Life on the Tracks

 

by Steven B. Orkin

 

 

Today, December 26th, 2012 would have been my father Jerome Orkin's 76th birthday. Further, 2012 marks twenty years since his passing. In acknowledgment of these two dates, I wanted to share a story about him as an honor to his memory.

A good portion of my dad's adult working life was spent as a trackman for the Long Island Railroad. Though the guys he worked with provided him with many an entertaining tale that he would often share with us around the dinner table, the job entailed a lot of difficult, physical work, potentially life-threatening at times. Despite his caution, he was injured more than once, on one occasion breaking his leg and arm after being hit by a railroad tie, the long wooden blocks that help anchor the actual metal train tracks in place.

During bad winter storms, he would be called in the middle of the night to clear snow and ice from tracks and platforms. On some of those occasions he would be gone for 2-3 days at a time, sleeping on the work crew’s bus to get the overtime pay. I remember him one time bringing home a strange pair of gloves. They were stiff and shriveled like the hands of an old corpse, far too small for his hands. However, he told us they had indeed been his gloves. After getting some sort of powerful de-icing solution on them, he had felt them shrinking and just barely had time to pull them off before they would have encased his hands to excruciating effect.

Summer had its share of difficulties as well. He and his crew tangled with bees and hornets, removed the bodies of animals that had been hit by trains. They spent every working day completely exposed to the sizzling sun. The heat was amplified by the track itself, which absorbed and continuously radiated it back out through the metal tracks. On the lighter side, we would often tease Dad about the workman’s tan he got every year: chestnut brown from the waist up, bone-white from the waist down.

Because of the intensely physical nature of the work, turnover was relatively high. Further, he was periodically moved to other crews due to redistribution of work or other factors. As a result, he encountered a lot of different guys on various crews over time and many of them knew of him if they didn’t actually know him personally. At 35, Dad was known as ‘The Old Man’ to a great many LIRR trackmen.

Though he was well-liked and the phrase was mostly intended with a kind of good natured respect, there were some that didn’t view him in that way. On one occasion, one of the bigger, younger guys he didn’t know well challenged him, saying, “You wanna lay track with me, old man? Think you can keep up?” My dad wasn’t a proponent of this kind of testosterone-driven braggadocio and wasn’t easily provoked to rash action, but he had a lot of pride and he had a fairly refined moral compass, a desire to see justice done.

Dad considered it and responded, “Sure. But we work at my pace, not yours.”

The younger guy confidently agreed, assuming the actual pace didn’t matter, and they got to it. But by the end of that long summer day, the lesson Dad’s cocky coworker learned was that though the old man was not the strongest guy on the crew and he wasn’t the fastest, he could swing a hammer all day long.

In this story, we find a timeless message of consistency and durability over flash & bang. There will always be someone stronger, faster, smarter, funnier, wealthier, more attractive, more charismatic. But at the end of the day, I’d much rather be the tortoise than the hare.

Thanks for the lesson, Dad. Happy Birthday. I love you and miss you every day.

Thanks for reading.