Gandy Dancing

This strange and conspicuously ancient term was first encountered while enjoying a tapas of steamed little neck clams bathing in a small sea of butter, lemon, garlic, and chorizo at Walker’s Grill in Billings, MT. The gentleman seated beside me, a rather haughty, local real estate magnate came to know my current profession and with a self-satisfying chuckle proclaimed, “You’re a gandy dancer!”. With obvious confusion on my face I succumbed to his infectious laughter and allowed him to explain to me what exactly prompted this outburst. When I returned to my room that evening into Google went “Gandy Dancer” and much to my surprise I found that the man had hit the spike on the head.

(OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY)
Gandy Dancer
slang (orig. U.S. ).
[Orig. uncertain.]
A railroad maintenance-worker or section-hand.
Hence gandy dancing.

1957 J. KEROUAC On Road (1958 ) III. vi. 215 Working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack.

1933 Amer. Speech VIII. 26/2 Gandy dancer, section hand. (From the rhythmic up-and-down motion of workers pumping a handcar.)

1970 F. MCKENNA Gloss. Railwaymen’s Talk 35 Footplatemen have a great regard for gandy dancers,the men who keep the rail safe for the train to run over.

Wikipedia, our modern day aberration of the great Alexandrian Library, had a similar take on the term claiming that, “The term originates from the late nineteenth century. It is often said to derive from the Gandy Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-based tool manufacturing company, but several sources cite an absence of any record of this company’s existence. Hand crews used specialized hand tools known as gandies (of unknown etymology) to lever rail tracks into position.” It was this laying and leveling of track, the movement of which required the workmen to straddle a length of rail and waddle it into position that conjoined the gandy with the dance. Get enough men in greasy overalls doing this in a line while caroling the bit of folk-lore (below) and you’ve got yourself the next YouTube video of the day.

As railroading progressed the nomenclature traded and morphed and shifted into what today is kitschy lingo used to talk about hobos and highwaymen, while a new technological albeit still blue-around-the-neck  tongue set in. Nowadays there are hundred thousand dollar machines of greasy, hydraulic, steel pounding beauty that do the heavy work once the specialty of Irish, Mandarin, and African American labor along America’s future suburban landscapes. There remains however the need for such track to be inspected, quite regularly I might add, since even 130lb rails of steel submit to the beatings meted out to them by mile-and-a-half long, fully loaded trains of coal snaking over their heads multiple times a day.

Your guide for this one way ride into the steel ribbed gut of America’s  track-side eateries happens to be just one of these modern day dancers of the Gandy. While I may have traded straddling the rails for riding in plush comfort on them, and pawned my magnifying glass for a mélange of cameras, wires, and chips with silicone dip I still fall under the definition of a Gandy Dancer, no matter how reluctant I am to admit so in public. It is under this guise and atop these rails that I travel the country, with an empty belly and wandering curiosity for all things given to make my taste buds dance. From cosmopolitan cities to unincorporated towns, haute cuisine to Big Benny’s BBQ, my Gandy Dancing days are sure to turn up the best, and worst, that America has to eat.