I recall the small, dilapidated shack standing broken and falling apart there alongside the corroded railroad tracks.

The beat-up structure was made of splintered wood and rusty nails, and had at one time served the railroad as a place to store things used in track maintenance.

Between the rails, grass had grown up amid the bedding and the railroad ties where it dried in the summer sunshine. It was a warm day, and I was happy to sit down and “take a five” as my dad used to say.

I began a reverie which brought my mind back through the old trains we’d see as kids, smiling engineers, the sound of the engine whistles and the way the train cars would shift from side to side slightly as the mighty trains moved slowly past us, making the rails creak under the heavy weight.

We kids would stop whatever we were doing to just stand there, chewing bubble gum or sucking on some kind of hard candy, maybe a Bit-O-Honey, and stare at the train.

Railroaders call people with that type of an interest in trains “foamers.”

When we’d hear a whistle or see the smoke in the sky, we used to jump off the swing set to run from our backyard through the neighbor’s yard and across an intersection of a couple of streets to get closer.

We counted how many railroad cars and which type there were, taking special note of whether there was a caboose at the end of the line. We’d see mostly boxcars in town, but if we were elsewhere, we could spot hopper cars filled with iron ore, tanker cars and sometimes even the push cars railroad maintenance workers might use.

When the trains weren’t around, we spent time walking the tracks, balancing our tennis shoes, one foot in front of the other as we moved, over one of the steel rails.

Even though they might have only measured a length of two or three city blocks, those railroad tracks were a whole universe of discovery and adventure for us kids.

We could see a trestle from our backyard, a place we would go to for a better view when trains were passing. To make it in time, we had to hop on our bikes and race.

I liked to look for beautiful, shiny specularite hematite stones and other “pretty rocks” along the tracks.

I also fell in love with the different colors and varieties of grasshoppers buzzing, jumping and flying from one patch of grass to another. Some were rusty colored and blended in with the red ore dirt, others were bright shades of greens and yellows, with red stripes on their legs.

Like a lot of kids, we used to put pennies, nickels, quarters and maybe even a Kennedy half-dollar on the railroad tracks to see what the weight of a string of railroad cars could do in terms of flattening various United States minted coins.

These coins themselves were a curiosity with their dates, raised images of presidents and other distinguishing markings. Baseball and football cards, Cracker Jacks and candy bars were and are all good things.

The railroad engineers wore brimmed caps and bib overalls. Some kids wore engineer’s caps to school. I still see some guys wearing them around town. The caps are still cool to me.

Those were days of comic book reading, trying to perfect yo-yo tricks and riding wheelie bikes. Just looking at the ads in the back of magazines was worth the purchase price. Sea monkeys, X-ray glasses and magic tricks were all for sale there.

We would also head to the library for Saturday puppet shows or to climb the metal ladder to the higher shelves to pull out volumes to see what kind of pictures were inside.

This is where I first discovered the Egyptians, Byzantines and the Vikings. I also found Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Dr. Seuss (lower shelves).

All these fascinating things were part of a world, a universe really, that seemed big, wild and beautiful – with fishing, creek wading, catching frogs, turtles and snakes, climbing bluffs, jumping off things and into leaves, running, walking and just looking around at everything everywhere we went.

We could walk to school, the party stores, downtown, the lake, the playground and the houses of our friends or we could ride our bikes. Just be home by dark.

We were sponges. I still am and I know that is where I got it from.

Back in the sunshine at the railroad tracks, my butt is starting to get sore from sitting on the steel rail, and my jeans no doubt have picked up some of that track rust, but I don’t care a bit. I just slap it off.

This was once a spot along the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railway, which connected Duluth, Minnesota and Sault Ste. Marie – carrying timber, iron ore, copper and passengers through Bessemer, Marquette and other whistlestops on its way to or from Sault Ste. Marie and St. Ignace.

Under management by the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic had its heyday in the early 1900s.

A train hasn’t run on these tracks now for probably several decades. I count the fact that the tracks haven’t yet been pulled up as a victory.

I need to still be able to come to places like this to again explore and enjoy the outdoors in a different way. This is reminiscence tourism for me.

I drove my Jeep more than an hour from home to find this old place in the woods. The tracks in town we used to haunt as kids have all been ripped up and turned into paved bike paths or streets.

Like the railroad tracks I grew up loving, this place where the rails turn around a corner has grasshoppers too. There’s a wigwag where the tracks cross the road and inside one of the wells for the old signal lights, there is an old bird nest, dried up and dusty.

The colored glass on the signal lights is cracked and some of it has fallen out. There are no rocks visible between the rails here, but I found a couple of railroad spikes, a steel plate from the tracks cast aside among the ox-eye daisies and black-eyed Susans nodding in the light breeze.

I think every kid in our neighborhood talked about growing up to be an engineer at least once. One of my best friends, who I met later in life, did that. He is still riding the rails, and he gets paid to do it. Wow!

All these sights, sounds and experiences, memories, hopes and dreams, yesterdays, today and tomorrow. It’s so hard to really get my mind around what it all means and why we are doing this thing called “life.”

The whole planet is like an Etch-a-Sketch, its surface has been made, shaken and erased and made over time and again. I don’t think we even have a fraction of an idea of what there is to know about that story.

I started to walk down the old tracks that rounded that bend headed away from town. There are broken down houses, garages and other structures — just like the old railroad shack — with bent and rusty square nails and wavy window glass.

There is a pond alongside the tracks whose edges are adorned in autumn with bright, red-berried winterberry bushes. It’s a beautiful place at any time of the year.

I saw a large snapping turtle that walked along the roadside. I bid him hello and continued in the opposite direction, following the tracks. There are poplar trees growing here on both sides of me as I walk.

They are a beautiful species, one of my favorites, and the wind made their leaves flutter and whisper deciduous secrets to the grasses and the red and orange hawkweed growing here.

At a clearing I took another opportunity to sit down to relax, this time in the shade of one of those poplars. The relatively cooler shelter from the sun was welcoming to me.

I kept thinking about trains and tracks and us kids and me now and everybody else. My dreams aren’t simple like they were when I was a kid. The world seems exponentially more complicated and tragic these days.

After an undetermined amount of time, I realized that I had fallen asleep propped up here against this poplar trunk, like an old rake.

That’s something I enjoy doing sometimes on just the right kind of summer day.

I stood back up and kept walking, around the bend and down by the creek to listen and watch to the water flow.

I listened to the birds and the bugs and knew that in some as-yet undetermined and perhaps unknowable way, I am a part of all of this.

EDITOR’ NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.