I’m finally here. It seems like such a long strange journey. Flight is a sudden shift in time and space. You can be in one place and time, and within a few hours find yourself in a completely different one.
But the train is different. It starts slow, rolling along and the landscape changes almost imperceptibly at times. Faded flatlands transform into dry grassy hills that, in time, evolve into mountains. To come here by train feels like more than a trip, it feels like a journey.
I won’t soon forget strange landscapes of a city in Indiana whose name I never caught, a city that seemed to made almost entirely of wrought iron and steel, where great cranes stretched up into gray skies. Barrels and rods covered the earth in lieu of grass. The train sank down into a concrete tunnel and everything went dark. It felt almost like we were descending into some strange new world out of a science fiction movie. When we emerged it was into a whole new world where cows grazed what little grass was still green and the sun was settling into the Western horizon. All the while as the world changed without, there was the world within the train and it was changing too as old passengers exited at their stops and new ones boarded. Like the raspy voiced, tattooed man who always seemed angry about something, and couldn’t wait for the next smoke break. Or the little boy who kept running up and down the aisles back and forth giggling as he went, until my sister suggested that we hold out a paper cup filled with water to aid him in his impromptu marathon. We met people in the dining cars and were reminded that people can get along, even strangers who are suddenly thrust into one another's space. People seem to get along fine when they have, but those times are so few and far between now.
It was night when we passed through the mountains of Montana. We never really saw them at all. Unfortunate because we were looking forward to the sight of them after all the flat plains we’d passed through. But in the peaceful hours that presaged the dawn, I saw lonely houses, their porch lights glowing on snow covered hills with nothing at all around for miles. I can’t imagine what it could be like to live so far away from the rest of the world. Are they lonely, or contented? Do they long for bright cities, do they smile more or worry less?
In Whitefish Montana we passed a cheerfully decorated house where people in red vests stood on their porch and waved energetically as the train passed. it reminded me of my youth when we still celebrated Christmas with egg nog and trimmed trees and sugar cookies frosted with icing of green and white and red. I didn't know there were still people honoring old traditions like that.
Soon after that the journey was over And the time that was so long in passing, seemed little more than a moment, in memory. We saw more mountains and beyond them the sea.
That night I was sitting in a hotel room looking out at the Vancouver skyline, wondering what tomorrow would bring.
Within a week’s time classes will have started and the real work will have begun. But tomorrow there is the business finding a place to stay, a new phone a dozen other various and sundry items I will need for my time here.
There’s also the little matter of a lime crush I saw at the local 7-11 tonight. A lime green drink, that I’ll buy with a bright blue five dollar bill. I just might learn to like it here.
