A Taste for Trains

I almost convinced Daniela to take the train with me to Perugia this morning, but as usually happens when I almost convince her to do anything, she changed her mind. “What’s wrong with trains? Why won’t you ever take a train?” I insisted she think about it. “It’s the way they taste,” she explained, grimacing, making a tsking sound with her tongue as though her palette were suddenly producing the taste for her to spit at me. “I don’t know what it is, diesel fuel, iron…ecco…trains taste like iron. When I ride on a train, for the rest of the day my mouth tastes like train. I can’t stand it.”

I take the train from Spoleto to Perugia and then back again from Perugia to Spoleto at least twice a week, usually three or four times a week, and have been doing so for months and I can honestly say that they have never left a bad taste in my mouth, not even during a sciopero or strike, when I’ve had to readjust my entire schedule to board the only train-of-the-day serving commuters. Not even when the Eurostar sat on the track ninety minutes with all the commuters sealed up inside it, with me thinking it would suddenly buck into ferocious, lightening speed action…any minute now, any minute, the minute refusing to come. How delightful it was to text-message my boss that there was a “guasto nella linea elettronica” realizing I did not even quite know how to translated “guasto” into English…some kind of problem in the electric line that would keep me sealed in Carozza 9 for god knew how long intent on whatever thoughts I was thinking at the time and I assure you I was not thinking of the taste or even the smell of the train.

Not even when I once took a train from Ravenna through Bologna to Naples or thought I was taking a train from Bologna to Naples until I reached Florence and was told that I’d boarded the wrong train and was actually heading toward Milan but could get off in Florence and take another train to Naples and so wound up spending half a life time on the train, this time in First Class, because no other seats had been available, with a little pull-out tray holding the only thing I remember tasting-- an endless Dixie cup of espresso and little cookies shaped like crescent moons dipped in chocolate.

If I had a better head for arithmetic I’d start calculating how many hours of my life I’ve spent on trains and am sure I would come up with a staggering figure comparable to those arrived at when one discovers that humans spend a third of their lives sleeping. I am never bored on trains, never anxious for them to reach their destinations. There are days I read or grade papers or even pull out my laptop to write a letter or a story or stream ideas for a book; there are other days I press my head against the cool window glass and read over and over, a zillion times perhaps, “Non gettate alcun oggetto dal finestrino”—don’t throw things out the window—read the words as though they were haiku conveying something metaphysical. There are days I do watch the landscape, pretending the train is what’s stationary, all Umbria is flashing by, like celluloid, like what Keats must have meant when he said the world is “a vale of soul making.” It’s the vale that glides by, outside the window, making my soul—creating it!—while I sit idly on the idle train tasting nothing in my mouth but my own spit.

There are days I strike up conversations with random fellow-travelers, surprisingly rare days, given how much I travel and how many eyes I meet, rare enough that, when someone does break through the forcefield of my aura, he or she seems mysteriously important, a ghost from time past or time future, a guardian of thresholds, an angel bearing messages I will need for whatever turn my life is taking around the next bend, on the outside of the tunnel the train enters when all cell-reception is lost and the lights go dim and there you are with a stranger who is never really strange, no matter how foreign, his or her words hanging heavily in the air between us.

There are days I think I live in Italy simply so I can ride the trains and feel myself hurtling from here to there, houses, family, lovers, jobs, friends fleeting scenery in something wilder going on, my entire life suddenly a trajectory of train trips, AMTRAK from Georgia to Washington, Baltimore to New York, derailing for the tranatlantic crossing that will restore me to the carozza in which I find myself today, where it seems I have always been, stowing away for the adventure, the only stench I do recall that which comes from the toilet, but a mere gust of air will dispell it, if one opens the window.

The train is all its metaphors, is the phallus, eros, kundalini, is time and force and industry, is life itself hurtling through history, careening toward inevitable death. I much prefer being a part of the central nerve, fire in the lightning, than waiting on the platform, watching it whiz past. I know only exhileration and the wonder of hills, trees, stations platforms, familiar faces appearing for a moment in the fog and then receding. I find Daniela herself at the crossing where road meets track, sealed up in her jeep, the windshield wiper's whacking at the glass, heading where I'm headed but so alone in the getting there her propensity for road rage doesn't surprise me, nor do her sudden about-face u-turns toward the safety of home. I've offered her chewing gum, Mentos, sacchettini of salty travel snacks, but how naive I can be, offering antidotes when I don't know the poison, suggesting cure when I've yet to determine if there's any illness at all to be cured in either one of us.