The Man Who Believed Time Was Racing
A railroad laborer in a remote mountain camp suffers a psychological break after a near-fatal cave-in, convinced he is living at an accelerated pace.
Eph is a common laborer with an uncommon affliction. One day, a railroad tunnel excavation caved in and he was buried for an hour. He was almost suffocated when the crew got him out, and he never came back to his right mind. He believes he is living at the rate of more than a year every hour. That is why he was in such a hurry with his imaginary telegram at midnight, believing that by tomorrow he would be an old man. It is a curious mental phenomenon; when a man is in mortal peril, his past life flashes before him, but this poor chap's impression that his whole lifetime happened in a brief moment has remained in his disordered mind. He believes his future years are compressed into days, and his days into minutes.
“I was only ten years old yesterday. Tonight I'm sixty. Tomorrow'll be too late.”
This account captures a 19th-century understanding of trauma and its physiological effects, which we now recognize as PTSD or severe dissociation. It highlights the brutal conditions of early railway construction in Washington, where life-altering accidents were often treated as simple, individual quirks rather than systemic failures.
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