GHS Alumni News: Town, Train, and Tracks

Town, Train, and Tracks

By Stephen Rowe

Fred Kissinger’s Town, Train, and Tracks is a streamlined yet evocative composition. Fundamentally there are but three elements:

· The town, represented by the boy and the civic water tower

· The awesome, coal-burning steam locomotive

· And the tracks

But this simplicity is deceptive; as we shall see, the composition is dynamic and rich in complexity and nuance.

First, note the graphic above the iconic water tower’s truncated lettering GARRE[TT]. Garrett, Indiana is an historic, proud railroad town, and the graphic is a steam engine in silhouette, mirroring the real locomotive which enthralls the boy. While some towns’ high school athletic teams sport fanciful names like Auburn Red Devils, Fremont Eagles, and Angola Hornets, Garrett boys and girls are Garrett Railroaders. Hard working, blue collar, and proud of it.

So the boy knows even now that he will be a Garrett Railroader upon entering high school. And beyond …? Is he wondering this very moment “Will I, can I be a railroader, like my uncle, or cousin, or neighbor, or brother, or like the strange men who gather in the town’s restaurants and taverns at all hours, day and night?” Are these aspirations? Or is he yearning this very moment, looking above and beyond the train, to do something else someday?

Or perhaps he is simply thinking “I wonder if this is the train my Dad is on?” Or “Where is this one going … to Chicago? Or just coming back from Toledo?”

But we suspect his wonder is less specific and more mysterious: “Where do these tracks go? What is out there, beyond here, far beyond here?” These speculations are colored by the purple night sky, suggesting a mysterious unknown; by the enveloping train steam which clouds the boy’s straight ahead view, channeling his upward gaze; and by the train’s beaming headlamp, so obviously powerful but no match for the great beyond, illuminating but a narrow straightaway, soon to be swallowed by the vast night which shrouds a vast land.

So the composition‘s fundamental elements dynamically interact with each other. The train, its awesome economic and physical power almost unfathomable, inextricably interlace with the town, its character, its people, old and young. So too the tracks, which bind together train and town, while simultaneously conjuring powerful, mysterious, cross currents of wonder about the mysteries lying beyond … far beyond, as the tracks span a thousand horizons straight ahead, and thousands more, left and right, all along the way.

For more information about the work and the artist, contact:

Stephen Rowe (GHS ’70)

StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

(watch for the period between Rowe and OriGraphics)

630.251.6931

Living outside Fremont

Phone is a cell # left over from Chicago area days