All Aboard!

(This posting is dedicated in memory of my father, Juha Kaarla, who died on 12/31/10 in Espoo, Finland after a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease. He was 75.)



Of all the basic forms of mass transportation in our modern age, I feel that the train trip to some far off destination is still the most metaphorical and spiritually rich experience to be had in travel. On a recent train trip to New York City in order to renew a passport and to visit an old friend, it occurred to me that everything from the motion of the train to its sound and its access to beautiful landscapes have been connected to me profoundly for my entire life even when I wasn’t actually riding on a train. Not so for other forms of transportation, which seem to pale in comparison.

Bus trips are somewhat akin to slower car trips. You see traffic and highways and not really any new vistas. If you are on a crowded bus, there is little room to get into your own head space because you are so close to the person sitting next to you. The bathroom is most definitively a jiggle fest and it is not an enjoyable experience to have any kind of an illness on a bus because of the shaking and that locked in feeling. There is just not enough space in which to be comfortable. There also seems little freshness to be had in the experience of traveling by bus; Greyhound advertisements be damned.

Ever since 9/11, I have been terrified of flying and find myself not enjoying the invasive security checks at airports, the endless waiting for takeoff clearance and the very vulnerable feeling of being in no control of my body whatsoever. I don’t like being high up with only the air underneath me to prevent me from falling. Flying usually finds me meditating furiously as I am not the praying type; my wife will be perturbed by my anxiety and I end up feeling wimpy and weak. A number of life reviews take place in flight, but they are not pleasant to say the least. The process of flying is way too scary and intense for this brooding Scandinavian.

Though not considered mass transit, driving a rental car or your own vehicle for business or pleasure is a much more active way of coming and going while traveling -- hopefully you are keeping your eyes on the road and daydreaming as little as possible! When driving in traffic or when reading difficult directions, there really isn’t time to perform any kind of spiritual examination of oneself, especially if you are driving in a big city and using your middle finger for further communication! You sit in traffic, you stop for gas and so many parts of the journey seem exactly the same from town to town and even from state to state that you lose any sense of uniqueness. Driving certainly gives you personal freedom and seems the most American way to travel, but it really isn’t that novel anymore. Always there is the traffic to deal with!

The boat trip is fun but would seem to be more about personal enjoyment than existential insight. One kind of boat journey is even called “a pleasure cruise.” Usually you will want to feel the rocking of the boat under your feet and to smell the breezes wafting over the open deck and to feel the sun on your skin. This kind of experience seems to evoke classic movie images more than anything else. The smell of the ocean may make you remember a summer vacation or some dream trip from the faraway past as well. The smell of the ocean certainly evokes the senses and can partially get existential in an indirect kind of way.

For my money, though, it is the train trip that seems to put together a fantastic chain of psycho-spiritual examinations. Perhaps it is the rumble motion of the train that is the ultimate pathway into the human soul at least it seems that way with mine. When sitting and staring out the window as people and places are left ever more behind, it becomes easy to get a sense of the passage of time and of the very matter of life. There exists the feeling that all is shooting by faster and faster, which is perhaps an exaggerated reaction, but the train ride as life metaphor is relentless with its clear symbolism. It goes on and on until your final destination arrives. Even getting off at your final destination brings home the metaphorical message of there being an actual end to the trip and all of life. As you hear the sound of a night train howling in the distance, it would seem to be the very echo coming out of the void from the end of time. The night train’s whistle sounds forlorn indeed. I won’t leave out mentioning the train wreck headache achieved through drinking the low-shelf liquor “Night Train”. Trains and the railroad exist in a world of incredible imagery that is both dark and magical at the same time.

For myself, I don’t take the train often and after getting married in 2005, I have not been on a train by myself for years. Now as I find myself en route from Burlington, Vermont to New York City in the middle of winter I feel disconnected from my life somehow and weary and chilled as we slowly make our way along the snowy tracks. A train ride is very lonely when you are, in fact, alone. I hadn’t given a thought to any prior experiences connected with trains, but now my mind is suddenly beginning to drift into the past and I suddenly find a genuine train narrative that has evidently run through my life like an invisible wire. Here are some of the vivid remembrances that have brought me back to the world of trains.

Let’s go all the way back to when I was a young boy. I consider my childhood to have been an anxious one having been mothered by an extremely nervous woman and an angry and depressive father; I was a blond and pudgy only child growing up in the Bronx. Time spent with my mother and father was difficult for me; I would characterize it as a piece of personal history without any peace. Always there was tension and fast movement toward some other place or destination that had to be achieved immediately. An oasis from this tension came from my visits to my grandparents who lived in the South Bronx directly behind Yankee Stadium. My grandparents from my mother’s side were Finish immigrants with little formal education and they certainly had their own anxieties, but there was one activity I pursued with my grandfather that somehow provided some calm in the storm. He would walk with me to some local train tracks and we would watch trains roll by for hours it seemed. To be honest, I can’t remember if he enjoyed the trains, or was it that I had somehow shown interest in them, but I do know that from the ages of 6 to 10 or so, I engaged with him in this activity endlessly. Some of the trains seemed incredibly long and perhaps what little math aptitude I have demonstrated in my later life came from those simple days of boxcar counting. As a young boy, I had noticed the rails, the names of the various companies listed on the cars and the sounds of the screeching pistons. Watching trains with my grandfather was a strange kind of early therapy for me no doubt. There was something truly magical within this activity. A sense of movement and time flowed out of those New York trains almost like music out of a cello.

There were many toys in my childhood, and as is the way I suppose it goes for an only child; many of these numerous toys involved building things. There were indeed many train sets that I put together as a youngster. I can remember the laying down of little tracks and then finally getting the locomotive and all of the cars lined up behind it. The switch would be thrown and that little train would go! There was a kind of pulse to the controlled movements that the train would make. Sometimes the train would fly off of the tracks if kept at top speed, but most of the time the train would manage to zoom around and around with absolute certainty. I faintly remember our pug barking at this strange contraption. For me, though, there seemed to be some strange kind of comfort in that endless circling. The movement was anchored into a steady and reliable pattern. I do remember my father smiling as the train went around and around. He said that when he had been a young orphan that the train had been a symbol of freedom for him. Often he had dreamed of jumping onto a train and riding it as far as it would go.

In jumping ahead to my freshman year of college, I found myself at that stage of life to have suddenly fallen in love for the first time. The girl’s name was Melissa. Melissa was a Vermont girl and for those freshman year holidays back in 1984, I would find myself heading to her parents’ home in Brownsville, Vermont. While the relationship was tortured at best, I remember the sex as being volcanic and steadily so … after all, it was quite new to both of us. It is hard to believe today that back then we had to do it every night. OK … sometimes we would even do it twice.

During one of those freshman year holidays, we decided to take a sleeper car from Vermont in order to visit my friend Pat in New Jersey. We, of course, didn’t need to get the sleeper car (it was crazy expensive), but it was necessary for the young lovers to experience sex on the train. It is difficult for me to go back almost a quarter of a century in time, yet, I do remember a few of the details of that expensive ride (literally!).

The sleeper car was tiny and since Melissa was a smoker, I can remember it being full of Marlboro smoke. Since the train trip was essentially happening through the night, I remember being anxious about when it would actually be time to go off to bed! If I really search my memory banks, I can recall Melissa wanting to have the window shade closed as we made love, but I wanted it to be at least half open, not so people could see us, but so I could see lights and movement and places being left behind in the night as we did a simple missionary style with youthful vigor. I remember some diaphragm insertion difficulties as well, but that was a steady event within our sex life – it was the eighties after all.

As I matured and graduated college, Melissa and I were no more. I did not get a driver’s license until my mid twenties, so as a young Bostonian I would take the Boston “T” all around town as I explored being a guitarist and a salesman. On the T, I would usually be carrying a guitar or a briefcase. T rides were frustrating because the trains were always running late and since I was a big coffee and beer drinker back then, it would seem that my bladder was continually full and I would be holding it in all the time and cursing at the slow train service out of Park Street station. One time during rush hour, I broke into a janitor’s closet in order to urinate only inches away from rush hour throngs. For me, waiting for the train always seemed to be a kind of agony. To this day I am an anxious person and never more so, than when I am waiting to board a train. Waiting to board a train seems very much a karmic lesson for me.

I am also connected to the world of trains through my own ambulation. Although I have never been a serious runner, I have found myself jogging from time to time through the years and often I would do this on train tracks. I am not sure why I did this, but I can’t help but think that the tracks somehow connected me to the sense of trains as being life happening in the flesh. Perhaps I am autistic and I was counting the crossbeams in the tracks in a comforting fashion, but I don’t really remember counting so much as trying to jump perfectly from crossbeam to crossbeam. This was truly a grounding sensation and I could feel good as I deftly skipped in perfect time burning at least a few calories in the process.

Another portion of my feelings associated with trains shoots directly to the reading of Stephen King’s “Stand by Me” short story and with seeing the movie adaptation evoking sweet terror whenever running over train tracks that ran near or over bridges. The visual in the movie is particularly striking with the train approaching the boys from a distance with smoke bellowing out of the old time engine. The bridge is also a marvel in its fragility. An approaching train can surely be a killer made out of steel, but really, in a fashion, it is simply the passage of time speeded up. Any old railroad equipment and facilities are usually creepy. The train trestle image in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” is one of the most dreadful images that I have ever seen on television. Nothing is spookier than an abandoned train trestle.

One particular jog that I performed on train tracks was especially memorable. At the time my partner was dying from breast cancer and we had a visiting nurse and my partner’s mother helping us out through the end care. The early summer heat of 1997 was sticky and sweet after a terrible spring and to break the existential unease for myself I put on my running shorts and my black Reebok cross trainers that my partner had purchased for me from a yard sale (she loved saving money) and I took off at a frightening speed to which I was unaccustomed.

I was immediately out of breath after hitting a short pathway that led to the train tracks that run from Wareham to Buzzards Bay and the heat washed over me like hot towels. I remember quickly becoming dizzy and my eyes beginning to squint into slits as I concentrated on each cross plank, so as not to twist an ankle. As I ran I realized, too, that this was to be a run that I would remember … and indeed this would be the case as I am remembering it right now! The harder I ran on the train tracks, the more engrained became the memory, or so I assume today. More sweating and mosquitoes buzzing by created a cacophonic soup around my face. I had attained a strange body disconnection when suddenly a huge black snake was directly in front of me with its teeth barred and I remembered some kind of an audible hiss coming from out of its huge mouth.

I cried out and jumped out of its way. It only took me a few seconds to slow down and to want to go back and see the magnificent serpent for I knew that it must have been a black racer sunning itself on the train track. I turned back to look for it, but it had wiggled away. The cars in a train and the lengthy body of a black snake – both these phenomena clearly were agents of change acting for me like a wrist watch that couldn’t quite be read clearly in the blinding light of early summer.

Years later, I was on a train bound for New York from Boston. My partner had been dead for two years and I still existed in a tunnel of sorrow. I had moved to Jamaica Plain and moved in with an older colleague as a roommate. Miriam and I were going to attend the wedding of her nephew in Brooklyn and we were to stay at my godmother’s apartment in the South Bronx for a few nights. This was the same building where my grandparents had lived and that I had walked from to watch the trains with my grandfather, Paavo.

For Miriam and I the trip began in a typical Friday 5PM Boston panic. Everywhere was traffic. The cab was late picking us up. We were whisked to a minor train station downtown where we had to figure out which train to run to. Miriam was panicking and we made a last minute decision to run at a particular train – it was the right one! Again the sense of time needing to be caught arose in my mind and I held on to it because a particular destination needs to be reached and usually this only happens if one is present and running as fast as possible toward the correct train.

There is an anxiety to trains no doubt as in: “Run to catch the train!” I believe in French there is the saying “je me suis trompee de train” meaning I am on the wrong the train. Always there exists the pressure to ride the right train and to move in the right direction.

The train ride to New York seemed to be mini-therapy for me. It was an evening train and throughout the ride Miriam told stories about her family and of her youth growing up in New Jersey. I couldn’t help but notice a kind of free flowing narrative forming with the rhythm of the ride. A station stop would signal the end of a story and a new story would start upon departure. Miriam’s family history scrolled out like a ticker tape that was controlled by the movement of the train’s conductors. She had nine brothers and sisters to talk about; I had none.

Trains link me to my personal history.

Some years ago I had to talk to my mother over the phone about my father’s worsening Alzheimer’s. It would seem that he has been in end stage of the disease for a long time now. My father and I haven’t had a real conversation since 2003 or so when his faculties had just kind of disappeared. My mother and father never had the greatest relationship to be sure and the dark tunnel that my father has gone into has left me with a sense that “when I really got smart and adult” we couldn’t talk anymore because he had fled the scene through his Alzheimer’s. Perhaps, I, too, am on the same train tracks as my father riding into that much disturbing mental darkness in the near or distant future and this causes me much pain.

As I spoke to my mother on the phone, I had the television on a PBS station. This is a technique of mine so as to dull some of her more painful comments made in nastiness and for me not to be sucked down so heavily into things and places and times that cannot be changed anymore. As I observe the PBS station, I notice that it is a program about some of the older train lines operating in Vermont. Even though I am used to using the television for drown-Mom-out drivel, I find myself uncharacteristically being sucked into this particular program. The documentarian's voice is earnest as he tells the story of aging men working through snow covered passes in order to keep the trains running in winter Vermont. It would seem that there is something heroic and inherently masculine about trains. Are they just long cocks that seem to have constant trouble and a lack of support from federal monies? Are trains simply non-Viagra supported withering male sex organs?

Out of nowhere another train image shoots into my mind. For years I played in a blues rock band called “Junction 69”. We played mostly bars and small clubs in Massachusetts and in addition to bringing amps and drums to these gigs, I used to cart an old railroad light that had 4 colors in it. I would strategically place this lamp on the stage with the idea that the audience would catch the connection between our name and the railroad light. I was adamant about carrying that light, too, and would often place it on top of my amplifier as the first part of the sound check. When the band finally did die, I sold the light. It was easy to sell because there are many collectors of railroad items out there. It is eerie that even in my musical life “the railroad” or the “the train” had made an appearance once again seemingly out of nowhere.

The train that I am riding home to Vermont has now changed direction because of a track switchover that was necessary. As I look out the window at the approaching twilight, we have now begun a movement towards the distance at a crawling pace. The feeling is a strange one. For a moment I can remember the train set that I had as a small boy and the laughter that came out of me when I switched the direction of the train.

There arrives the feeling of being pushed toward something. I assume the front engine has become the back engine and it is pushing us. It seems a harder force than is pulling. It feels much clumsier to be pushed towards home rather than to be pulled.

The train seems unable to gather speed. It jerks along while emitting that night train whistle; outside it continues to snow. Is it forever harder to journey forward than backward? Can I read the train signals of my future in time to act on them before it is too late or does it only work while riding the rails and looking backward into the encroaching darkness?