written on the train
If there is anything cooler than sneaking out of class early while your instructor’s back is turned after completing a heinously tedious project in order to get your summer vacation started a little early, it’s taking a train somewhere shortly thereafter to a place where people who love you are waiting.
It gets better if you’re wearing your new shirt and if you have a window seat. Even better if you pass through the industrial district where earlier in the week you were pounding past the train tracks on your bike and looked at them and thought, four more days. It’s good for you when you get to go over the water and look at the huge cargo ships loading, and when you go past factories and esoteric machinery in abandoned areas you’d never get to see otherwise. It’s good when you pass a car junkyard and get to see a crane pick up an entire car, swing it around like a dead cat, and then drop it disdainfully. It’s good when the sun is shining through your windows and makes you just hot enough that you drift off to half-sleep, where you’re just awake enough to enjoy that you’re sleeping. The Ashton Kutcher movie on the train’s TV screens you wake up to is not cool. But that is the only not-cool thing, and you don’t mind it.
The fact that your sciatica isn’t bothering you after sitting down for so long is cool. Watching the freight trains smear past you at lightspeed on the parallel tracks is cool. Getting to see tiny towns with crackerbox buildings and short skylines that are so exactly defined and perspective-flat that they look like theatre sets is nice. (My friend Zach, who loves long drives as much as I do and has the enormous landshark pickup truck to prove it, once took me through a town in southern Washington that was perfectly square and just slightly longer than a football field, complete with one store and a post office.) Seeing an ancient Vitamilk truck trailer that someone has sliced into a pondside ice cream stand is cool. Listening to quiet seventies folk-pop that reminds you of your mother singing in the car when you were small while you see all these things is beautiful.
God, Ashton Kutcher is weird-looking.
Post-ride update: Got picked up at the train station by Sarah, Jaimes and DiTolvo, who tumbled out of Sarah's junker wearing a huge jester hat. They put on these huge black hula hoops Sarah made out of industrial PVC, popped those little toy whoosh-whistles in their mouths, and stood there hula-hooping and whistling until I was good and embarassed. It's so good to be home.
It gets better if you’re wearing your new shirt and if you have a window seat. Even better if you pass through the industrial district where earlier in the week you were pounding past the train tracks on your bike and looked at them and thought, four more days. It’s good for you when you get to go over the water and look at the huge cargo ships loading, and when you go past factories and esoteric machinery in abandoned areas you’d never get to see otherwise. It’s good when you pass a car junkyard and get to see a crane pick up an entire car, swing it around like a dead cat, and then drop it disdainfully. It’s good when the sun is shining through your windows and makes you just hot enough that you drift off to half-sleep, where you’re just awake enough to enjoy that you’re sleeping. The Ashton Kutcher movie on the train’s TV screens you wake up to is not cool. But that is the only not-cool thing, and you don’t mind it.
The fact that your sciatica isn’t bothering you after sitting down for so long is cool. Watching the freight trains smear past you at lightspeed on the parallel tracks is cool. Getting to see tiny towns with crackerbox buildings and short skylines that are so exactly defined and perspective-flat that they look like theatre sets is nice. (My friend Zach, who loves long drives as much as I do and has the enormous landshark pickup truck to prove it, once took me through a town in southern Washington that was perfectly square and just slightly longer than a football field, complete with one store and a post office.) Seeing an ancient Vitamilk truck trailer that someone has sliced into a pondside ice cream stand is cool. Listening to quiet seventies folk-pop that reminds you of your mother singing in the car when you were small while you see all these things is beautiful.
God, Ashton Kutcher is weird-looking.
Post-ride update: Got picked up at the train station by Sarah, Jaimes and DiTolvo, who tumbled out of Sarah's junker wearing a huge jester hat. They put on these huge black hula hoops Sarah made out of industrial PVC, popped those little toy whoosh-whistles in their mouths, and stood there hula-hooping and whistling until I was good and embarassed. It's so good to be home.