Ride the train

“In complex trains of thought, signs are indispensable.” – George H. Lewes

From this day forward, I will never travel anywhere that I can’t go by train.

There is a languidness to trains that soothes me and makes me slow down, gives me pause, rolls time around in my head and heart and belly at a pace gentler than air travel.

This past week, after two days of work with large, gentle, complex men with Popeye arms who make sheetrock in Stony Point, New York, I took the train to Washington, DC, rather than fly. What a soothing three hours of rocking slightly from side to side, sitting into the motion, swaying with it, looking ahead to see a car full of slightly swaying heads and bellies, like seaweed at the ocean’s edge or under the pier, swaying, rocking, letting my body feel the motion.

Not correcting it or stopping the motion, that sway, but allowing it, moving with it, a soothing calm, a late afternoon reverie in deep sun, that special time of day, that warm peace punctuated by strips of sunlight, dappled visions of light, dark, light, dark, light-dark as we moved past trees. It was a peace shattered only by Loud Man on Cell Phone, his voice carrying through the quiet like an arrow piercing the air. “I am a social entrepreneur!” he shouted. “I can’t be bothered with this kind of existential trivia!” he continued, using words that made my teeth hurt. “She needs to be fired!” That didn’t sound too awfully social, what with his being a social entrepreneur and all.

[As an aside, cell phones are the bane of my existence.

I once gathered enough information from another train-bound Mr Loud to apply for a credit card in his name, should I have wanted to do so:  birth date, address, phone numbers, email addresses, social security number, mother’s maiden name, wife’s name and social security number, their wedding anniversary date, the site of their past five international trips, their children’s names and birthdates, his employer’s name and address, and much more. When I realized how extensive a personal history he was broadcasting to his captive audience, I started writing down the information I heard, quietly offering the page to him as I disembarked, with a note suggesting the dangers of Living Out Loud.]

Yes, there is something fulfilling about train travel that airplanes don’t offer, a voyeuristic and momentary journey into the lives of people whose homes abut the tracks, realizing with a shock of recognition that whole lives—birth to death—are occurring in those walls we pass, all the things of life: those dinners that sometimes burn, television blue glow hypnosis, disappointments and birthday cakes, birth and rebirth, that precious mundane life, like brushing teeth and inside jokes and watering basil on the windowsill.

Some track dwellers attempt a form of beauty for fellow travelers by decorating their track-focused patios with plants, some allow for the futility of beautification or privacy: white fences wholly penetrable by my gaze from the track above.

Watchfulness, fast passing, like life is, really, barreling in another direction, away, away, people and circumstances left behind as we step forward to a destination, hoping we’re on the right track, the right train, and panicking when we think we are not. How much do we miss by going so fast, I wonder often; how much do we miss by worrying about the right destination rather than enjoying the view, so quickly passing by; how much do we miss by not stopping to dip into that life, the one in front of us instead of the one ahead of us, by not recognizing that the destination is really a horizon, not a boundary.

When I lived in Munich, train travel was like breathing. Going to Italy, Brussels, Amsterdam, Switzerland? By train, of course. Ah, those lovely sleeping cars, those meetings with others, that memorable journey from Munich to Amsterdam perched on small pull-down seats in the corridor for hours with my friend, the fantastic Howard, watching Europe pass by us, making up stories about the people’s lives in houses we passed, their fires glowing, their lamps beckoning us on, forgetting momentarily if we were moving or if they were.

Living in Sri Lanka much earlier in life—as a teenager—I took a train from Colombo to a small village down the coast, traveling to attend a Sinhalese wedding, a three day feast. The tracks took me by the coast, impossibly large coconut and palm trees lining the country’s outline, all swept by the wind into amazing arcs over our tracks. The train car in which I found myself was occupied almost entirely by young naval officers, a brilliant brown in their starched white uniforms. Inspired by the palm trees, I started softly singing to myself,

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port,
aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailin’ man,
the skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day,
for a three hour tour, a three hour tour…”

Before I reached “the skipper brave and true,” the whole train car was singing.

We made our way slowly down that coastline for hours, moving from Gilligan, the professor and Mary Anne to “My Three Sons” and on to “the one day when the lady met this fellow, and they knew they was much more than a hunch. That this group, Must somehow form a family. That’s the way we all became the Brady Bunch.” It was magical, swaying down the coast, singing, laughing, finding a common language; however fictional the referent point, the idea of a single humanity didn’t seem too far away that day.

Call me crazy, but I just can’t see that happening on a plane (or on the Long Island Rail Road, for that matter).

[And yes, let’s just go with the image and address the McDonaldization of the world in another 37days, shall we?]

The train frees us up—or it can. But not if we’re there but not there; there but on the phone; there but on our Blackberry; there but in our laptop, there but resisting the sway and rhythm of the ride.

Enjoying my languid train journey to DC, I was disappointed that I was scheduled to fly home from there, not sway and rock home. But fly I did. And on that flight yesterday, I flew with a pilot enlisting all of us in his fantasy of being a stock car driver or a bobsled team captain at 37,000 feet, so sudden were our drops in altitude, so banked were our turns, so fast was our descent, like Mario Andretti had overpowered Vonetta Flowers to take the helm.

A few moments into the flight, we banked a turn so steeply, with me at the bottom of it, that I found myself leaning at a 45 degree angle back uphill into the seat of the person beside me, convinced that my rigid counterbalance was the one thing keeping the plane from tipping over, my head in front of the head of Mr. 8B, my every nerve tensed and holding, holding, holding, willing the plane back upright.

How unlike my seaweed-in-water-under-the-pier on that train. How unlike Gilligan and friends, that unspeaking and forward-facing bunch aboard the plane not allowing for song. How small and indistinguishable were the people and their basil plants and patios miles below, not even like ants, so small. Humanity escaped us way up there, my rigidity belied my fear of tipping over, we moved too fast and too small, then.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Take the slow train, not the express. Put down your cell phone. Sing songs with your fellow travelers (even silently) and find the themes, those indispensable signs that we’re on the right track, that the track we’re on is always the right one. Lean into the turns, not against them.