On Travel

It's late, and I'm sitting here, for no particular reason, thinking that it's been far too long since I took a train.

I'm not talking about the subway, though it's been a while since I've taken the subway, or the 4:55 LIRR to Ronkonkoma. I'm talking about train travel, a journey taken by train, not a commute. There's something about train travel that fires my mind.

When I lived in Sydney, for the brief time when I lived in Sydney, there was a hill up the street from my house in Kingsford, and at night I often used to walk up to stand and stare down at the factories and refineries on the other side, an area that I never visited and rarely noticed during the day, but was continually drawn to once the sun went down . I called it the Silver City, months before I learned, through a film of the same name, that there WAS a "Silver City" in Australia, a shanty town of corrugated steel raised by migrant workers fleeing postwar Europe. Their Silver City was a place of chaotic change and paradigm shifts, of people struggling to adjust to a place far different from the one they had known, which pretty much sums up my time in Australia, so maybe I was on to something. The film "Silver City" was shown to me by a professor at University of New South Wales, and of it I remember very little; the professor, however, I remember distinctly, a Teutonic gentleman with a goatee and heavy glasses and heavy accent, who had the rare gift of being able to nonchalantly convey his opinion without raising his voice, yet at the same time, in the same voice, drive that opinion home with the force of a sledgehammer and the conviction of the Almighty. He was a terrific lecturer, and would have been my favorite professor abroad, if I had not had Sal. Sal was the creative and independent young woman, possibly one generation removed from a commune, if that, who taught my Philosophy of Travel class. And if you scoff at the very idea of Travel having a Philosophy, much less an entire class devoted to the subject (as I first did when I read the class synopsis), then let me say, as nicely as possible, that you haven't thought about it enough. It was in Sal's class that I learned of how train travel gave rise to the idea of cinema, and how the development of each went hand in hand. Train travel, for the first time, gave one the ability to view a large amount of still scenes--the view outside the passenger's train window--very quickly, in sequence. A train window is the frame through which a continually rolling horizontal landscape passes, as a loop of film passes vertically through the gate on a film projector. And so on, and so on. That was the kind of thing Philosophy of Travel tried to get your head around.

Which brings me back to trains. Plane travel is much like elevator travel: when you get in the metal box, you're in one place, and when you get off, you're in another. It's fast and relatively painless (though it seems to get less and less painless every time I go through an airport), but you're sacrificing the experience of the actual journey in the process. Walking seems the purest form, but isn't the most realistic of options. Train travel, on the other hand, gives you a visual connection with the world through which you're passing, and on a basic level, a physical connection as well: you pass through the tunnel in the mountain, you feel the rise and fall of the hill you're cresting. You're part of it, if not exactly OF it.

Quite a few years ago, I took a train from Poland to what was, at the time, the Soviet Union; the "midnight train to Moscow," because there really was such a thing. The trip was an experience into and of itself, but the moment that sticks out most clearly in my mind, and which I'm sure I'll remember until the day I die, is waking up in a dark train compartment to the faint sound of a voice over an old loudspeaker, and seeing, through the frost on my window and the fog beyond, searchlights and barbed wire, men in overcoats carrying machine guns on their shoulders and holding German shepherds straining against leashes. The bark of the dogs, the tinny sound of Russian echoing through the camp and through the thin glass of the train window, and everyone else in my compartment, and seemingly in the entire train, dead asleep. It was surreal in every sense of the word, and I sat and watched it all.

I later learned that the train had stopped on the border of Poland and the Soviet Union, so that the undercarriage of the train could be adjusted to accommodate the different width of the Soviet railroad tracks; the camp was a place of necessary transistion, so that the journey could continue, with the traveller fundamentally changed in the process.

Anyway, like I said, it's been too long since I took a train. And I've heard that view along the Coast Starlight route from Los Angeles to Oakland is really something to see.