Somewhere New
The double decker train hurdles past a concrete industrial complex of loading docks, metal chutes, piles of gravel, and rusting steel containers. Brightly scrawled slogans and symbols cover miles of concrete; “Authority = Tyranny, No War, Cure, PEXTR, and Race Hype.” In an instant a yellow-green patch work of fields emerges, dotted with stone farmhouses and silvered rivers. As I look out the window, I listen to Max Richter’s Songs From Before. Layered over the soundscapes are snippets of Haruki Murakami prose, and I try to place the words, but the works elude me.
As the train swallows the miles, I feel small. Small in time and space. Days ago, we passed a doorway built in 917, then boarded a wooden skiff and slipped under a bridge built during the second world war by the advancing American infantry. The day before, I stood hundreds of feet high on the top of church ramparts built with limestone floated down the Rhine and hauled into the air by human treadmills. This morning we joined throngs of commuters at a French train station where Jews transited, bound for concentration camps eighty years ago.
Everywhere we go is steeped in history. Everywhere we go ancient and modern meld into one. One night, from our apartment building in France, I watched a man in a dark suit weave an electric scooter through traffic while a woman in a flowing dress cycled alongside the Jardin des Tuileries in the waning evening light. The next morning my son and I admired a red Ferrari parked on a thin, ancient cobblestone road.
Outside the train window, an elderly couple in matching crimson sweaters walk a paved path on the edge of a wheat field and then a high arched bridge above a glacial blue river appears, with a conical stone building on the banks. The couple seated across from me on the train traveled from Illinois by plane, then by river boat along the Mass and Rhine. Their voices make me think of home. I think of how 4,000 miles away it is 4 AM in the neonatal intensive care unit. One of my colleagues may be curled under the covers of the call room bed or sitting in the workroom under a florescent light typing a note or standing in the delivery room while a mother cries out. Behind me sit our friends from home who moved to Switzerland a couple of years ago for work. The last time we saw them, we hiked a North Carolina trail to the top of Pilot Mountain. Now they live in a Swiss town, amongst houses of exposed wooden beams, wooden shutters, and shingled roofs. A tram line circles their village from the city center.
I think of all the lives unfolding in a similarity of instants, separated by the mass of distance. The immensity of time and space unravels.
To travel is to feel perpetually out of synch. In France we bought nausea medicine for my daughter. My wife held her left index finger to the corner of her mouth as she does when she speaks French and throaty sing song words emerged while I stood by helplessly, not knowing much of the language. In the train station I saw a billboard with a giant sheepdog standing at eye level with a man and woman and wondered what it was advertising. Just when I’m sure I have selected the correct bathroom I see a woman washing her hands at a sink next to the urinal. I can’t figure out which container is the trash or recycling or whether to push or pull a door. One day on the tram, an elderly woman with a walker unleashed a torrent of guttural Swiss-German. I stared at her, not understanding, until a man across the aisle grabbed her walker and unloaded it onto the platform for her.
What looks like a stork glides over the fields and in the distance, mountains emerge. Clouds rest in the grooves of valleys. Soon the fields give way to pine trees and as we draw closer, I can see the gleam of snow and ice on the near vertical peaks of the mountains. Out the left window, Lake Thun appears, the water a vivid glacial blue, surrounded by scatterings of green fields, woods and scattered red-roofed wooden houses.
It feels good to be somewhere new, to feel the massive presence of history and feel dislocated by the difference of languages and viewpoint. As the train skirts the lake, I see houses overlooking the shimmering water and dream that I am someone new. That tomorrow I will awake in a bedroom overlooking the water. That I will see the chop as a catabolic wind flows down the back of the mountains and I will sit at a writing desk as the sun climbs and a new day unfolds.