived with a considerably small number of broken body parts. The taters? They rained down upon the people of Durango like prizes in a Roald Dahl game show.

[Footnote: The older I get, the more I relate to the adults who collected up the spuds and took them home for free.]

478, sister to valiant ol’ 473, in the shop.

478, sister to valiant ol’ 473, in the shop.

And that heroic 473 who saved dozens of lives?

The steam engine once again got her renovation on. She’s still pulling tourists up the mountain to this day, with nearly two more DiCaprios under her boiler.

Which I think is a lovely way to think about those we love. We don’t dismiss them because they are train wrecks; we invest tens of thousands of dollars in them, because we’re never going to find another one at this point in life.
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Especially not one who, now that I think about it, makes me pierogi for special occasions. All my favorite train wrecks really do come with potatoes—and without fatalities, to date.