On the wall, you can see a poster of popular breakfast items available for purchase when you visit me. Old? Young? Hungover? Health-conscious? Worry not—there’s something here for you.
The Northeast Regional is an old and trusted friend. On it, I have listened to cell phone confessions about regretted hookups, sat in a single booth with a family of four and an inebriated divorcé, and asked a stranger to send a photo of a rainbow from her cell-phone. I have heard personal histories, given unsolicited legal advice, and listened to a father explain to his toddler that—if only he’d close his eyes—the train would move faster.
I usually sit facing forward, on the right side of the café car. At various points in my decades-long career as a student, different details in the train-side landscape have piqued my interest. Environmental studies classes drew attention to the border of discarded tires and scrap metal at the tracks’ edge. An engineering course taught me to appreciate the imminent demise of aging infrastructure; graffiti only barely covers the rust that covers everything. An urban planning seminar gave me insight into eerily identical housing units, and my current internship has made me painfully aware of the hundreds of slit prison windows and chicken wire separating “criminals” from commuters. And my legal education, “The Wire,” has transformed strips of condemned Baltimore “row houses” into a social commentary on, well, a lot of shit.
My first years with Amtrak were tinged with the excitement of first love. I traveled from Princeton Junction to South Station (via Midtown) on a near-weekly basis. When the waterscape of New London signaled we were nearing arrival, my heart leapt. I would ask a seatmate to watch my laptop as I washed five hours of travel from my face in a damp and quivering bathroom. When we hit Back Bay, I’d reapply my chapstick and re-tie my hair. I was greeted on the platform with open arms, and parted on Sundays in the same spot— after a protracted and occasionally tearful goodbye.
As an undergraduate survival mechanism, I made Amtrak hours my most productive. In six, I could read an ethnography, or write ten pages of something mediocre. During naps, I could formulate emails and sort logistics. As college came to an end, however, the train’s ceaseless inertia and unexpected jolts became symbolic of my own mounting uncertainty. After an emotionally tumultuous year abroad, my Amtrak orientation changed. The new trip—which spans Penn and Union—is infrequent and spontaneous. On short notice, I might arrive (as I did last night) for dinner. Or make day-long excursions to visit my thesis advisor for periodic affirmation that everything is mostly fine.
As I sit, once again, on the Northeast Corridor, I smile at the thought that the entirety of my consciousness is a tiny fraction of the weight we’re carrying—with all of its images, melodies, and frenetic reflection.
Yesterday, when I was enlisted to contribute poetry for a wedding speech, I reread Frost’s lines about the “power of standing still.” He describes this aspiration as a metaphor for marital love. Nevertheless, I think it offers a personal ethic, too. For the first time, I think I feel closer to the feeling of stillness he describes. Though private retreats “up the stream of time” remain open to me, I feel freer of them. I walk without a camera. And I feel less lonely in the moments I cannot share.
When Laurence Binyon wrote “slowness is beauty”—I think this is what he was getting at. It’s a slowness of feeling—like his moments of pause in front of Japanese paintings. It’s a feeling of arrival and a feeling of contentment.
