Like A Rolling Stone

For no reason I can name, I’ve always loved the train. If not for the intervention of Lindsay’s parents, we’d have had our honeymoon on a train trip across America, instead of the far superior cruise that we took instead. Such is my hobo-like love of the rails. I’ve been top-to-bottom of the West Coast on trains, and even traversed the snow-dappled Alps when I was young, traveling from Rome to Berlin for Christmas. And while the rest of the family slowly went mad from cabin fever on that trip, I settled in like a zoo critter returned to its natural habitat. 

Perhaps it’s the womb-like rocking, or the steady staccato of the tracks, something swaying, rhythmic, and maternally soothing in its ceaselessness that makes me feel warm and safe, slightly somnambulant. Whatever it was that appealed to me as a child, it’s something else entirely that appeals to me as an adult. 

For as obnoxious as trains are to us in our normal lives—blocking traffic at key intersections for long stretches, the blaring of horns at midnight as the train cuts through the neighborhood—they are still fairly invisible for most of our days. They run along the back side of everything, in the interstices of places not seen or traversed by the civilized. These twilight borderlands are all drainage culverts, broken ramshackle fence-lines, rusted hulks of forgotten things overturned, and the unkempt back-lots of businesses that you never see from the showroom floor. 

Out-of-the-way spaces holding the dirty laundry that gets shoved under the bed when company comes over; a hot mess of capitalism and official boundaries, broken up by tunnels and waterways, dotted with invisible homeless encampments. A train ride is a rare chance to tour the secret histories going on all around us. A story of collapse, with shanties groaning under the relentless work of entropy, blooms of rust and oxidation spreading silently, and the disturbing beauty of a world receding into loam.

Or perhaps the magic of the rails is really created by the fact that I’m always on a break from my real life when I board the train. Headed out on vacation, or sometimes ferrying someone home in their car and then returning to my own via the Amtrak highway. That's the case on this rainy day, as I find myself hugging the water’s edge of Puget Sound, tracing the iron-gray inlets, isthmuses, and estuaries as I meander homeward like a rolling stone. 

I jumped outside my normal life early Monday morning at the sound of my Dad’s labored breathing and almost ceaseless coughing, an alarming rattle attending his every breath. He’s been living with advanced COPD for years, but this was beyond the pale even for him. Around 3:30a I decided that there was no way he’d be able to make his way home safely if he was still coughing for 15 minutes of every hour, especially after a night spent that same way. 

So I rolled him and his CPAP machine, oxygen bottles, and ukulele up and piled him in the car for the supposedly six-hour trip back to little Kingston, WA. We made it in five. He slept for most of it, which I was glad to see. He opened his eyes once, saw that it was snowing to beat the band, that we were boxed in on three sides by semis, and the visibility was slashed to near-zero by the onslaught of slush and the gray haze of spray rising off the road. He said, “Oh, my.” Then he went right back to sleep and left me to it, just as I’d done a million times as a kid, when all of the problems in the world were his and not mine. An unanticipated exchange of something, me and Benjamin Button passing each other in the middle and swapping the baton. 

He seemed to have stabilized when reinserted into his native environment, and was returned to good spirits this morning. So I hopped the ferry in little Kingston and the train in Edmonds to spend the next ten hours leisurely making my way home through the drippy, verdant folds of the Cascades, along the Cowlitz, Chehalis, and Columbia rivers, navigating the warren of secret tunnels and clinging to the mountainsides high above the steady stream of cars on I-5. 

For me, every minute spent captive to the steady plodding of the train, away from any ability to answer the call of my life, is a minute spent outside the boundaries of the world. As my iPod tirelessly queues up the tunes, every passing thing seems apropos to what I’m hearing, imbuing each song with fresh import. I can’t help wondering, from the comfort of my rolling portal on the world, at the lives of people that sleep on all those mattresses under lashed tarps in the passing woods. At the world we actually inhabit, as opposed to the thin cross-sections we allow ourselves see every day. 

It gives me the uneasy feeling that the real world might actually be happening in the forgotten spaces, where relentless tracks march ever onward behind the disguise of raised berms and thin tree lines artfully arranged to separate us from the unappetizing utility of life's real work. Maybe the clean, well-lit I-5 parts of life are just what you do to keep your belly full and have a little light to gather around. Where we never have time in the midst of our hunter-gather-y lives of work, shopping and entertainment to think about it—whatever “it” is. Lest we consider arcane prophecies scrawled in graffiti on the mouldering columns and buttresses out in these badlands.   

Before he made his trip down to see us, my Dad told me to wave him off if any of our friends or family was even a little bit sick, because of the COPD. Fortunately no one was, so he came to town to visit, talk religion and politics over brunch and cocktails, and play ukulele and Euchre with us. He never travels alone like this, so I was delighted to have some Dad time, though a bit worried about him making it all the way on his own. 

It was as we were eating eggs at a new breakfast place in town that he said that the next time he got the flu would be his last time. Just casual like that. He was being careful about things, and took the possibility seriously, but was otherwise at ease with the reality of it because he’d already accepted this thing that was so striking to me. So he could just go right on eating his eggs after he said it, and he did. 

When you’re away from the hustle and flow of everyday life, you have time to realize that your days can be measured out in any number of ways—minutes, hours, years, even switching-stations and whistlestops. But no measurement is anything but a parsing of the definitions of finite things. I first realized the uncomfortable reality of this years ago, in hearing a line of song that said, “His heart ran out of summers, but before he died...” Like summers are a unit of measurement, the same as gallons of gas, and you aren’t going to make it. 

So perennial things like Christmas mornings—that seem like innocuous markers on the road to wherever—are actual the ticks of a metronome winding down, and sooner or later you simply reach the end. Maybe you've got a hundred Christmases in you, but probably not. So when you know there is such a thing as “flu season,” hearing that the next flu will be the last one is like finding out that there's such a thing as “death season.” Like you might just spontaneously die because 'tis the season and somebody’s got to go. 

As the last of the gloaming gives way to true night, I’m more aware of the lights of the world as everything else recedes into the gathering darkness. Without the incandescent urban halo rising off a million points of light, the passing landscape disappears and the train window is just a black mirror, revealing only me staring right back at me. But those dark interludes are becoming fewer as I draw closer to home and towns simply fade into each other, briefly separated by the inky negative space of empty fields. Cars are sitting at flashing barricades as I hurtle past, and I'm feeling rather important to be holding up the business of all these people on their way somewhere else. 

I already know I won’t care about any of these thoughts the next time I’m trying to get home to eat and watch TV, only to find myself delayed at a flashing railroad barricade by some jackass on a train writing his memoirs as he hurtles past. Oh, well. At least flu season is over, right? Missed me again, bitch. 

Better luck next year.