I left the street lights and headed down the railroad tracks through the darkness. The railroad tracks were built along with Hamilton, for the steel industry, and a century and a half later here they were, anachronisms in more ways than one. As the industry faded and the highways got clogged with big trucks, there were fewer and fewer trains. But in another way, the tracks were like wounds carved into the body of the earth that the city was built on. Wounds that had never healed because, even when everything around them was paved, the tracks remained, unhealed and oozing untended weeds that grew into trees and bushes, hiding places for wild creatures that eked out an existence in the silences between trains: creatures that rejoiced and thrived as the trains became fewer and those silences
