Existential Travelogue

Train Sequence

Locomotive

Cross the signal bridge and start at the suburban station: home of the Big Sky Garden Railway. It’s a Saturday and the train is brimming with tourists. Around the bend, six Hereford cows make their way up the ramp and into the cattle car.

The locomotive blows its whistle and so starts the steady rock of the passenger car.
You move forward, absorbing Montana’s majestic beauty. Across the broad plains sprinkled with tufts of silken grass, over the glistening Gallatin river, then forward through an orchard of floweret trees, beside mountain peaks dusted with snow.

A team of cowboys gently ushers cattle out to pasture. One of them tips his hat as you head into town, past the local grocer, the Big Sky Café, the bank. A child licks a lollypop outside Mr. Foamy’s Soda Shop.

On the final bend of the Big Sky loop, you lean out the window and take in one last breath of the town’s rustic charm. Its 24 telephone poles. Its 36 street signs. Its 48 male and female figures (modeling several sizes and poses). The train gently coasts to a stop, and you pause to thank the engineer for the smooth, slow speed operation of the electronic power pack on this impeccable, nickel-coated track.

Exiting the platform, you turn and notice that the locomotive has a real, operating headlight and a tube of liquid smoke.

Platform

The brakes make me panic with every scrape of metal against metal. I’m waiting for the green line. A sullen engineer sits crumpled over his paperback. I lean my head against a concrete pillar, close my eyes, and remember Italy.

I only understand pieces of her smooth incantation as it spreads out over the speakers.
Il treno. . . e’ in partenza . . . dal binario tre. Downstairs, I cross the underpass and make my way to the platform. Avvisiamo . . . il treno . . . per La Spezia Centrale . . . e’ stato soppresso.

Soppresso. A common event. Temporarily stranded in Monterosso I wait with a sigh, absorbing the solid air. The red, wooden bench. Everything still except the pigeons.

At 16:15 a train arrives. We board and I travel upward in my window seat. Outside: flashes of vineyards and disheveled castles. Inside: an exquisite woman in a white tank top fiddles with her necklace. Her phone rings. Pronto? Upward she smiles that love affair smile that everyone smiles in Italia and I warm to her but just as my face begins to blossom the brakes scream to a halt.

I open my eyes. The engineer pockets his paperback. Clears his throat. Boards the train. And I think is America beautiful? With all its peaks and rivers, certo che si.

But I never seem to go there in my mind.

Railway

She left Antigua. Not because she no longer admired the roses at the Iglesia de Santa Clara, but because she got soul sick when children in rags left their bare footprints in the garden. So, she bought a ticket to Taiwan on the first Oceanic Railway across the Pacific.

Now she sits alone in the dining car, sipping a glass of Riesling while the train skates across the waterway, waves washing over the rails, obscuring the path before and behind it. Her forehead pressed gently against the window, she watches the shore sink beneath the horizon. Suddenly and without warning, a solitary thought rises up from her toes and sucks itself into her chest: No one will ever know I exist. She swallows. Then opens her handbag and fumbles through, searching for a tissue.

Then, a distant quake. Passengers pause and set their forks on their plates. The plates shudder. Plumes of yellow ash burst forth to the surface and the winds rise and the waves rage churning into a violent, onrushing tide that shatters the glass and splinters the boxcars. Shot from her seat and derailed by the storm, she sinks downward past the monk seals and moray eels. Downward past crustaceans and corals, through layers of darkness, into the depths beyond light and clouds.

She releases her handbag and floats gently among the passengers. Turning and drifting. Swollen bodies engaged in a nautical dance.

Bone Sequence

Femur

Some ranchers say it’s impossible to catch all the strays.

It’s a beautiful day on the Big Sky loop and you’re somewhat distracted by the auburn sky. Then your mind wanders and you hit a bump. The train stops quickly, minor damages, slight derailment. But the smoke obscures your view. What happened here? Is she hurt? The passengers look on – frozen in horror. Then you see it.

One of the brown Herefords was crossing the track when the cowcatcher caught her.
We need help somebody, somebody help, can you hear me? Cast aside, motionless, still breathing. Her flank: severed. Her leg: disjointed. Sal arrives at the rail – the best vet in town – but even he agrees it’s a dismal scene. He offers to fashion a splint out of toothpicks, but you decline. Now the cow count is down to five.

Some ranchers say it’s impossible to catch all the strays, and Sal agrees. But you know the truth that lies beneath the railroad ties. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Rib

Between the din of construction and the trains overhead, it’s a tense wait for coffee. Everyone seems on edge. A lawyer in a white shirt snaps a fold in the newspaper. A courier on skates dips in and out of the line. I hunch my shoulders, survey the tables of a quaint outdoor restaurant, and think of Florence.

Standing on a footbridge at the Ponte Vecchio, an old man with no teeth stands beside me and sighs Ah, la bella Fierenze. And he asks if I am a turista and I nod because I can’t explain that I’m here on business. So I smile and brush strands of hair out of my face just as the breeze brushes sunshine over the water. Un raggio de sole. It captures everything: the scent of leather, tomatoes, la statua del David with his ribs exposed and his fingers curling around the way my own fingers curl.

Too hot to hold. I put my money on the counter. I grab a cardboard sleeve, slide it over the cup, and head out to State Street.

I step off of the curb drop my keys and dip down, without looking. Construction zone. The tractor hits a pothole and the backhoe snaps – slices my rib cage – snaps my leg.
I crumple beneath it like tissue paper.

Hand

She stands on a sphere where the horizon seems unnaturally close. With deliberate steps, she makes her way to the excavation site. It takes a moment to settle into this cratered wasteland. She takes up her trowel and begins the first archeological dig at the Sea of Tranquility.

Slowly scraping layers of soil, gently sifting, layer by layer, moving from buckets to sieves. Sifting and scraping until a small white nodule, a pearl, peeks from the dust. She picks up her brush. Begins to sweep away the moon dust. There are 27 bones in the human hand. Piece by piece she counts up the scale until it reveals itself, palm down, clinging to the past.

Detailing the edges she uncovers the first of a series of roots stretching out from the fingernails, a splash of red beneath the gray, stretching, pulsing, she brushes and brushes, unearthing the intricate network of silken threads and she thinks of cummings (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; swelling outward into the sharp-rimmed craters in Kandinsky colors spreading and nourishing the ground with flesh which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide).

Gently. Skillfully. She lifts the wrist. In the tomb of the palm, she finds them. The heart. The kidney. The lung. i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart) A huddled pile of stones. Dead beneath the bones.

Sleep Sequence

Strap

Before laying more track, carefully consider the sleepers. In the early days they used wooden railroad ties, and you must never break with tradition just because you’re bored. Remember: the sleepers provide a level base. They keep the tracks parallel.

However, there may come a day when you head to the lumberyard for materials and you pause and wonder if you really want to forge more rails and build more paths leading back to the same, monotonous loop, and you get tired of playing.

You remember Thoreau and his solitude. We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. And instead of construction, you choose a piece of pie at the Big Sky Café. You slide onto the red leather stool, put cream in your coffee, and you ask yourself did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, and you stare out the window at two young boys fishing in the river. One sits on a rock still with his head at a tilt. One stands in the grass and stares at the line. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.

The boys never age. Look at the peak. The snow never melts. The river never dries and the water whispers sweet lullabies to children who never wake. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.

Bed

The car is rocking steady and a man in white hovers over me. Stay with me. Stay awake. But a red light bobbing in my periphery lulls me out of consciousness and I drift to Venice.

It takes mere moments to conjure, recapture, the romance of a city on water. I take an evening walk and listen to jazz gently flow out of a nearby bistro, while smells of wine and sauces drift in front of my nose. Come dire che amate? Stay with me. Statte cu mie. How do I say that I love you? Somewhere there is an accordion, a guitar, a man singing love songs. Se tu m'ami, dimmi un segreto. If you love me, tell me a secret.

Water slaps against the sidewalk as people drink wine on patios. Shops glowing. Tinkling glass. A man with a bouquet of red roses slung over his shoulder walks along the canal and the pathway is guided by lampposts, by couples, by bridges and gondolas by candles dotting the walkways with stars. Tu sei una stella . . . la mia stella.

The whole city is in love with me. The window boxes on Via Garibaldi are full of gardenias and I want to rest my head in their beds forever, ever, ever.

Night

She’s on a bridge turning upward. Her eyes peel back like iron shutters. You’re awake, how do you feel? Tears burst and travel into the tributary folds of the pillow. All her organs are dead, she says. No, no. You’re confused, it’s the morphine. She keeps crying. Let me get Dr. Snyder.

He scoots on his stool in white coat and glasses. The leg will heal, but the rib’s gone. Whom should we call? Her Grandpa Sal raised her, but he’s gone. Friends? Traveling for the agency leaves little time for friends. Well, your office was concerned when they heard, so the nurse will touch base. A pat on the hand, and he’s gone.

She turns her head slowly, taking snapshots of the room. The leather chair. The unopened juice box. And the moon framed in the window is just like the moon she remembers. Come outside and look at the sky. He promises she can go back to the basement tomorrow and the train will be just as she left it. There’s nothing like a Montana moon in July. She steps out on the porch and climbs up in his lap. The rocking chair goes back forth, back forth, back forth.

And the moon is fine but she’s partial to the stars. Here’s the secret that keeps the stars apart. I carry your heart. That’s cummings. And she asks what it means. You’ll learn. And she asks why it’s secret. Nobody knows, little one.

They gaze upward. Nobody knows.