What does it mean to be on a train
If only I had a bomb. Or the courage to throw myself off.
These were the options I juggled last October as I sped toward Salem on the Amtrak Coast Starlight. I had missed my stop in Portland where I was supposed to meet my friend for a weekend trip. The line is famous for its large windows that frame the coastal evergreens and little parties of sheep. But as night drained the view, I was left simply with my own dumb reflection and plenty of time to marvel at my stupidity.
To my credit, I am almost certain the announcer had not stated that we were in Portland, only that we were being held momentarily because someone was lying on the tracks.
Suddenly, I felt like Venya from Moscow-Petushki. Written by Venedikt Yerofeyev in 1969 in Soviet Russia, it is the story an alcoholic writer trying to take a train from Moscow to the town of Petushki. Once aboard, Venya gets increasingly drunk while engaging in chaotic existential conversations with other passengers and an unseen choir of angels. His girlfriend awaits him at the station in Petushki, “where the birds never cease singing, not by day or by night; there, neither winter nor summer does the jasmine cease blooming.” Eventually, he realizes that he’s missed his stop, and he succumbs to his uncertain fate.
You have entered, following your own whim, into the sphere of the inevitable – be at peace and be patient…And in this silence your heart says to you: It is indiscernible and we are helpless. We are deprived of freedom of will and are in the power of the arbitrary which has no name and from which there is no escape.
As my train barrelled south, I called my friend in tears, explaining that I would be three hours late. It’s not your fault, she said, they always do this. This is why I never take that train.
A train is a trap. This is why so many thrillers are set on them. A convenient metaphor, once we’re on, we can’t get off—at least without violence. There’s no escape from our fellow passengers or our destination.
Last year, so many of my friends derailed their lives, so to speak. Myself included. I resigned from the job I thought I would retire from, broke up with the man I thought I would marry, and moved out of the home I thought we would grow old in. It was a year of eruptions–reactions equal to the inertia born out of the systemic instability and middleish age; we destabilized our lives in order to regain control after years of being stuck on one track.
My ex said, “I knew Mike was going to blow up his life and then you would blow up yours.”
In Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains (published in Czechoslovakia in 1965), an old ventriloquist attempts to stop Nazi tanks with the power of his mind–only to be crushed. Soon after, his grandson, our protagonist Milos, gets a job at a German-occupied train station. His boss says to him, “being a railroad inspector now is like being a major in the army under the Austrian Empire.” It’s only through the power of sex that the station workers are emboldened to an explosive rebellion. It’s a glorious story of solidarity, the fulfillment of desires so mundane, so embodied, that they become an act of self-realization, derailing the preordained.
My aunt once cautioned me that money was the primary cause of divorce, but in my experience, it’s sex… Alice Munro's story "Chance” (in her 2004 collection Runaway) is about a young woman whose life is overturned by meeting an older man on a train. Brought together by a suicide on the tracks, they forge a connection based on their unfulfilled desires, an event that propels her into a totally different life, unsure and “assaulted by happiness.”
There’s a claustrophobic glamor to trains, the tension that comes from being locked in a space with someone, like them or not, seven-minutes-in-heaven style. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 The Lady Vanishes is an excellent movie about opposites attracting, made at a time when cabin cars were large and soft enough to fool around in.
In contrast, The Emperor of the North Pole (dir Robert Aldrich, 1973) is about two foes determined to kick the other off a train. Set during the Great Depression, the story follows a stoic and determined drifter named A-No.1 as he challenges Shack, a sadistic railroad conductor. A-No.1 seeks to ride Shack's line to Portland (not lost on me), known as the Number 19, considered an impossible feat due to Shack's violent enforcement of a policy preventing hobos from hitching rides. The film unfolds as a bizarre battle of wills, with these two old men going at each other with chains, planks, and axes. A-No.1 sabotages the train, halting it, so he can jump on. Shack calls to him, “In three damn minutes you’re gonna hear a whistle, which’ll mean the fast train’s coming down the junction, and that’ll mean a head-on collision with ten people aboard!” A-No.1 cooly responds, “Sounds like a ghost story to me.”
When we’re on, we want off. And when we’re off, we want on. And there’s nothing we won’t do to reverse our position. We can’t see the trolley problem for what it is: a stupid hypothetical sketch of choice that should have been crumpled up and thrown in the trash.
In Samanta Schweblin’s story “Towards Happy Civilization” (published in Argentina in 2009), a man named Gruner tries to buy a train ticket to the city, but the ticket seller won’t sell it because they don’t have change. Stuck in the station, Gruner finds four other men who live there, working for the station master and his wife, he learns, because they also didn’t have exact change. Gruner befriends the station master’s dog, and he “worriedly wonders how long the dog has been here….He has the notion that the dogs of the world are the result of men who have failed in their attempted journeys.” The men band together to put the station master to sleep so they can signal the train to stop. When they finally board, everyone who has been stuck on the train gets off. Civilization has moved to the country station, and the city to which they’re going has been deserted. Will we ever be happy?
The above-ground track for the F train is visible from my new bedroom window, just next to my desk. I watch the F go back and forth with little clouds of people inside, all bound to their destinations, and I wonder how many of them I might have shared a train car with before.
“When I meet someone on a train,” Norm Macdonald wrote on Twitter, “which I often am on, and we are both strangers, that is when I can get down to truth, ugly and beautiful. And he can too. All that is required is that there is motion (the train), anonymity, and a destination…. And, so, most of my book, Based on a True Story, was written on a train, and what does it mean to be on a train. What does it mean to be on a train. Love You. Goodnight.”
I can hear the train too, in harmony with dogs barking at the moon, as I lay awake in bed. I say to myself, “another train will come, another train will come, another train will come” and it does, carrying me into sleep and uncertain dreams.