Long Distance Train

Four hours. You have four hours and nowhere to be for any of them.

The train left the city twenty minutes ago and the city has already dissolved. No more suburbs. No more industrial stretches. Just countryside. Field and hedge and the occasional farm emerging and receding, the landscape shuffled like cards, never the same configuration twice.

Your seat faces forward. The table is down. On it: a drink going cold, a book you may or may not open, and the afternoon doing everything it can through the window.

The rhythm of the wheels is your companion. Click-click-clack. Click-click-clack. Not identical. Slightly irregular. Which is better. Pure regularity would become invisible. This rhythm catches your attention every few minutes. Shifts. Slows through a station without stopping. Speeds on a straight. Quiets slightly at a curve.

A tunnel. Thirty seconds of dark and echo, the train's sound trapped and doubled, then the burst back into light and open sky. The window, fogged by the brief cold of underground air, clears slowly. The countryside is different on this side. Steeper. Rockier. You have crossed something. A watershed, maybe. The train does not explain itself.

A man across the aisle is asleep. Profoundly. Mouth slightly open, one hand in his lap, the absolute unconsciousness of a person who has made a long-distance train journey into a nap. He is excellent at trains.

Three o'clock. The slumping hour. The light through the window has taken on the particular quality of a winter afternoon, already inclining toward gold. In two hours it will be amber. In three, the windows will be black mirrors showing you your own face instead of the world outside.

But now, fields. A river. A small town, visible for fifteen seconds from the elevated track, its rooftops and church spire and one incongruous warehouse. Then gone. You know nothing about it. You will never know anything about it. It will be, for you forever, a glimpse from a train.

There is a kind of knowledge you only get from trains. The spine of a country. The way the landscape changes from urban to rural to agricultural. The way wealth appears and disappears in architecture. The geology in the cuttings, the layers of rock and clay exposed when the Victorian engineers blasted through hills. Things that are invisible from a motorway, visible from a train.

The tea is cold now. You drink it anyway. It is bitter and slightly flat and it is the taste of moving through the afternoon in a comfortable chair with no obligations. It tastes exactly right.

Two hours remaining. The sun is getting lower. The shadows are getting longer. The countryside is at its most vivid, everything lit from the side, every surface showing its texture.

Watch it pass. All of it. Let the miles go by without trying to hold them.

You are not going anywhere important. You are going there. And there is plenty of time.

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