Train Travel

I want to say that my son is as enraptured with train travel as I am, but the truth is, he's never been on a train. I, on the other hand, have had some of my most remarkable experiences on trains. As someone who loves to move, I hold it to be one of the more perfect ways to glide past trees, buildings, and space.

In high school, we lived about forty-five minutes away from my school, so I had to take a train and a (was it a trolley? A mostly above-ground subway?) something else to school. So many angst-y hours were spent, forehead pressed against the glass, moody folk tunes piping in my ears from a Walkman. (That's right. A Walkman.) Some of my early memories included attempts to ignore the advances of lecherous drunk old men.

I like train platforms. There's a stunning quality to train stations - I couldn't detail the many aspects of my love for them here, but - Union Station, so many of the big train stations in France...they're just gorgeous enough if you stand still in the middle of them to make you understand why they are the subjects or settings of works of art. *

And then there's the El. When we move this summer, I think it is one of the Chicago things that I'll miss acutely. This evening, walking home, several trains rattled ecstatically above our heads, and my son's face immediately bore a broad grin, feet kicking wildly. It reminded me of an evening when I was babysitting, giddily thinking this:

I can see the lit windows of the train slide through the houses and trees past the living room's front window. I love the sound - like a long wind, or an ocean crashing. The Brown and Red lines provide the best views: the backs of apartment buildings, decks littered with flowerpots and furniture. The brick building that reads SCHULHOF on the side. Construction workers moving about with their measured, muscled grace, thick and steady. The sensation of gliding above street life. Miscellaneous faces whizzing by on the raised platforms.

Closer to the Loop, the tracks arc and bend back and the train rocks like a careening roller coaster. If you're in the end, you can look out the window and see the fantastic patterns of the tracks, peeling away in the car's wake. Arching around one of these bends, just past Armitage or Sedgwick, the skyline reveals itself in its massive glass and steel presence, a single squat beast, smug dragon of modernity and architecture.

Sunsets are different, when filtered through the sensation of riding the El at twilight. To watch buildings shift from brick to rust to inky black, is a special thing. Years ago, I once rode the brown line from Chicago to Wilson and I got out there and walked all the way back home. That was a fine day, full of hope and sunshine and the excitement and possibility of new love.

*There's this delicious descriptive passage that opens in a train station in some Calvino book, but I won't put it here, for fear I'd get carried away and type out whole book. Love, love, love that man.

Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo