BRATTLEBORO — It was a beautiful summer afternoon, and the young college student, recently arrived from his native France and preparing for his studies at the University of Massachusetts, decided to take a walk in the woods outside Amherst. He had heard about a beautiful path along the railroad tracks that went through some especially breathtaking countryside.
He found the tracks without much trouble, and started walking.
The only problem with this story is that a train – Amtrak's daily Vermonter, heading south from Brattleboro, was also heading in the same direction.
And another problem was that the student knew the train was coming: a two-page letter found in his dorm room explained his clear intention to have a rendezvous with the Vermonter that afternoon.
Turns out that “chance encounters” between trains and people are not that infrequent. Sometimes it's a clear suicide. Sometimes it's a drunk or otherwise-impaired individual who falls asleep at the wrong place at the wrong time.
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This incident with the French college student started me thinking about the ways our lives impact with other people, for better or worse, and the choices that we may have about those impacts.
I ride that train a lot. For the past year and more, every other week, I've gone to New York to spend a few days with my 93-year-old dad.
Most of the time, the trains run pretty close to schedule, even in the winter, when sometimes the engine is completely encased in ice, and some of the doors are frozen shut.
And sometimes there are delays, like the time the engine caught fire (not a big deal - just a delay) or another time when the train in front of us died, and we had to push it into New Haven. Or the time we almost wound up in the river when the northbound train ran into several dozen trees blown across the tracks just south of Brattleboro after the summer's extended rainy season.
These kind of delays are unavoidable - what the Plains Indians used to call “accidents of the Great Prairie.” The train crews react as quickly as possible, alert the passengers to the problem, and move on as soon as they can. The longest delay I've encountered was less than two hours, and most are less than one hour.
But when a train hits a person on the track, it's different: everything stops, and for quite a while.
The head conductor has to get out and find the person, to see if there's any sign of life or anything that can be done. The police - usually local and state - come to the scene to investigate. Amtrak sends a supervisor and relief crew to the scene, as the engineer and conductors, understandably, are neither expected nor permitted to simply press ahead as in nothing unusual or unplanned had happened.
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These incidents - especially the suicides - are not “accidents of the Great Prairie”; these are incidents that all could have been avoided by better planning (in the case of the drunks) or what I'll term “consideration for one's fellow beings” in the case of the suicides.
When I read about the French student's suicide, I mostly thought about the train's crew and passengers: how their lives had been impacted by one man's decision to end his life.
Now, I can respect a person's decision to end his or her life, even if I don't agree with this as a way of resolving life's challenges. But what bothers me here is that there are many ways a person can commit suicide. And many of them will rarely directly impact more than a few other people.
In the case of the French student, what I can't understand is the absence of any concern on his part about the effect his actions would have on hundreds of people who had absolutely nothing to do with him.
This was not an impulse decision - he had, after all, taken the time and effort to write a detailed letter about his choice.
You could say, and I supposed it's true, that for engineer and conductor, this is part of their job, and they're trained to handle these situations. They take the mandatory time off before returning to work, and then hopefully get back into to swing of their routine.
But for the passengers, who are simply trying to get from here to there in a relaxing environment, this is more than they bargained for. And, I dare say, it's something that the average passenger can't shake off so easily.
Death comes to us all. Most of us don't have the luxury of choosing the time or place. The suicide, however, does make the choice of time and place. And yes, I understand that a person who is driven to even consider suicide is probably in too much despair to consider the collateral damage that might occur.
But I can certainly consider it, especially when sitting in my comfortable seat on the Vermonter. I understand that a suicide is always an acknowledgement of a failure of some type, and I can mourn that death as evidence of yet another failure of our society to adequately provide for the physical, emotional and financial needs of our citizens. But does it have to disrupt my life?