The Other Side Of The Tracks

Most people grew up with certain smells, sights, sounds, tastes and feelings, tattooed in their memory along with something like an hallucinatory sixth sense.

I grew up in Lasalle, Ontario, on the other side of the tracks, in a flagstone house beside a fiery barn.

Milkweed and prairie snowballs, carrot flowers and tall grass, wild raspberry bushes and grapevine made up the field my family owned. A line of pine trees stood in the small side-yard, with a crab-apple tree at the end. A curving garden with forgotten flowers and wild strawberry curved around the square of the house. An emaciated apple tree in the backyard, mushrooms sometimes popping up in the dark earth beneath.

I know that feeling of a train whistling by in a foggy night. The look of the ratty rusted boxcars with the industrial logos painted over with graffiti. There's a salt mine down the road. The sound and feeling of the dynamite charges deep underground rattling from a mile away on the Detroit River still resound in my memory.

My Grandmother Lived and still lives in an old house on the river farther south in Amherstburg. I'll get to that later on.

Mark Lanegan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbe4OV0D8ig