The Descent

Most people meet me now as a professional railroader — a manager and a builder of railroads, a photographer and storyteller of the steel. That is the second half of the story. Here is the first.

I built a company and watched it burn to the foundation. I took a federal indictment with my name on it, and I went away for ten years — a decade of my one life, counted one steel morning at a time. I did "where are the bodies" time: a murderer's number for a paper crime, served at the floor of the human condition, among the whole catalog of the damned and the maybe-damned. Some guilty as sin. Some I'm still not sure about.

For more than a year of that decade, I fought a case I already knew was lost. The price of that fight was a six-by-twelve cell — twenty-three hours of every day, sometimes days on end without the door opening at all, a shower only when the water happened to run hot. A room built to reduce a man to nothing. It did not succeed.

When the fight was finally over and the verdict entered, they moved me to FMC Rochester — a federal medical center, the place the system sends the sick, the failing, and the dying. It was there, not in the hole, that the work I do now first found my hands. I did two things I never set out to do.

I became the sole law clerk for the institution — some nine hundred men — the one every last one of them brought his case to, the ones who couldn't read and the ones with more letters after their name than the judge. I read their transgressions as the government wrote them and as they had lived them, both sides of every file. And I learned the thing this whole work rests on: a man is never just the worst line on his charge sheet.

And I sat with the ones who died there. In a medical center, men do die — and when the years and the shame had burned away everyone who should have stood at the bedside, there was no one left to keep the vigil but me. Someone to stay in the dark and not flinch, not preach, not run.

There is an old phrase in the English law for a man the state casts past its own protection — caput gerat lupinum, let him bear the head of a wolf. An outlaw, huntable on sight. A sentence heavier than the deed will do that to a man; it means him to lie down and be finished. I won't spend your time on whether it was fair. What matters is what a man does inside a fire built to consume him. Behind the wire I read, I drew, I wrote. I rose, on paper, whether I felt like it or not. A man stripped to the studs — even in a box six by twelve — is still standing on something, and that something is enough to rebuild on.

Then the long climb back — and it ran further than any man in that cell would have wagered. I started at the very bottom again: conductor, brakeman, switching cars in the cold. And somewhere in that climb I did the thing the boy I had been wanted long before commerce and courtrooms ever got their hooks in me — I put my hand on the throttle and became a locomotive engineer. A childhood dream, reached at last. Then up through the craft, post by post: Road Trainmaster, Terminal Manager, Shortlines Railroad Manager, Production Roadmaster, Senior Project Manager — rebuilding mainline, running mechanized gangs and multimillion-dollar programs. Every one a seat of tremendous responsibility, the kind measured in lives and in millions, and every one demanding an integrity you cannot fake and cannot borrow. They do not hand those posts to men they do not trust. They handed them to me. A professional railroader across the whole of the craft, a photographer and storyteller of the steel besides, and now turning that hard-won knowledge back to the industry, privately, hand to hand. A revenant with calluses.

Hear the strange arithmetic in that. The catastrophe built to end me is the very thing that put me on the locomotive. Had the indictment never come — had I kept the commercial desk I sat at before — I'd likely have grown old having never once run the engine I dreamed of as a boy. The fall took a decade from me. It also handed me the dream. Ruin is not always only ruin; sometimes it is the door to the thing you had long given up for lost.

The sentence cost me more than the years; it cost me my marriage, too — a decade is more than anyone should be asked to wait, and I hold no grievance for the leaving. And yet even that, in time, we rebuilt. The marriage I lost, I have back. Let it stand as evidence against whatever you have already written off as gone.

I did not merely survive the fall; I built a life on the far side of it taller than the one it took from me. What looked impossible from the bottom of that hole is exactly what I climbed out and did — and the only part that matters to you is this: it can be done, all the way back.

That is the whole of my credential. Not that I was wronged — plenty of men are wronged. That I walked into a fire meant to end me, came out intact, and I know the moves. The work you find here was born in those cubicles, at those bedsides, over those legal pages. It just took me the climb back before I had a name for it.

REVENANT is that name. If you are in your own fire now — whatever its size — that is why you can trust my hand instead of a coach's script. I have been in the heat. I know the way out because I walked it.

Get busy living, or get busy dying — and there is nothing in between. No neutral ground, no third road, no still place to wait it out. It is the missing middle that compels the first: stand still on that fork and you are not resting — you are dying where you stand. Andy Dufresne chose to get busy living. So did I; I clawed my way to it. So can you.

Get busy living. I'll be on the far side.