Learn The Train's Rhythm

If a train noise were solitary, staccato, it would almost certainly wake you up.  It feels like an earthquake.  But because it is rhythmic and rolls like the surf, it isn’t hard to sleep atop the steady thudding of the train.  The sky was overcast and there were drops on the windows.  I tied the tired old curtain the covered the bottom half of the window on my side into a knot and considered the view.  I wanted to check where we were on the map on my phone.  My phone was dead. 

There are not outlets in this compartment.  For that one needs to head out in the hall.  Through a swinging door there is a cubby outside the bathroom where an outlet can be found.  I hopped up on the shelf that could almost comfortably seat a man and figured I’d grade papers as my phone slowly sucked up new energy.  The night’s garbage bag was also in this hall.  A plastic bag slumped below my phone held the community trash from the night before.  The smell of the bathroom mixed with the trash and I fortunately I remembered that the widow above my head could be opened. 

Siberia is always spoken of with dread by prisoners who were to have been sent here.  I’m sure it’s rather bleak in the winter and this is the deciduous Far Eastern version of it.  But from where I sit it looks clean and verdant and highly reminiscent of northern North America.  It looks like an uninhabited stretch of upstate New York. There are some automobiles, and they go faster than we do.  This is certainly not a “high speed” train.  There are some villages and every two hours or so we stop somewhere that seems to be a town. 

Slowly we learn the train’s rhythm.   We’ll be on this vehicle for the next six days.  Later, after an hour’s worth of compromised posture and compromised olfactory sensation and standing and sitting and standing and sitting to afford my fellow passengers ease of passage into the toilet or dining car staff passage through the train car, I discern that the dining car also has a plug outlet.  This is a rather dramatic upgrade and I camp out at a table there for the next four hours.  

Monday 6/25/18