Rockville Pike

In my early teen years in Rockville my buddies and I would hitchhike along Rockville Pike on Saturdays —just down to Congressional Plaza, a couple miles south on Rockville Pike, or sometimes to Washington, D.C.  It was something to do for restless, suburban kids.  Hitchhiking was safe in those days, as was picking up hitchhikers. 

If we ended up at Congressional, we would hang out at the People’s Drug Store, buying Slim Jims or cherry-flavored cigars—Swisher Sweets—or White Owl Tiparillos.  Usually I would go with Dave Kizler or Kevin Seavey.  The drug store also had a lunch counter (later, when I turned 16, I would work there as a short-order cook). 

Rockville Pike, as now, was lined with car dealerships and all kinds of stores.  We would go to the Plymouth and Dodge dealer to check out the muscle cars—RoadRunners, Barracudas, Chargers.  

Belby’s liquor store was near First Street at that time, further north from where it is today.  We would go there to buy candy—those awful wax “soda bottles” filled with a few drops of sugary syrup, Sugar Babies, Black Cows.  

I remember going in one day and saw a guy dressing a deer carcass in a back room.  The deer was hung from the ceiling and he was gutting it with a large knife while he was smoking a cigar.  He was wearing a white, bloodstained apron.  Even then I thought it wasn’t the most sanitary of procedures.  

Later on, when I was 16 or so, we would go to Belby’s to buy beer, or hang around outside and try to get older patrons to buy it for us.  The legal drinking age was 18 and enforcement wasn’t nearly as strict as it is today.  Fake IDs were pretty rare.  A little farther south there was a mysterious business near what is now a McDonald’s called Moon Villa; according to middle-school lore, it was a brothel.  It’s been gone for many years.

Parallel to the Pike, and to the east of it, behind the Plymouth dealer, are railroad tracks.  These days the tracks are used for the Metro subway system.  In the days before Metro, freight trains would trundle through.  There weren’t fences to keep curious adolescent boys away.

One Saturday Kevin and I were on the Pike near Edmonston Drive and noticed a train stopped on the tracks.  The tracks were dug about six feet below the ground, so there were steep banks on either side of the train.  We decided to take a look.

It was a long freight train.  We couldn’t see the engine, which must have been hidden by a bend.  We climbed on one of the boxcars and were trying to get inside when we felt a jolt and heard a grinding sound.  The train started to move.

Before we knew it, the train was going pretty fast.  We were holding on to thick vertical metal rods that had something to do with the sliding doors and trying to make ourselves flat against the side of the car.  The rumbling of the cars, screeching of the wheels against the rails and the wind were very loud.  We looked at each other, wondering what we should do. 

“Where do you think it’s going?” I shouted to Kevin.

“I don’t know!” he called back.  We were both scared.  The train kept accelerating.  What if we ended up in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Virginia?  What if there was a tunnel or a protrusion from the bank that would knock us off the car or impale us?  We decided to jump but were concerned that we would land against the bank in such a way that we would be rolled back under the train.  At least that’s what worried me.

We counted to three and jumped.  I grabbed Kevin by the collar of his army surplus jacket.  We landed roughly against the bank and the debris in the track bed.  Kevin landed face first, certainly because I had grabbed the back of his jacket, and broke a bottle with his nose. 

We sat along the tracks watching until the caboose passed and the noise faded.  The bridge of Kevin’s nose was bleeding. 

“Why’d you grab me?” he said, some anger rising in him, as he daubed his nose with his hand.  Maybe I thought he would need help in actually jumping.  Or maybe I was afraid that I would jump alone and Kevin would have grander stories to tell, tales of adventure and of far-away places.

Copyright © 2013.  All rights reserved.