On a commuter train into DC for 30 years, economist George Miller heard stories, told stories and made some up.
In a rail car Sunday in Chesapeake Beach, Miller read one of those stories and sign copies of his newly released book that contains them, Loaded for Bear: Adventures and Misadventures from the Appalachians to the Chesapeake.
Loaded for Bear was published this month by New Bay Books and is available here and in online bookstores. The book includes 16 short stories featuring characters that Miller, an economist, encountered or imagined over decades riding trains to and from his home in western Maryland.
“My fellow passengers boarded the train at Union Station at the end of a work day, some ready to unwind, some ready to party, more than a few with a briefcase in one hand, a six-pack in the other and stories to share,” Miller told his audience, seated in a restored train car adjacent to the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum.
“The party car was a mother lode of inspiration,” he added.
Trains have long held a prominent place in literature and film. (Think Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, Harry Potter.)
Miller spoke in a rail car with a name, Dolores, fitting for an artifact that recalls the days from a century ago of women dressed in their finery arriving on the Chesapeake Beach Railway to visit an elegant hotel or partake of restaurants and an amusement park.
After the railway went bankrupt in the Depression Era, its mostly wooden cars were destroyed or sat forlornly 25 miles away for decades. In the 1970s, Dolores —actually half of one long chair car—was rescued, brought back to Chesapeake and painstakingly restored by the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum Committee.
It is available now for viewing and for small events, literary or otherwise.
Miller acknowledged during his presentation that several of the stories in Loaded for Bear grew from personal experience.
In one such story, from which the book’s Loaded for Bear title derives, a 12-year-old delivering the morning paper is stopped by a car full of well-heeled men with guns, friendly fellows who turn out to be Pittsburgh Pirates out to do some hunting. It takes place during a momentous year for the team—1960, when they won the World Series.
Among other stories in the book are The Oxymoron and the Baltimorean, Breech Birth and Rules for Repelling a Bear.
For his presentation, Miller read a story called A Single Father, about a man’s middle-of-the-night struggles to sleep amid worries about his daughters and the arc of his life. In the bedroom a cat named Mehitabel carries on.
The story ends much as it begins “3:10 A.M. Mehitabel rocks side to side in an autistic trance, kneads her front paws into the cotton cord of the throw rug. Her tail snakes haltingly, randomly through the darkness, moving with her eyes.
“The leap center in her frontal lobe runs through several thousand calculations to determine the correct tail position and thrust vector for several destinations in the room.”
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