A Stop at Ellicott City

On Monday, August 20th, 2012 at 11:54 p.m., a piece of rail snapped beneath an eighty-car train carrying 9,837 tons of coal as it passed over a bridge above Main Street in Ellicott City, Maryland.

Just a moment before the accident, Elizabeth Nass and Rose Mayr, two nineteen-year-old friends spending one last night of summer together before heading back to college, sat on that same bridge, dangling their legs over the edge.

Just a moment after, the train cars tipped over on their bodies, crushing them beneath piles of coal.

On August 22nd, 2012, the Baltimore Sun reported: “Late Tuesday, it still was not clear why Nass and Mayr decided to perch above Main Street in Ellicott City.”

I understood exactly why. I had never met those girls, but I felt I knew them, as a younger version of myself and my friend Kristen. We had found our place on the train tracks of Ellicott City from 1992 to 1998, during our middle and high school years. We went there to get away, from school, from our families, from any expectations, responsibilities, and burdens. Adults never explored the railroads; in fact, we never saw anyone else around them at all.

A place for both space and quiet, and then the whoosh that began when the track started to vibrate, the chugging got closer and closer until the train appeared out of the darkness.

Just like Elizabeth and Rose, we put our limbs through the slats of the iron railings at the edge of the bridge and swung them in the night air of humid summers and crisp autumn nights as the train cars called up thunder in our ears and shook our bodies, a real rush.

But every time we went there, we survived.

As the trains passed by, caught up in the sensation, I thought of nothing, worried about nothing. Afterwards Kristen and I would laugh and laugh, joyful for the freedom we had experienced.

And I loved the honesty of our conversations as we waited for the trains: the perspectives, hopes, dreams, and wonderings we couldn’t share with others around.

We sat above Main Street like queens on a throne, looking out on our kingdom, our postcard town that wound uphill from that train bridge, full of rivers and granite and tiny homes and antique shops and the lives of everyone we knew.

***

I first read about those girls while lying in a hospital bed in Newton, Massachusetts in the middle of another night. I had twin girls inside me, twenty-nine weeks. I’d been at an appointment in Maternal Fetal Medicine, and the doctor detected premature labor.

The hospital had to stop it, to keep those babies inside me as long as possible. A part of me wished they would just be born. I hated lying there, helpless, immobilized, powerless over my own body, unable to go about my daily activities, and too keyed up to concentrate on a book or even the television.

I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled on my phone while my husband snored the night away on the half-sofa in the corner of the room. I read countless celebrity biographies on Wikipedia, a year’s backlog of Page Six gossip, and all the Mad Men blog posts I could find. Then, I had the idea to I search up Ellicott City and saw the news of the accident.

After a few more days, the hospital released me, but I had to go on bed rest. My body had swelled up so much that I could hardly walk anyway. For the five weeks between getting home from the hospital and my daughters’ birth, I read every article I could find on newspapers.com about Elizabeth and Rose. And the life I though I’d left behind in Ellicott City flooded me. Why now, at this hopeful time, did my past wash up on the shores of my mind, dredging up my hometown, that death town?

Kristen left the town and moved to Colorado in 1998, just before our senior year of high school, leaving me alone just before the suicides began. Six of our friends killed themselves: one senior year and the others within the five years of graduation. Colin lit himself on fire in the woods. Meghan shot herself in the head. Jordan stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. Lauren took all of her brother’s medication and wandered into the forest to die. Pat and Danny, I can’t even remember how I found out about those two or even how they died. Maybe someone called me, maybe I ran into someone, I don’t even know.

The Washington Post reported four hundred mourners, the Baltimore Sun seven hundred, for the funeral of Elizabeth Nass, held at Resurrection-Saint Paul, the same parish I had attended with my family during those years I’d roamed the tracks. Two hundred and fifty turned out for a vigil for Rose Mayr at Mount Hebron High School, my own alma mater. Sophomore year, Chapelgate Christian Academy expelled Kristen for smoking in the bathroom, so she went to Hebron for nearly two years, as well.

I had gone to Colin’s funeral along with maybe twenty other people. I don’t think the other five even had any type of service, or perhaps I just didn’t attend. I can play back the moments I shared with Kristen in Ellicott City like a crystal clear film, but senior year and the times I returned to the town from Boston only come to me distant and hazy. I looked back in the newspaper archives and could find a few mentions of Colin, one of Lauren, websites with a couple of comments for Pat, Jordan, and Danny. Nothing of Meghan but a scholarship to Howard County Community College in her name.

At the time of their deaths, Elizabeth had plans to teach special education, and Rose studied nursing. I have taught special education in the Boston Public Schools for nearly twenty years. Kristen works as a registered nurse at Denver Health.

Elizabeth and Rose passed away beloved. Our six friends took their own lives and went unnoticed. Kristen and I have somehow survived.

Why have Kristen and I lived and become wives, mothers, with even the same careers that Elizabeth and Rose imagined for themselves? Why have we outlived so many others? The town has forgotten us by now. We bide our time in other faraway places.

***

My life at the tracks, my whole adolescence in fact, began on a Thursday afternoon in the sixth grade, when Kristen somehow convinced this eighth grade girl, Daniella Bates, to give her two Marlboro Reds on the bus ride home from Patapsco Middle School.

When Elizabeth died, the principal of Patapsco praised her accomplishments in the Baltimore Sun. If I had died in high school, my middle school teachers may have only remembered my three suspensions at Patapsco: one for having mace in my pocket, which I always took on our adventures to the tracks, and which the school considered a weapon; one for dying my hair fire engine red with Manic Panic; one for the time this girl Gina stole my boyfriend and I graffitied the wall in shop class in big hot pink letters: “Gina is a whore. Blow jobs $3.00.”

We weren’t supposed to walk around when the bus drove along, but Kristen went from Daniella in the last seat of the bus and plopped down next to me in the middle. She showed me the cigarettes cupped in her hand.

“I know where to smoke these,” she whispered in my ear, “and I have matches in my backpack.”

When we got off the bus, I followed Kristen, past the watchful triangle eyes of jack o’ lanterns on almost every porch of the streets of our suburbs, uphill through the dust bowl construction sites of deforested about-to-be suburbs full of lumber and construction equipment, and downhill into the thick woods that crouched under the transmission wires of high voltage towers. She walked so fast that, no matter how I tried to catch up, she stayed at least three yards ahead of me the entire time.

Finally, she stopped on the bank of a river, putting one foot up on a rock and digging the other into the mica-sprinkled mud, her hands on her hips. The metal train tracks on the bridge above her glinted in the sun.

“Let’s go!” she commanded as I slid along, clinging to pine trees and watching my step as not to stumble over rocks on the last steep part of the hill, wondering how Kristen knew this geography so well. Clearly, she’d made this journey before, but when and with whom? Maybe by herself. She seemed like the type that would go off and explore the woods on her own without telling anyone.

After all, she didn’t have a mother to ask her where she’d been; her mother had passed away from breast cancer the year before I met her in the fourth grade, when we’d both been new to the neighborhood.

Back then, I wished I didn’t have a mother either. I wanted that freedom that Kristen had. She didn’t have basketball practices and games, piano lessons, dance classes, or even the expectation of a straight-A report card hanging over her head. She had a busy stepmother and a quiet father. And Thursdays weren’t her only free day to go exploring in the woods. She could do this every day if she wanted. No wonder she knew the land so well.

When I reached Kristen at the banks, I thought we might take a break, perhaps sit on a rock and finally smoke those cigarettes or even just sit period. But Kristen started moving again, tracking left through the mud, guiding me right through the water. I shrieked when a crayfish mounted the side of my sneakers, but Kristen just kept going to a place where the river moved below a hill covered in black rocks. Then she began to climb.

I followed her up the rocks. At the top lay a tunnel of granite bricks with the train tracks running through them. She began to walk along the wooden slats of the tracks, away from the tunnel and towards a bridge high above the river, and I did too.

This was not the bridge above Main Street, the one where we’d later hang out in high school, the one where Elizabeth and Rose perished, the one easily seen by passersby in the town. This bridge nestled itself in the woods far from any street, from anyplace anyone, especially an adult, would normally travel.

As I watched Kristen bounding along, a cold sweat washed over me and I trembled, but I tentatively put a foot on the first slat anyhow, pulled along like a magnet attracted to Kristen’s bravery or, perhaps, her carelessness. I could barely hold my balance, but Kristen glided along like the wind. I had maybe a yard or two in, but Kristen had made it halfway across when the rail began to vibrate. I froze in place, but Kristen pivoted and sprinted back towards me, reaching me just as I heard the first clacking of the train. She grabbed my hand and pulled me along, and I began to fly with her.

I don’t know if we really flew, but it seemed like magic. One second I had been glued to one spot with fear, and then next I found myself inside the tunnel, the heels of my hi-tops and the tops of my socks digging into a damp crevice between its bricks. I glimpsed Kristen for a second, out of the corner of my eye, but the light of the train’s engine blinded me, as if I’d stared at the sun. The cacophony of the cars passing rang the fear out of my brain and body like the clanging of a great bell. I had no fear, no worry, no duty, no expectations, no one to impress or disappoint, and especially no one there who would criticize or critique me.

After the train passed, I tried to move but couldn’t. My spine had welded itself onto the tunnel wall. I observed from there as Kristen just took a step out from the wall, brushed off her jeans, and moved towards the track, laughing all the time.

She put her hands on the metal.

“C’mon and feel it,” she commanded, “it’s still warm.”

I still couldn’t move, so she grabbed my hands and pulled me off the wall. I knelt in the rocks next to the tracks, practically burying my face in them, and stretched toward the tracks in something I later learned to call “child’s pose.” When I felt the warmth, I laughed too. It felt great to be alive.

We collected rusty spikes from inside the tunnel and threw them down into the river, trying to make the biggest splash. Several times, the spikes hits the rocks and shattered into pieces.

When the red and orange blazes of sunset filled the sky, Kristen led me back through the hills, the construction sites, the neighborhood, right up to the edge of my driveway on Thornbrook Road.

I hugged her goodbye, but then remembered.

“We never smoked the cigarettes,” I murmured.

“We’ll save them for next time,” she winked at me, then headed off towards home.

I sprinted through the front door, kicked off my mud-coated sneakers, and ran up the stairs. The house sounded and smelled the same as any other day: Dad’s TV blaring some old show on TNT, the smell of his cigars. I went into the bathroom and looked hard at myself. I had soot all over my face and hands, all over my Howard County Cougars basketball jacket. My jeans had tears in them, but I smiled and my smile looked the same as ever, only bigger and wider.

I put my clothes in the sink with a squirt of shampoo, wrung them out a few times, and tossed them in the hamper. I showered, changed into pajamas, and then took some baby wipes from my little brother’s room, and headed downstairs to work at cleaning my sneakers.

Afterwards, I lay stomach down on my bed and started my homework. My body felt sore and tired, but my mind relaxed. That night in bed, just before drifting off, I heard the distant train whistle. I had heard it many times before, but never knew where it had come from. The whistle reminded me of my sweet secret: I had almost died, but I’d beaten death instead. And, best of all, I had a friend who knew my secret, too.

***

The day that Kristen lead me to the track, Elizabeth Nass had either not yet been born or had been growing inside her mother. But she’d grown up in a house just a tenth of a mile away from my family’s home on Thornbrook Road. Perhaps she’d grown up hearing that train whistle each night like I had. Had she gone down to the river with Rose? Or had the night she died on Main Street been her first time at the tracks?

***

I gave birth to my twins at thirty-five weeks. While waiting for the epidural, the pain became so intense that I started to black out. Coming in and out of consciousness, I half-thought half-dreamed of myself as Elizabeth and Rose, crushed under that coal, asphyxiating. I thought I might die in childbirth, but that is no thought to have while bringing the lives of two new baby girls into this world.

I told myself to think of sunflowers, but those woods, those tracks, that town, those girls pushed their way inside my mind again and again.

***

Ellicott City sits at the lowest point of valley at the intersection of four branches that feed the Patapsco River: the Tiber, the Hudson, the Autumn Hill, and the New Cut.

Since 1789, Ellicott City has had eighteen major floods.

In the beginning, the floodwaters rose from the stream beds of rivers. But since 1952, as more and more suburbs have replaced the once-forested slopes, the town has seen mainly “top-down” floods in which waters rush down into Main Street from the summits of the valley.

The floods begin with violent downpours that meteorologists call “training thunderstorms” because of the way they behave like train cars, with a tremendous rush all at once over a relatively small area.

In 2013, Howard County placed a pair of benches in Tiber Park, a little brick patio in the shadow of the train bridge, as a memorial to Elizabeth and Rose.

On July 30th, 2016, six inches of rain hit Ellicott City in two hours, felling roads, businesses, sidewalks, even the town clock. The floodwaters killed Jessica Watsluta, thirty-five, as she climbed into a car with her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law after a girls’ night out. They took the life of Joseph Blevins, a father of three, as he headed home from a night at the movies with his girlfriend, Heather Owens. As the car filled with water, Heather escaped through a passenger window, but Blevins disappeared, eventually washing up two miles downstream.

In 2018, eight inches of rain descended on Ellicott City in three hours, destroying most of what the town had just rebuilt since the 2016 flood. This flood swept away the life of thirty-nine-year-old Maryland Army National Guardsman Eddie Hermond as he positioned himself in the street to catch Kate Bowman, who stood in the top window of her pet shop, screaming and readying herself to jump.

Today, the benches still stand.

-Jennifer Dines

Jennifer Dines is a Boston-based essayist, a bilingual reading specialist in the Boston Public Schools, and a mother of three daughters. Her essays have been published in Current Affairs, Rooted in Rights, WBUR Cognoscenti, Motherwell, Retrofied, and Memoir Monday’s First Person Singular. She is a recent alumni of Grub Street’s Essay Incubator program.