Far and Wide Buddy Mays

section of the Vermont Railway I would ride in a freight locomotive so many years later.

Railroad tracks haven’t changed much since the first trains chugged across the landscape. Steel rails are laid across wooden ties (concrete is now standard on high-speed intercity tracks), which are set into a bed of crushed stone called ballast. The rails fit onto steel plates, which are in turn spiked onto the ties. Since both rails and ties have a limited lifespan – about 40 years for rails, 30 for ties, although the tonnage they’re subjected to can cause considerable variations – periodic replacement of both components is necessary. Rail is so heavy that new sections had to be dropped into place by machinery even during my gandy dancer days, but our crew was still replacing ties by hand.

Every morning, we’d head out of the yards at Rutland for the section needing new ties. The six of us rode a little open-sided diesel jitney that scooted along the track, probably having replaced the seesaw-cranked handcars you see in old movies by only a couple of decades. The foreman was a Sicilian with a heavy accent, a wiry little guy who was probably stronger than any of us, even a couple of big lugs who prided themselves on their ferocious swings of the spike maul. During the time I worked, we were replacing ties up near Brandon, maybe fifteen miles north of Rutland, and it was a pleasant, breezy ride of a half hour or so. The next time “pleasant” was an operative word, though, was the trip home.

The foreman told us where to start, and we began by prying out spikes with long iron crowbars. Since these were old ties, the spikes were often loose and came out easily. Next we’d dig out as much as we could of the ballast surrounding each tie. Once enough ties had been detached from the rails and cleared of ballast, the foreman would place a ponderously heavy iron jack under a rail, in the middle of the loosened section, and ratchet it up with a six-foot iron bar. Modern rail weighs well over a hundred pounds per yard, so it’s easy to see why the bar working the jack had to be that long – and why the Sicilian had muscles. Next he’d repeat the procedure on the opposite rail.

With the rails bowed up a few inches above the ties, we gandy dancers would get to work with big iron tongs, like the ones icemen used to use, and wrestle out the old ties. With the same tongs, we’d wrestle in the new ones, which had been dropped along the roadbed by a crew that had passed through the day before. When every tie was in place, and properly imbedded in ballast, the plates would be set to receive the rails. Now came the moment of drama – and danger.

“Everybody away,” the foreman yelled, and we had no trouble heeding his warning. He’d trip the jack, and the rail would slam down onto the plates and ties with a force that would treat the strongest steel-toed work boot, and the foot inside it, like an aluminum beer can. Once more, other side, and it was time to start spiking.

A railroad spike is six inches of iron, a giant square-sided nail tapered at the tip, with its head offset so that the protruding lip grabs the base of the rail as the final thwacks of the hammer sets it into the tie. The head is maybe an inch and a half across . . . and so is the face of the spike maul. In other words, aim is everything.

But perhaps we’re talking about a realm beyond aim. Aim is a combination of decision – where you want to land your blow – and skill, the ability to land it there. Raising a spike maul, bringing it back over your shoulder, and swinging it downwards with enough force to cause a railroad spike whose head is the same dimension as the hammer face to penetrate a creosote-impregnated block of Georgia pine cannot, in this exgandy dancer’s opinion, be reduced to an equation of aim and skill. No. It’s more a matter of the body simply knowing what to

do, without thought or aiming. If you want to get nerdy about it, you can call it The Force, but I tend to think more prosaically in terms of what a good baseball pitcher does. Take Sal Maglie, the Dodger ace who got the nickname “Sal the Barber” because of his ability to place a fastball so close to a batter’s face that it all but gave him a shave. Did Maglie aim those pitches? Or were they aimed for him by some inner alignment of mind, body, and will?

Of course, Maglie did hit a few batters –forty-four, to be exact, over the course of his career. And even a seasoned gandy dancer, let alone a rookie, will miss the spike sometimes. What do you hit when you miss the spike? Almost always, it’s the rail. Remember those cartoons where a character swings a hammer, bat, club or whatever at a hard, immovable object and starts to vibrate from his hands to his shoes? I don’t think Chuck Jones or Tex Avery made those scenes up. I think they watched gandy dancers take mighty swings and hit the rail. I can feel my fillings rattle just thinking about it.

On a good shift our crew of six would replace maybe sixty ties. Railroad ties are generally a shade under twenty inches apart, so figure that we put a firmer footing under a hundred feet of rail each day. At that rate we’d cover less than a mile in two months, but that’s not entirely accurate because there were stretches where the existing ties weren’t quite ready for replacement. There must have been other crews working other stretches of track, but still, it’s easy to see why there aren’t any more gandy dancers. The machines railroads use now lift the rails, cut ties in half and yank the pieces out from either end, slide in new ones, and smack in spikes with unfailingly accurate blows. Concrete ties, of course, are another matter altogether, and there aren’t any spikes – and even on wooden ties, curved steel clips are often used instead of spikes.

At the end of the long day’s shift we would climb back onto our little jitney and clank back home, usually starting off with the indefatigable foreman’s cheery suggestion, “Let’s ago getta fock.” Fock, hell. We were almost too beat to lift a fork. As for me, I lasted less than three weeks. It wasn’t lugging out the ties and spiking new ones that got me – it was the day the boss in Rutland assigned me and another guy to the tie-dropping train, where we’d ride a gondola behind a slowly creeping locomotive, lifting ties from a pile and heaving them over the side for our gandy dancer friends to attack in coming days. By the time we got to the bottom of the pile, we were lifting ties over our heads and barely clearing the high sides of the gondola. That did it. Unless you’d been a college athlete in those days, you weren’t fit for that kind of work. No one I knew, myself included, went to a gym, or lifted weights. And railroad ties were weightier than most of the weights you’d lift at a gym.

I punched out at five that day and didn’t go back.

But I was once a gandy dancer.

-- Bill Scheller

In All Directions Join award-winning travel writer Bill Scheller as he gets lost in Venice, bicycles the length of Canada’s Prince Edward island, hikes England’s Peak District, and follows Columbus’ route through the Bahamas. These are just a few of the adventures that await in this selection drawn from Scheller’s thirty years on assignment for some of America’s favorite travel magazines. Available on amazon.com

Photographing Birds of Many Feathers By Two Masters of the Artform

Human fascination with the beauty of birds has been recorded in art dating back millennia. It’s as if every conceivable color has somehow managed to appear in the plumage of some bird, somewhere. That collectors of this art are willing to pay vast sums for examples reached a pinnacle in 2010 when John James Audubon’s Birds of Americanetted over $10 million at auction, making it the world’s most expensive published book. “The 19th century masterpiece, replete with — count ’em — 435 hand-colored illustrations, has long been considered a crucial document about U.S. natural history,” Time reported. “The winning bid of $10,270,000 went to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone.”

Today, everyone with a cellphone camera is a photographer. Photographing birds, however, is a particularly demanding enterprise, requiring camera cameras, with long lenses, the knowledge of where to go look, a great deal of patience and, of course, the eye of a practiced photographer.

The photograph spreads that follow are by two photographers who check all those boxes. They are examples of the ubiquity of birds and how accomplished photographers can turn that into photographic art: photos by Buddy Mays of birds from far and wide; photos by Janet Safris, all shot near her home in Iowa.

Buddy Mays

“A few years ago, after many seasons of wishful thinking, I finally purchased a true ‘bird lens’ for my camera,” Mays explains. “It was a 600 mm, sharp-asa tack, put-you-in-the-poorhouse, kind of lens that allows me to examine the auriculars of a two-inch-long hummingbird, or the tinted tongue of a keelbilled toucan, up close and personal.”

Denying any official “Birder, ” relationship as “one of that enthusiastic breed of homo sapiens who eat, breathe, and dream about our feathered friends 24hours a day, Mays admits, “ I can barely tell a northern flicker from a fricasseed chicken, but I love them all the same, all 18,000 species. They are a principal part of Mother Nature’s world – and consequently my world – and there is nothing I would rather do than lurk on the bank of a river, or in a copse of aspen trees, or on the edge of a steep-walled desert canyon somewhere, anywhere, watching for flashes of movement or color. Or listening to the twitters and murmurs and screeches and songs. Of birds.” Mays shoots with a Sony RX 10 Mark IV with a 600mm Zeiss lens.

Keel-Billed Toucan, Western Costa Rica

Brown Pelican,Intracoastal Waterway, Florida

Laughing Gulls, Biloxi, Mississippi