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Don't take flight—the shore is still in sight
"That's fine," I just told the Amtrak IT person from Ottawa who warned me, over the phone the conductor had handed me, that my wi-fi speed would not be lightning-fast shared with seventy other people, "I don't expect lightning on a train," and realized as I said it that it sounded like a proverb. I wonder what for.
So, yes. I'm on a train. Somewhere in Rhode Island, I think; it took until south of Providence to get the wi-fi working. Right now beyond the window is a kind of damp birch swamp, everything bracken-reddish and stapled with lichen and granite-grey humps of snow. It flashed to seawater and the rust-brush of salt marsh, little brown-headed ducks bobbing at the edge of a dry white shoreline. Now someone's backyard full of buoys. Now a water tower, bleached blue as a dry swimming pool. A little fold of stone walls on a hillside, like transplanted moor. More of the flat silver mirrors of sea, under a flat silver mist of sky. A cemetery of small headstones and the black bore of a cannon. A fire station. A catenary maintenance vehicle, sidetracked, its fiberglass-yellow paint crawled all over with rust. The prevailing colors are nineteenth-century daguerreotype and tobacco-stain. Now a trestle bridge running into a harbor, the sea pleating the color of Athene's eyes. We may have crossed into Connecticut. Yes, there's the whale's tail of New London. I like the look of this world. Could use more people. Park benches are post-apocalyptic with no one around.
I didn't sleep at all. I couldn't stop coughing and I couldn't take anything for it that would knock me out, since I had to leave the house before seven in the morning to be sure of catching my train; I lay in the dark and wheezed and eventually my alarm went off and I got up, the pre-dawn sky just fading mussel-blue. I seem to be in a good mood nonetheless. Maybe just in that sort of glassy, floating all-night way, but I'll take it over crushing depression.
Green cages of lobster pots. Fishing trawlers with nets and gear. Concrete warehouses eaten into puzzles of brick on the back faces. A river or an inlet, granite islands cracked with dry-leaved saplings. It's like the waste land out here and it's beautiful.
So, yes. I'm on a train. Somewhere in Rhode Island, I think; it took until south of Providence to get the wi-fi working. Right now beyond the window is a kind of damp birch swamp, everything bracken-reddish and stapled with lichen and granite-grey humps of snow. It flashed to seawater and the rust-brush of salt marsh, little brown-headed ducks bobbing at the edge of a dry white shoreline. Now someone's backyard full of buoys. Now a water tower, bleached blue as a dry swimming pool. A little fold of stone walls on a hillside, like transplanted moor. More of the flat silver mirrors of sea, under a flat silver mist of sky. A cemetery of small headstones and the black bore of a cannon. A fire station. A catenary maintenance vehicle, sidetracked, its fiberglass-yellow paint crawled all over with rust. The prevailing colors are nineteenth-century daguerreotype and tobacco-stain. Now a trestle bridge running into a harbor, the sea pleating the color of Athene's eyes. We may have crossed into Connecticut. Yes, there's the whale's tail of New London. I like the look of this world. Could use more people. Park benches are post-apocalyptic with no one around.
I didn't sleep at all. I couldn't stop coughing and I couldn't take anything for it that would knock me out, since I had to leave the house before seven in the morning to be sure of catching my train; I lay in the dark and wheezed and eventually my alarm went off and I got up, the pre-dawn sky just fading mussel-blue. I seem to be in a good mood nonetheless. Maybe just in that sort of glassy, floating all-night way, but I'll take it over crushing depression.
Green cages of lobster pots. Fishing trawlers with nets and gear. Concrete warehouses eaten into puzzles of brick on the back faces. A river or an inlet, granite islands cracked with dry-leaved saplings. It's like the waste land out here and it's beautiful.
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t's like the waste land out here and it's beautiful. --yeah. I **love** those wastelands.
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It is very easy for me not to look at the world around me if I am reading or thinking or otherwise doing something inward. And then I wind up just staring out a train window for half an hour. For example, we just passed a golf course the same rolling tawny color as the marshes, with a sole white-jacketed golfer teeing off while something upward of a dozen Canada geese cluster around the sand trap. And then another cemetery, this old enough to be planted with weeping willows and cypresses and also something that fountains so extravagantly downward, I think it must be a weeping cherry. And then sometimes nothing but cuts of granite and lichen and a highway paralleling the right of way. Always the ghost-season of trees.
I feel like a bad person for coughing so much in the quiet car, but I have such a good window seat on the salt marshes, I think everyone can deal with it.
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. . . The people within immediate eyeshot of me are. Good point.
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You are very welcome. Thank you!
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Thank you! The train part has been fine so far. [edit] And the subway parts went fine! I am now at the house of the relatives I am staying with tonight and I am going, before my reading, to nap.
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Thank you! It actually was lovely; I meant to nap, but it didn't work, so I wrote a poem and looked out the window instead.
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Thank you. I am glad it looks right to a person who has been.
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It's around 75 here in Jacksonville Beach, so I have the sliding door open to the balcony at my sister's condo while I babysit her boxer. The clouds look like scattered batting from a kitten-eviscerated quilt, and the blues of the sea and the sky, the greens of the palms, clover, closed-up flower bushes, are all fever-bright. The wind is just brisk enough to require a cardigan, in my case, though healthy people are out there in shorts and tee-shirts; it smells like brine and early roses. The birds are chirping relentlessly as a Top 40 station blasting out a parked car window, frequently drowned out by low-flying helicopters and rattling construction trucks.
Of course, the temperature is supposed to drop again this weekend, rise on Monday and Tuesday, then plummet on Wednesday. It's February in north Florida.
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Thank you.
The clouds look like scattered batting from a kitten-eviscerated quilt, and the blues of the sea and the sky, the greens of the palms, clover, closed-up flower bushes, are all fever-bright.
That sounds lovely. Like one of those paintings done in bright flat oils that are not simplistic at all. The clouds are especially vivid.
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*hugs*
Audience responses were indeed favorable.
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I hope the trip goes well!
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Thank you. I like watching the world.
I hope the trip goes well!
It did! I am still on the train home, so it is conceivable (avert) that some catastrophe could occur between now and my falling into bed, but the New York parts were wonderful!
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It was on those trips, looking out at vistas very similar to yours, that I realized landscapes that one thinks are uninteresting or colorless aren't. When you look deeper at the colors, and translate them - the browns, the duns. the almost reds and the greys and ivories - into heavy velvet, and voila! You have pre-Raphaelite paintings.
I couldn't have discovered that without train rides through the landscape of my childhood and early adulthood.
And everything you wrote brought that back to me. I don't get that immediacy from a lot of writers. You're good.
Many good wishes for the trip. (I realize that sounds really like an appendix after I'm going on about my own trips - it isn't. All good wishes, truly.)
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I like that.
And everything you wrote brought that back to me. I don't get that immediacy from a lot of writers. You're good.
Thank you. That is a wonderful thing to hear. Your descriptions are vivid, too.
Many good wishes for the trip. (I realize that sounds really like an appendix after I'm going on about my own trips - it isn't. All good wishes, truly.)
I believe you! It was lovely. The train is late coming home, but I blame that on the vortex of Boston's MBTA.
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You're welcome! Thank you.