Picking Dewberries by the Railroad Tracks

I talked my sister, Linda Ann, in to going up to the railroad tracks to pick berries.  “Come on, go with me!” I’d said.  “If we don’t go now, they’re gonna spray that stuff all over and kill the berries.”  I was referring to the "stuff" the Railroad sprayed right from the trains to kill all the vegetation around the tracks every year.  Our house was right by the tracks in McNeill.  We were used to the whistles, the shaking of windows and the wrecks up by the crossing. 

Linda Ann finally agreed to go with me.  I loved to pick those berries by the tracks because they were the biggest and juiciest!  However, Mama had one strict rule, “Never go anywhere near the tracks!”  So we had to sneak up there with our buckets and then go a little further down so she wouldn’t see us from our back yard. 

We had our buckets about full, when we decided to cross the trestle.  It was a long trestle and as we approached the middle, we heard the sound of a streamline train.  It was the fast one, so we had to jump down to the banks of the trestle and hang on for dear life.  As we hung on to the sides of the trestle, the briars from the dewberry vines pierced into our skin.  When the train roared over the tracks we shook.  Straight over our heads, “baboom, baboom, baboom” went the train and it seemed to be endless.  Finally it passed and we dug our way back up to the top of the trestle to the tracks, bruised, scratched and half scared out of our wits.  Then we heard it, “Linda Ann!  Elizabeth Pauline!”  Mama was yelling both our full names.  “Holy hell,” I thought, “She’s gonna kill us!”

So we dragged our bleeding bodies back up to the house as fast as we could.  I could see the peach tree switch already perched in her hand as we came in the back gate.  She was pissed!  It didn’t matter that we had survived the train, or even that we had picked almost two full buckets of dewberries!  No!   We had scared her to death.  Mama had pictured us lying smashed under the train as it went by.  She told us so much as she was whipping us with the peach tree switch.  She wanted to teach us a lesson and it worked. 

From then on, we never went up to the railroad tracks to pick berries.  We just let the Railroad spray them with the “agent orange” or whatever they used and then they’d turn brown and die.