Notes from a Train
Tunnels and Giants
I kicked from the corner of my stone-glass building. The weight of the sun had flattened the river Rhône. Old and new architecture of Geneva turned by and heat rolled down the hill that rose to the rail-station. The Paris train was waiting somewhere at the back of the yard — some place already in France. I made it with the whistles blowing. The train’s two stories were the 20th Century, a permanent-transient thing. I had not hoped for black smoke curling or a white faced clock or Swiss romance; right enough. Amongst what in an almost empty carriage I took my seat I can’t say. The tracks long the line were a-hum.
The conductors rattling ended and they put their whistles away. The carriage grew heavier as more passengers arrived and we were no longer suspended — it was to race out. Looking back, when that train’s still going and I am what, I can now say what I sat there with in the carriage as it began to roll — the feeling that no one is lost until the end — that we’re all in this together — that a train is like life, and that dying is not like death at all.
The first shift of trains long their tracks makes something leap in you, and maybe the reason is because over the mountains, round the lake, through the tundra or past the border, what might be seen and what might we be. The windows of Geneva, from the city to the outskirts, are painted white and green. And there’s graffiti on the building walls — it says we’re magic.
Geneva is not a city of trains but trams. They slope round the streets like saxophones getting drunk. And a tram is no train. It has none of the energy or the perspective. The greatest difference might be that whilst more often than not it is reminisce that trams instill, trains may lead people to hope.
The city was under us immediately, and before soon it slipped out of sight. When you stay in one place for any length of time you become less aware of the geography of the land around you. It might take an hour to happen in Tokyo, a morning in Lagos, half a day in New York or two nights in Paris, but it can happen anyplace. Geneva rests at about 1,200 ft above sea level, but living there you would think nothing could fall from it. After a short climb from the station the train had done just that, it had begun to fall.
Trains have run through the last two hundred or more years of human civilisation. In 1802 they began to carry coal out of Wales. The next year they twisted from London to Croydon. June 1827, railways opened in continental Europe. 1830 and the first train in the States. Dún Laoghaire to Dublin City, 1834 and the first Irish line. The first Cuban railway, 1837. Turner’s picture of Rain, Steam and Speed, painted 1844. Seven years later there were trains running cross Chile and India and from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
And on and on and on and.
Ploughed fields still and brown dipped into mountain tree-lines as we made from Geneva towards France. Power pylons stood in the fields strangely positioned. Their wires led towards the mountains and the mountains themselves were blue through the window glare and the softening of natural colour and light in the ending of day.
You give up something for the perspective a train grants. You let go when you jump into: ‘we went’ ‘we go’ ‘we are going’ ‘we are’. I wonder if I had went up to talk to the driver, how it would have been; how he would have greeted me. Would he have carried around elite charms as in the American 50’s when to become a train-driver was to become a pilot was to become a King, or would he have had eyes on a computer instead of eyes on land, full of a very particular kind of knowledge, no doubt useful, but not quite the knowledge we hoped for when we were kids.
How could you become a train-driver by chance? Would it be possible to work your way up from ticket-cutter or beer-salesman? It doesn’t seem so. Most likely you have to want to get there, which makes current train-drivers, at least those following the western-European lines, tragic heroes. It’s like they say, astronauts don’t even go to the moon anymore.
We passed two power plants in succession and a dried up river lumped with crisp white rocks that might have been chalk or limestone or gypsum. It quick gave way to a dense green tunnel of trees where the only thing to glimpse at was the rust of an older line laid parallel to ours, melted brown-and-orange in time.
The train hummed by an electric dam. What’s wild there in the west-of-Geneva French-Swiss hills?
We had seen no animals. It happens sometimes that one observation triggers the noticing of other things which may have otherwise slid by. It happened then. No one was talking on the train and it even seems now that we were not moving. We were long from the flat of Geneva and longer still from any destination. When the train took off people had been talking, but they were so quiet then. The train did not shake and we did not shake. We rode surrounded by some myth of suspension. And we might have made able to realise it if some jolt, some spark, some crash had come to say, you are!
There might only be a few ways in which we can shake one another. Or perhaps it is that we only get close enough to make an impact with very few people, and that getting that close long before requires the abandonment of any conscious desire to have an impact.
By reach of the border there had been no beauty to see about the ride. In Turner’s picture you look at the train from the outside. It’s a picture of a train as opposed to a picture from a train. Maybe some things are strained out by the prima facie detached perspective. Maybe when you’re on the train, you have to mud your eyes a bit, you have to shake, talk to strangers, imagine as the landscape goes, read aloud and open the window, because that all might be what beauty is mixed up in.
The land began to green away the rocks and wheat of Switzerland and we were in France. We passed small white houses. One alone then two or three. A small village then a larger one. At one point a garden of children’s toys jumbled up around a lone-standing tree leant hazard towards the hills and their rolls. Some unregulated space, somewhere. It was a sign of things to come as soon all the dams were gone and their ruler-square rocks. The hills began to climb and fall shapelessly in natural indies of time. They were the kind of hills that curled out ancient Celtic stories and from where some strands of music and language have their origins. The train started to jumble slightly and the hills let the train. They did not mind it at all. If it were possible they might have only shouted out in greeting: Woooh-ooo!
The tunnel came towards us like we were children once and woke up at life’s midnight. The train dived into it and the lights of the world blinked. Next year the Swiss will open the world’s longest train tunnel: fifty-seven kilometres through the Alps: a hole through the European heart. It will make it 25 minutes quicker to get from Zurich, Switzerland to Lugano, Italy, and take an hour off the ride from Zurich to Milan. Its construction began after a referendum amongst the Swiss in 1992. With the tunnel passengers will rise by 6,000 come 2020. Freight will be up by 20%.
Even that small tunnel was claustrophobic. When we emerged it was the sky that dominated. It was strong and late and blue. The sun was falling away. In neither the epic Greek stories nor the Bible is blue used to describe the sky — that colour just doesn’t appear there. Maybe it was the base colour of things then. That might explain it if it is the case that we do not normally mention the colours which form the backdrop of our days: white walls or grey walls, in bedrooms or in offices might rarely be mentioned in a story for example. The truth is that amongst all that has stayed the same over time, so much has changed. Our train looked nothing like those that rumbled in the 18th Century.
The first stop came in a middle-sized French town without a sign. From our rest place along the station’s small platform we could see trucks heading back east on a highway overhang. Truck drivers with empty loads; others with full loads; men drivers women drivers, young and old drivers, them rushing them taking their time; everyone a-movement.
Human design can be awe inspiring. Moving off we soon swept by a simple curling bridge cross a steep fall between the hills to our south. It was so sudden and simple and strong that looking at it you lost all self-awareness and became child-like.
The corner of France in the shadow of the Alps and stretching beyond is logging land, or was. There is almost no forest left there. European logging companies have taken their tools overseas to the Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo amongst other places. Bridges like the one we had just passed were the only markers on the land till we rode further north where towns started more frequent to appear and an hour passed like a second in a blur of factories and houses and industrial pattern.
It became dark suddenly, and in the night we began to get cold. We passed a town built round a church clock tower and the hands read that the day had gone. People had covered themselves in thin navy blankets and fallen asleep. Somewhere before the tunnel talking had almost crept into the train but it had not stuck around. In those final moments of landscape before the outskirts of Paris dragged us in, looking out the window was like looking up at giant chess pieces. Rough hill faces folded themselves out toward the train as they had done back in Switzerland. An airplane passed by heading south. The feeling of looking up at the chess pieces was amplified by the false stillness of the train and the real stillness of the rock faces and the knowledge of relentless movement as well as stillness, all around, unifying, and just out of sight.
Words: MichaelPhoenix/Blackfish_Media_Cooperative
Paintings: YaroErler/Blackfish_Media_Cooperative
