Gaye LeBaron: Arrival of SMART train worth singing about

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends I’ll not be knowing,

But there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take;

No matter where it’s going.”

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Trains”

We lapse into poetry. We become joyously lyrical. This is what happens when we see a photo of sleek new train cars sitting in a Sonoma County depot, as were the SMART cars earlier this month for the Cotati celebration of what is still to come.

Or perhaps we go a step beyond and set it all to music. Happily, someone has:

“Let’s bring back the old North Coast Flyer.

’Cross the Golden Gate, through the Redwood Empire.

The rails lie there waiting its arrival.

It’s time we had a railroad revival.”

This anthem to the long-lost rail systems that served this county and beyond for the best part of a century is the work of former Sonoma County troubadour Lenny Anderson, who sang it often in local clubs and recorded it 34 years ago.

And, lo and behold, Lenny’s wish for our transport well-being is going to come true.

____

Trains are a traditional subject for the arts. The French Impressionists celebrated the new transportation in the 19th century. Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock and Fleming’s James Bond knew that the rolling stock provided perfect settings for romance, intrigue and even murder.

But it is music - the “train songs” - that we know best. “She’ll be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain.” “The Wabash Cannonball.” The tragic tale of Casey Jones. Woody Guthrie’s train “bound for glory.” Old Dixie, driven down in a night of civil warfare. The winning of the West via the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. “The Midnight Special.” “Railroad Lady” (“a little bit shady”). “The City of New Orleans.” It seems that everyone was “down by the station, early in the morning,” waiting for the “puffer bellies.”

For all of us eager passengers in Sonoma County, looking to the south for the first glimpse, listening for the whistle, it’s time for an optimistic hum-along to Lenny’s tune.

(Will SMART have a whistle? Tell me there will be a whistle.)

____

In the first-ever issue of this newspaper’s ancestor, The Sonoma Democrat, in 1857, there was a front-page story about the blessings of a railroad, how it would increase the prosperity of the whole region once it arrived.

The editor was highly optimistic. I guess you had to be optimistic to start a newspaper in a 3-year-old country town with no gold mine.

He wrote that he could “hear the whistle and see the steam” of that first locomotive, just over the horizon.

That guy had darn good eyesight, because it would be 13 years before any whistle, steam or toot came to town.

I’m a little like that editor. I have written more than once about how we rushed around, some 80 years ago, bowing to the shrine of the automobile and the oil companies, ripping up tracks, turning rights of way into roads, ridding ourselves of that old-fashioned transport.

Unlike the lyricists who romanticized the rails, my longing for that whistle is now, simply, for a way to go south without the weeping and gnashing of teeth that comes with driving the 101.

____

I’ve been waiting for the train, for the first true assurance that SMART is truly comin’ round the bend, to talk about Anderson and his song, holding on to the thought since retired Sonoma State University sociology professor David Walls sent me the YouTube link to the song early last year. Walls, who is now part of the leadership of the North Bay Organizing Project, was inspired by the progress of SMART.

All of us who are eager to climb aboard have to be inspired these days - smooth new tracks and modern engines rolling into Cotati for an official welcome from our congressman. There’s no doubt now that a train is on the way. Time to go looking for Lenny Anderson, the musical prognosticator.

____

I caught up with him at his home in Portland, Ore., just an hour or so before he was leaving on a monthlong trip, but he took the time to remember his days as a singer-songwriter in the late 1970s and ’80s in Sonoma County.

He’s not so involved with music anymore, he said, but he has never left his interest in wheels and rails behind.

He is 68 years old and retired last year as executive director of the Swan Island Business Association in Portland. At a party in his honor, community leaders toasted him for his involvement as founder of the Transportation Management Association, where he was declared “tireless” in urging Swan Island’s 10,000 employees to get to work by bike, bus or shuttle - anything but cars. His credits include bike paths and the development of the North Portland Greenway. His retirement gift was an appointment to serve on the Portland Streetcar Citizens Advisory Committee.

In our short conversation, he recalled earlier times, working three days a week at a Calistoga shop that printed wine labels, keeping four days clear for gigs at West of the Laguna and Rosie’s Cantina and many more of the music venues that fostered what the Kate Wolf crowd dubbed “the Sonoma County sound.”

Lenny doesn’t take a lot of credit for his train song, saying he got the idea from a similar lyric about a train in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and, of course, if you listen to it, you’ll hear the chord progressions of Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans.”

Gerry Haslam, a retired SSU English professor and Penngrove novelist, is the author of “Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California.” He is my go-to guy for where “North Coast Flyer” belongs in the increasingly diverse panoply of American music.

Gerry says country-folk revival. And that’s good enough for me.

“Flyer” may have been Lenny’s philosophical favorite, but it wasn’t his greatest hit, he said. That was a song he wrote and recorded in 1979 about the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“The Ballad of Dan White” got big play on San Francisco stations and in the Chronicle, he said - “My 15 minutes of fame.”

He said he recently “picked up my guitar, and I am playing again with some guys in the neighborhood.” He seemed tickled to be asked about his musical past and even more pleased that our train is coming.

____

I’m not at all sure what this column is about. Trains? Sure. Music? Definitely. Stories of the past and wishes for the future? I guess.

There is a moral: Good ideas don’t die. But they can take a long time.

Listen, do you hear a train whistle?