My fellow inmates in the seats ahead and behind me are a black muscular nightclub bouncer with a stutter, a tiny old Mexican man who works in the fields and a forty year old Nicaraguan lady with an excess of bling dripping from every surface.
I catch up on work on my laptop and watch the landscape flip by, it’s beautiful. Distant, like a slowly revolving painting.
People face out their windows and think. Jutting forward, their chins with their hands knuckled to rest on, staring intently out there into the nothingness, into their own minds I guess.
A train is like a portal. It thrusts you into your past and your future then it’s steely rhythm brings you back to your present. It’s a time travel really. It’s womb-ish.
A couple of frat boys talk behind me “It’s not right that chicks can get their kit off, and men get thrown into the slammer’ – “yeah it’s not right” says his friend absently as he checks out a blonde a couple of seats away.
New Mexico. We carve through rock – just a meter from my large window, crumbling, sun whitened. There are growths; sprouts on the mountains like bristles from a man’s beard. They look hard to touch.
There are elevators of rock ascending upward and there are lines cut into the ground from the men who used iron machines to stamp in the ground. Occasionally a disused feeding trough for animals. Black and white trees dead-looking from sucking up the salt.
The perspective out here is hard to get your head around. Except for the foreground stuff, you wouldn’t be able to tell how big those ranges were, or how big you were. Like when you stare down at the ground, at those small crumbly pebbles of rock on the ground, and if you look closely enough you can see ridges and valleys and gullies and peaks and troughs. The same as if you were looking down at the grand canyon. Sameness but for scale.
I feel jet lagged. The people in my train I've gotten to know now. I leave my laptop and people nod as I leave, guarded from nobody. They tickle my feet as the morning grows slim ‘get up now, you’ll be missing the day’.
The train exists, nothing else really. The page book flip of the window story and the inevitable breakdowns in lonely towns. I got out at San Antonio, Texas for an hour, to explore. I was a little weary about leaving the safety and going into a dark town that I knew nothing about. But it was worth it.
It was just the sweetest place, right in the centre of town is a track of small rivers, with elegant light sprayed bridges loping over them, a network of canals. Bright eyed and wholesome looking college kids on spring break hollering and chatting in groups.
There’s a mean blonde German lady who runs the train restaurant. She's brusque and rude and yells out over the loud speaker at screeching intervals ‘zix zirty meal – you are late!’ then she barges through the train trying to pinpoint the unsuspecting victim. Usually a mild mannered neck tied man and his wife. The other train conductors are all very old, creaking and hard of hearing and patience, we all keep well away from them.
But at night a new man comes on – I only ever see him when I’m half asleep – tall and friendly with a ruddy face and a permanent smile. He’s seems like a tall fairly book elf. He’ll pick up a dropped book and tuck a child in. I only ever see him in that half state and he disappears in the day time hours, where to I don’t know.
I woke after a sleepless night to the grey mists of swamp land Louisiana. It was ghostly and beautiful. As the heat came down I could see the trailer park homes, well tended with flower beds and small well kept hen-houses. It seems somehow familiar. Green lawned, white houses on wide swaths of land, fields. The towns small and graceful. Then I saw her; the Mississippi River – deep brown and thickly twisting off into the distance.
The Old Miss was the life blood of the area. Working and pushing her wares unendingly. Huge and brown and deep, 4000km long, her tributaries now misguided and threatening to cut off the Port of New Orleans.
Sometimes late at night, the shudders and throbs of the train stop and those of us awake make our way outside to feel the night air as the mechanics do their thing. In an old 1920's train station I stood outside in the moonlight and I got talking to a young guy with tattoos, a shy face and a soft Texan accent.
While we smoked and waited, he told me that he was travelling to find work, maybe catch his uncle who might get him some work on a barge on a river somewhere.
He'd been layed off by a ship building company. It used to have 3000 workers, now they have 500, their sister ship building company had 1000 lay offs per month he told me. We both stared down at the cracked gravel and butted out our cigarettes.
It was as though we were transported back into the 1920’s into the bowels of the depression. The ancient station in shadows around us, the gleaming old train waiting to have her bowels fixed, the talk of seeking work, travelling to find it, anywhere he could.
He passed me his cheap plastic lighter without my asking for it, a nonchalant familiar move that I liked. I felt comfortable with him.
When I was younger, our family would sometimes shelter homeless kids, take them in and try and turn them around and send them off into the world.
I recognised his frayed jeans and the hope still discernible in his eyes.
Around us stretching their legs were a couple of old gracious black queens, one of them holier than thou with clacking jewellery and sorely unimpressed by a solo white girl travelling. Turning her big jaw away whenever I tried to talk to her.
Another woman, with platform shoes and red straightened hair was the picture of grace, a huge ass with a winning smile. The affable toothed bouncer forever jumping in-between the groups like a thick faced puppy eager to please and to keep his stutter at bay.
The next day outside my window I watched the beautiful little houses go past – happy houses with lawns and flower beds and porches. Somebody lives in there, content and house proud. I get a little churn in my belly. A part of me wants that. A lovely house in the country – but I know it’s an ideal, a fantasy.
Because what would I do out there? Would I go mad with boredom? Probably.
When I look out the window at Louisiana and see the fields and buildings and endless sky – I know I could be anywhere; the German countryside, parts of New Zealand, India even. The same trees essentially, the same sky the same ways we work the fields. The rows of soil and crop. Trees with brush underneath – grass and dried bits and fresh bits and sky glimpsed through branches. Tilled fields of deep brown clumps, flags along their perimeters. Shacks and tractors.
It's the same, the same concept as my other train journeys, through Canada or France. It’s just us that imbues the land with meaning.
In Louisiana slaves worked these fields, I imagine them dressed in white for the heat, singing.
This land is the land of Louisiana. But is it really? Don’t we just bequeath that name to it – give it a name and find permanence in doing so? Some identity. When what it is is a continuum.
The same land seen from a million train windows from a million vantage points in a million places in the world.
Like the Australian Aborigines say, there is no ownership of the land – we are part of it – and it is enduring.
