Free Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta Page B

drove the old Subaru down to Route 5s, which runs parallel to the Mohawk River. She knew it was a horse trail once, the one narrow pass between the mountain ranges if you needed to go west, and of course everyone always needed to go west. First the Erie Canal paralleled the Mohawk, then the railroad, then I-90. Meadow loved how each thing remained even as it was surpassed by new technology: the river, the canal, the railroad, and the Interstate lay right next to one another like a graphic depicting two centuries of progress. But her attention was drawn to the freight trains; their approach and passing were infinitely more beguiling than the semitrucks that monotonously thundered down I-90.
    Meadow discovered that she could get to the tracks in a number of unprotected places in between stations. Sometimes she had to climb over a fence. At first she brought her lightweight Super 8 camera, but later she used her video camcorder. Other times she set up her expensive 16 mm camera and made Deke come to record sound. Oh, the sound of a train! The first rhythmic sounds of the approach, the wheels of the train clicking fast against the tracks. The way the rhythm gathered and the volume increased as the train grew closer. It created—a train approaching, that is—its own suspense. Not suspense, exactly. Momentum that intensified and created a need for satisfaction. And then, just as she anticipated, the sound built to a roar. The train went by in a huge rush: the clamor as it rattled the switch track, the whistle announcing its passing if it approached a station, the beeping alarm of the crossing signal if it cut through a road. The passing was a satisfying rush: you were in it, the longed-for moment, the powerful mechanical thing speeding by and dwarfing you. It overwhelmed you, but even in the midst of it you knew it would be over soon. The noise, the movement, the friction of metal on metal: it will all pass you by.
    Meadow filmed the trains by lying in the cold wet mud and pointing the camera right at the point of contact of wheels on tracks. She also filmed pointing the camera up at the train from the same vantage. She filmed them from far away, like a train passing in an old country song. She boarded the passenger train in the tiny station in Amsterdam and rode it one stop to Schenectady, then boarded a westbound train back to Amsterdam. She spent the short rides kneeling in the joint between two cars. She stuck her camera close to the gap where she could see and hear the tracks as the train rushed over them. She saw a blur where the ties would be, and the camera lurched when the train lurched. She practiced keeping the camera steady. Then she held her body loosely and let the camera lurch with the train. The mechanical solidity and simplicity, the weight of the train on the track, the power of the constant friction—all of this she wanted to find a way to put in a film. And the longing of the train, the Saturday reproach of a train whistle in the distance that seemed to say, Why are you here and not on a train? Going, going, gone on a train.
    Meadow sent her film to a lab in New York City on Forty-fourth Street. She collected the reels and watched them on the editing console in the studio she had set up in the Gloversville warehouse. She marked the film with wax pencil. She had two-minute or eight-minute segments clipped to a wire and hanging around her. She tried the sound out of sync, so that the noise didn’t match the images. She tried it synced, then she varied the volume so the sound dropped in precise places. Then she abandoned the sound she had recorded altogether. Variables, so many of them that they overwhelmed her. Other times the possibilities excited her so much she got up in the middle of the night to work or take notes.
    Meadow tried to add some of the Britten music to her films. Then she tried something more repetitive and tense, Steve Reich. Or something lush and melodic, Gershwin. Music can