I pause on the railroad crossing at the center of town and hold a yellowed postcard up against the horizon of track. In the picture, a train platform brims with travelers as a locomotive arrives. Cargo is neatly stacked in the shade of the canopy. Porters await in the parking lot, alongside a row of Model T touring cars. Just behind the platform stands a brick station with waiting rooms labeled White and Colored. It would be 40 years before Rosa Parks sat to oppose segregated transit in another southern city. Many of the leaders who would organize the alternate transportation systems that drove the civil rights movement had not yet been born.
I wonder where the passengers in this picture are going. Perhaps they’re bound for New York, Baltimore, or one of the many villages that adorn this Shenandoah Valley. Whatever this northbound train’s route and its passengers’ destinations, when it departs Harrisonburg, Virginia, I know it will follow the valley downriver. Though the only visible water is light clouds in a bright sky, the image seems to evoke a river’s freedom. Deed plots reveal that a stream ran beneath the station, and as below, so also above: People leave and return from beyond the horizon, changing yet constant. Life flows with them in a process as essential as the water cycle.
Today, as in the century-old photo in my hand, the rail bends out of sight just beyond a wooden bridge. A brick warehouse still flanks the right side of the track, though offices now peer through its rows of windows. To my left, the changes are starker. Where the train platform once extended welcome and permitted leave-taking, the blank face of the local jail looms overhead. Razor wire and surveillance cameras stand vigil. The pride of the city at its inauguration in 1911, Union Station is now a faint memory. In its place stands a depot of another infrastructure project: our national network of prisons, jails, and detention centers.
