Tracks

Tracks is my most autobiographical novel to date. I have always been a traveler, by instinct, by longing. As a boy I was fascinated by trains, particularly steam locomotives; and one afternoon years later I walked out of my Creative Writing class at San Francisco State and drove down to the offices of the Southern Pacific Railroad with some notion of becoming a locomotive fireman. The S.P. made me a brakeman instead, and with that began my three year odyssey, working my way across America on seven railroads, following the tracks wherever they led. What I found and the people I met and at times lived with became the material for TRACKS.Do writers invent their characters? Some do. But mine are faithfully drawn from the people I have known. Ingrid, my heroine in TRACKS is a curious case in point. She is actually created from joining together two separate people: the one a young German woman of striking beauty I met near the Burlington Railroad freight yards out in Cicero, living in a cheap hotel which had once served in part as a speak-easy for Al Capone. She would have caught any man's eye, and she certainly did mine. She had married a GI who had brought her back with him to Chicago as a memento I had the feeling, a token of the time he spend with the American occupation forces in Germany at the end of World War Two, and now she was on the run, hiding in a shabby hotel in Cicero, Al Capone's hometown, afraid someday someone would find her body in a Chicago alley. . She was one of two young women I drew from to create the character of Ingrid. The second is my wife of 60 years. It is Helga's memories of her town being bombed in World War Two, hiding down her cellar nightly, afraid as the planes passed overhead and she could hear their bombs exploding. I have tried to render the lives of these two women with empathy and compassion, replicating as best as words can, what must have passed (and in one case still passes) through their minds and beings.