The first sound Mick Harty heard that foggy, November morning was the quick, low whoot of the train. He couldn’t see it with all the drizzle that seemed to hang from the sky like a lady’s silver veil, teasing his face with a cool flick. But that train whistle thrummed in his stomach, where all his senses seemed to originate and be processed by his brain. At least it wasn’t in his lower region, his “down-belows,” as his father used to call them. “Thinking with your dick” was a phrase he would never have used to describe himself. Mick moved his surveyor’s pole to the right, about ten feet from the tracks. The train wouldn’t come this far, as it had only been funded to get from Portland to Brunswick. He for one was happy to get the work. The real estate market had crashed in 2008 and his work had plummeted with it. Now the Maine Central Railroad office had given his small firm the contract for surveying the layout of the tracks further on, past Brunswick and north, so it could re-establish its former glory of getting people where they needed to go long before the military-industrial complex destroyed life as we know it by building the super highways and making the oil companies rich.

He reached over to the hood of his Jeep and grabbed his to-go cup of coffee. It had retained some good heat and he leaned back against the side of the flame-red Cherokee he’d had for years and drank in big gulps of dark French roast, resonant with hints of charcoal, almost as good as his camp coffee. Soon, the sun would pierce the clouds, and his magical retreat of silver-gray fog surrounding fan-shaped green ferns at his feet would lift and reveal the cold metal tracks supported by the railroad ties. Mick smelled the pine tar coming off the ties now, and it tainted his coffee. He preferred the pure smells and tastes of nature in its early morning splendor to the chemical inventions of man.

He was happy to have all this new technology, the new surveying equipment that made his job so much easier and a lot more accurate. But he loved the great outdoors and took every opportunity to head north to “God’s Country” to fish and hunt pheasant and grouse. He put back his coffee and returned to work. He felt the cold, the Jeep didn’t have a thermometer in the dash. It was too old for that. But he guessed it was about thirty degrees, and that silver-pearl ball of sun trying to part the clouds and fog wasn’t having much luck. He zipped up his Northface jacket to his chin, pulled down the Stormy Kromer black wool hat to his matching jet-black eyebrows and got back to lining up his sights, jotting down his findings in his left-handed scrawl in a black and white mottled composition book he’d bought at the local stationary store and otherwise enjoying the hell out of his good fortune: good coffee, warm clothes, a reliable, if old vehicle and a business of his own with a new contract to get him through winter. Maine, The Way Life Should Be. Yup, thought Mick Harty, it surely is. It surely is.

What Mick didn’t know right then, though, was that if he looked down, almost right at his feet, he’d find something that would make his life a lot more interesting. More complicated, for sure, but also more interesting, an object that would shed some light on questions Mick had about who he was and what he should be doing in life. And then there was the object itself, the type of thing Mick loved to ponder.And just when he was about to stand back a judicious distance and let the train pass, he did just that.

Just as the train emerged from the small wood filled with hundred feet tall pine trees, sounding that same low, warm whoot, just as the silver ball of sun pierced the fog and blinded Mick for an instant with a reflection off the train’s headlights, and just as he stumbled, lost his hat and stooped to pick it up, at just that moment, Mick Harty tripped over an object big enough to send him sprawling on the fallen pine needles. The train snaked past, unaware of a downed surveyor, and without regard for the newly purchased, very expensive surveyor’s wand it ran over and sent into a spray of smithereens that showered Mick with metal and glass. He swore at the same time the train sounded it’s whistle again, and the “goddammit” was buried in the now louder rumble and vibration of the mechanical beast and harsher whoot, whoot, the sound the train makes when the conductor pulls it into the station.

Mick began getting up, and immediately swayed with vertigo not unlike he had if he had indulged in one too many Shipyard Pumpkinheads. He stayed on his knees feeling the cold and damp creep in through the knees of his jeans. “Goddammit,” he said again, seeing the brand new tool scattered over the gravel and ties and the tracks. He sat back, not caring that the same wet soaked his rear end. He lifted his hands in the air in a gesture of supplication, then felt around for his hat. His hands touched the fallen pine needles, some gold maple leaves scattered from a nearby stand of trees, ran over an empty acorn or two hurled down from the oaks by squirrels eager to eat their fill for winter. And instead of finding his scratchy, wool baseball-style cap, his right hand was scratched by something metal. “Not my day,” Mick whispered, looking sadly at the blood trailing from forefinger across the palm. He wiped it on his jeans, then crawled on his hands and knees until he found his hat, which had falled directly on top of a small, leather box with a bright brass clasp.