Thoughts from the train

Dear Friends,
This is another long entry, but it was what I put down while on the train by myself, heading to California, and records my thoughts around the end of the trip. Thanks for reading and for all the good thoughts during the journey.

Neale
 
    We go down through close caves of trees hung with moss. We leave behind the settled quiet of the swamp broken by the screech and trilling response of mating owls, the air in the root-woven trees like cool breath from an earthen mouth. From that to dense car-run highways, the crumbling walls of plantation gardens. The road widens, we fly on concrete bridges above estuaries, the air is rimed with salt. Months since we've smelled that, ocean in the throat. And then we are there, and we run down the packed sand and into the wet swaying glass of the Atlantic.
    The trip began with hastily packed bags, a short wait in the train station before departing into restless sleep, waiting for the sun to rise on Oregon. In a travel analogue we spend the day in Charleston and then rush off to the station to box bikes, check bags, board and glide through the South's humid night. A lay-over the next morning in Washington DC, where we walk the mall in a giddy travel-dream, eat a meal and buy a blanket, board again in the afternoon. The familiar lolling of the head on the seat back with the swaying of the train. We listen to a Bruckner symphony in the near-empty observation car while the moon rises like a gold dollar through the silhouettes of trees.
    Morning mists up out of Indiana farm country, the cut fields, watering lines standing derelict on their spoked wheels, close-clouded rain. The trip rewinding like a tape, images we had absorbed now speeding in reverse. How the houses seem blank-eyed and lonely in the fall, how their lights burn on the hills in the dark with the cold interstices between them. The breaks of silent trees overhanging the edges of fields, russet colors muted in the gloaming. We cross back to central time and add an hour we had lost three weeks before.
    This feeling of rolling our wheels backwards, as if they had played out a string all across the continent and we now had to recover it. This feeling of loving land and not wanting to live in it, only hoping it goes on being. Land I carry with me, its dust in my lungs, chaff in my bones. Land that entered through my senses and embossed its own image in my brain. This feeling of all this land stored up in me now, time and sensation laid up in loam.

    We pass Gary, Indiana, and can see the thoroughfare we took through town, where we remarked on the city's decay, this modern ruin of gutted hotels, crumbling boxes of cement, rebar going to powder; bushels of acacia and other weeds springing out from fissures in the sidewalk; the downtown buildings lurking and drab with soot; the billboards reading Isn't it Gary's time? It is not Gary's time, Gary's time has come and passed, in this strange accelerated deja vu, wherein the distant past and the present seem to be passing beside one another at speed, wherein it seems we could search Gary's streets with binoculars and find ourselves peddling there.

    Through Chicago's south side rail yards we recognize our route again, forgettable casinos and drive-through cigarette shops and interstate highway signs now familiar landmarks. Downtown scrapes the clouds beside the lake, water the color of rock flour. Dave and I coming close to the end of our journey together. During the lay-over, I shop for a few days of food, much the same as we have done, except it is only for me, a half-portion.
    Back at the train station we eat together a last time. Dave's bike is out of its box, realigned, ready to carry him and his few possessions into this next adventure. I am going on West, to retrace our path towards Lincoln, Nebraska, but this time more alone than almost any other time, deep in the gradient of alone-ness. For the past three months we have been in each other's presence more constantly than in any relationship in my life but mother and babe. We have shared equally the contents of my camp pot, slept beside each other in my tiny tent each night. At the gas station we place paired coffees and rolls on the counter; we often order the same thing for lunch without conferring. We have settled into a scrupulous balance that goes without saying, that comes from a love which has no ulterior motives, only the furthering of one another's experience. In this adventure we have had a each other to redouble our experiences; what we saw and felt reverberated through the other and vice-versa; the waves we ride rise higher for the other's consummate waves. As Steinbeck says in Travels with Charley, I put this down here for the record, though only those who have experienced it will understand it.
    This is a love, like the love of this land, this continent, that revels in it, and also must leave it, must let it go. This fidelity is one that knows we share the same path at times, and at others are separated by miles or oceans. This is brotherhood that begins in blood but goes beyond it. Now I ride over far fields and mountains to my own adventures, solitary again, but always knowing  what has coalesced between us.

    Here is a memory that has stayed with me all through the trip, and which in many ways has defined it for me: blistered August day in eastern Washington, in rolling hills of thick burnished wheat. No water and no wind. Sky as blank as a cheap plate, white sun, the slopes unmarred except for the road, or once in a while an abandoned house, a stilled tractor. The heat like an invisible wine press, squeezing sweat from us, the reflection from the bright chaff on all sides. Steep climbs breathing the oven air. In the labor, and the wondering, what the purpose is of all this, I look ahead. There is Dave on the road, the road that runs straight, rising sharply up a hill to end at the glass edge of the sky. I am feeling like getting on, getting done with this, finding water, and shade. Ahead, Dave is slowing and taking out his camera. In the midst of this heat and intense work, he is slowing and raising his arm to record the inhospitable beauty of the place.
    Having come back to the Pacific, and an existence at times more settled and more fraught with distraction, this is the memory I hold close and carry with me.