Driving Fuel - Missoula, Montana

"Heartbreak is good fuel for country songs. 
And cheating." 

-Miranda Lambert

Restless For - Missoula, Montana

"The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you."

-Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle

Freight Train - Missoula, Montana

"Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots."

 - Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

Freight Train Into Fog - Missoula, Montana

"....Well every time I fell behind, I could not get ahead.
I wish someone would pull the lever and give me a little sand.
 
And every time I slip behind, even further back,
I wish some switch man would come out of the fog and change my track..."
 
- From "Freight Train" by Alan Jackson

Misted Trestle, West Fish Creek, Alberton, Montana

As we tramped amongst the rocks at Fish Creek, headgear damp with intermittent spits of the lowering mist, a freight train thundered across the shrouded trestle. 
Many would think this disruptive, perhaps even shaking a fist skyward whilst exclaiming, 'Curse you, disturbing creature of man!' 
But not me. 
Partly because we'd already happened upon a recently wolf-mauled deer carcass, which qualifies as at least a day's quota of disturbing. 
But mostly because I've loved trains from the summer I was 5-ish and siblings three rode for a couple hours in a passenger car to visit our grandparents in Red Deer, Alberta. 
The rails have charmed me ever since.
So I smiled toward the receding roar, and enjoyed a bonus to an already favourite-things-filled day.