What’s your earliest memory? I’ll share mine and, in so doing, you will get to experience the terrifying rollercoaster that I experience between my ears every single day.

The earliest thing I can remember is being told to stand up at the front of a train for a picture. When I grabbed onto a piece of the train with my bare hand, I remember thinking, “Goddamn, that thing is cold.” Probably not in those exact words.

About ten years ago, my mom digitized a bunch of family photos of my sister and me. One of those photos is the exact moment of me on that train. Another photo shows me sitting by one of the drive wheels. Based on the chronological order of all the photos my mom shared, I’d guess I was probably 2 or 3 years old. I was surprised to see that the photo aligned with my memory.

Fast forward to a week ago. I was reading a book written in the 1970’s about land policy suggestions for eastern national forests, as one does. I stumbled onto a picture in the book that showed a man standing in the snow in front of a train. The man is Sherman Adams, a former governor of the state of New Hampshire. He was also White House Chief of Staff under Eisenhower. He started a ski area called Loon Mountain. The train behind him in the picture was a static display at the base of Loon Mountain. The train looked familiar to me.

Now, to use a train metaphor, my brain veers onto a siding for a second. Hang on. My dad bought a 1958 Willys Jeep from one of his University of Maine fraternity brothers. He still has it. The brother’s uncle used to go fishing with Sherman Adams in that Jeep. In the 1980’s, when my sister and I went to high school in Plymouth, New Hampshire, my dad was the US Forest Service District Ranger for the Pemigewasset Ranger District of the White Mountain National Forest. My dad had some oversight of Loon Mountain since it was on forest service land in his district. Because of that, he had a lot of chances to see Sherm Adams. My dad recently told me that every time Adams would see him, he’d ask my dad to sell the Jeep to him. My dad would say no. But anyway, here’s my dad teaching Sam how to drive that Jeep in a Chandler Brothers gravel pit in Maine. Sam can say he drove a jeep that Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff used to ride.

Back to the train. It looked familiar, so I compared it to the one in the photo with me. It looked the same. My parents confirmed they took a picture of me at the foot of Loon Mountain. I dug around the internet to see what I could find about the train. It’s a Baldwin 2-4-2T Locomotive #5, built in Philly in 1906. The 2-4-2 means the wheel arrangement, with the 4 drive wheels in the middle. It was bought new by the J.E. Henry Lumber Company and drove around in the East Branch and Lincoln Railroad system from 1906 to 1946. Then it ran in the rail yard as a switcher until 1969. I found a photo on eBay of the train newly arrived at its static display, right around the time I climbed up front for a picture. It was probably a “new” thing to my folks as we were out on a Sunday drive in 1969 or so.

I poked around to see where the train might’ve been on the East Branch and Lincoln Railroad. “East Branch” being the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River. In August of this year, I hiked a 31-mile circuit around this area called the Pemi Loop (short for Pemigewasset). The Lincoln Woods Trail was where I started in the dark and finished my loop in the dark 17 hours later. The trail right by the river is clearly a railroad bed with ties still embedded in the dirt. The map shows the EB & L Railroad was all over the Pemi, including places that are now designated wilderness areas. So, it’s very likely that old Locomotive #5 was working railroad that I ran up a century later. (As yet another aside, my dad just told me that Sherman Adams worked in those logging camps as a young man. So, Sherm, Loco #5, and I all rooted around in the same places.) The green line on the map shows where I went up to the right and came back down on the left. The modern trailhead is the “you are here” arrow.

ADHD is a hell of a thing combined with the internet, so I kept digging. It turns out that Clark’s Trading Post just down the road got Locomotive #5 from Loon in 1999 and got it running again as part of their railroad museum. In 2006, they spruced it up even more to celebrate the 100th birthday of the train. After that, I lost the thread about how long it kept running, but it appears to be sitting as a static display again at Clark’s Trading Post. I think these pictures are roughly from 1999, 2006, and the present. Cool to see the train with a head of steam after it sat for 30 years at Loon Mountain so kids like me could have pictures. I even found a video on YouTube of the train running along some track from about 2010.

Remember, I only dug into this train about a week ago. Months after I was in New Hampshire climbing 10000′ over 31 miles during a 17 hour hike. I went down the rabbit hole and found out where the train is. I was initially excited because I thought the train was still running. I thought it would be cool that both the train and I had run up the East Branch of the Pemi…and were still running. But the train is static. Even worse, now that I know where the train is, I realize I missed an opportunity. For my hike in August, we stayed exactly one mile away from that train. I could’ve gone and taken a picture reenacting the photo from 54 years ago. Maybe another time. But when the hell will that be?

All because I went back to the state of my birth to hike the Pemi Loop in one day. I got the book, with the photo of Sherm with the train, because I decided to do that hike. This is all just a way for me to remind myself that curiosity is a good thing. And that sometimes, the threads that you follow to their end only announce themselves as whispers. I barely discovered some of these things. If I paid a little less attention or was a little less curious, I wouldn’t have found all these connections. I wouldn’t have my earliest memory with a train looping back five decades later when I ran in that same train’s tracks.

All the connections, all the memories, looping back around on themselves, overlapping each other. Run loops in one place long enough, and you start to realize that the land, the people, and the memories are all connected, separated only by time. The memories loop them all together. Maybe we could all use a little more awareness that we’re all in this together as the time loops back around, over and over.