Riding the Rails: Part I - I Took a Train

I just read this article from Orion Magazine.  It reflects on one environmental writer's experience riding the rail throughout the United States after swearing off airplanes.  She speaks of the romantic nature of traveling by train--from the folk tales of people traveling across the plains and up and down the coasts of our country's past to hobos hitching rides to the European ideal of traveling easily by rail from country to country.  So, here are a few parts on trains...we'll see what happens.

Part I: I Took a Train...

"King's Sleeping Quarters" © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

As a child, I thought riding a train was an exotic way to travel.  I rarely saw trains, and the ones we did see were purely for moving goods, like coal.  I imagined riding a train to be a luxurious adventure of eating meals in the dining car, coughing my way through the smoking car, sleeping in a fully serviced room the size of an RV and waving at passerby from the caboose.  Upon further thought, I still imagine traveling by rail in the U.S. to be like this.  Hopefully my dreams will be realized or quashed sometime soon.

While I have never ridden the rails in the land of opportunity, I have been privileged to travel by train in Europe and India.  My experience in Europe happened years ago, in a sleeper car with my mom, traveling from Krakow to Prague...I think.  I don't really remember!  Some memory I have.  I do remember a middle of the night pound on the door to check our passports.  It was nice, as I recall, but not as fancy as my childhood fantasy.  It looked something like this:

That is a far cry away from what I imagined as a child, but not too shabby!  Traveling by train offers a much more comfortable way to get from place to place than sitting in a cramped airplane seat, and it lets one relax and sit back a lot easier than a car ride.

After a ten year hiatus from trains, not necessarily by choice, but from lack of trains/abundance of other forms of travel, I took them again in India in April 2010. It was sticky, loud, uncomfortable, crowded and awesome.  The trains are cheap, five to twenty bucks to get nearly anywhere in the country in the horrible sleeper cars (not the same as European sleepers!).  The trains are often fully booked, but that doesn't keep large families and holy men from hopping aboard and taking your seat.  One train I took had the old babas on the top bunk of every single berth.  the lower berths were overflowing with families...about twelve people in a space meant to hold six.  Coincidentally, my seats were often taken.  I wish I had a picture of all of the old "holy men" stealing the upper bunks as seats. Combine the following two photos, and you'll have an idea of what it looked like:

Imagine two Babas on that one bench, hunched over, with their tridents lying across their laps.  After spending some time standing in the aisles with my large backpack, someone else kicked one of the poor schmucks off so I could be the hunched over whitey on the top bunk.

While on the trains in India, I had the pleasure of reading Atlas Shrugged, which follows the building of a high speed railway in the U.S.  It was coincidental reading for this experience, although wholly different.  After getting very ill after my ride from Varanasi to Agra, I made sure only to eat the train food that mothers purchased for themselves and their children...it kind of worked.  I still got sick, but not quite as sick, and I still got to eat the delicious food of the tracks, from samosa and chai (I miss the voice changing chai wallahs) to strangely long cucumbers with spicy salt:

A Train Vendor Selling Strangely Long Cucumbers to a Family Below Me.

Sleeping in the "sleeper" car was a very different experience.  Theft is common, so I snuggled with all of my belongings on an eighteen inch wide bunk and spent most of the night listening to my iPod and reading.

The train from Trivandrum to Madurai, in southern India, weaves through one of the largest wind farms in the world.  We sped through it at twilight.  It was amazing...the soil there is a deep burnt orange, and the sky was purple with these graceful towers of energy spread as far as the eye could see.  The view from the seats of the trains are bothersome because the windows are barred.  I don't know if you can do this on an American train, but I stood in the open doorway of the train, nothing but the wind between myself and the landscape.  My hair slapped my face and my skirt billowed in voluminous waves as crimson, tangerine and hues or purple flew past, diced with the crisp white of turbines.  It was absolutely gorgeous.

Of the few trains I have ridden, the experiences have been amazing in their beauty, stench, accessibility, convenience and memories.  One of my friends takes trains in the U.S.  I should hop aboard soon. 

What's in a blog?...

...That which we call a blog by any other name would be many times as reputable. That is my take on it, anyway. A month ago or so, I had this discussion with my lovely boyfriend, Evan. I realized that I don't take "blogs" seriously. Many of them consist of amazing pieces of the written polemic, observations on current events, important life lessons and beautifully crafted fiction. Alas, many of them consist of the goings on in people's lives, often poorly written out of the perceived necessity that these people's loved ones need to know what happens to them 24/7.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it gives the bloggers who research their writings and put extra care into crafting pieces that a larger percentage of people can read and enjoy kind of a bad name. Perhaps not a "bad name" but a generic one, nonetheless. "Blog" has become the "Kleenex" or "Rollerblade" of online writing. "I'm blogging right now." "I'm going Rollerblading tomorrow." Are you writing an online diary about how you stepped in this HUGE puddle and then missed the bus, only to be welcomed at work with fresh baked bread, or are you writing an interesting piece about something cool that happened in Madagascar? Are you toodling around your neighborhood or are you doing sweet jumpy things on inline skates? (I have a huge knowledge of inline skating/rollerblading, if you can't already tell).

I know this isn't a totally valid comparison--blog isn't a trademarked brand. But it does make some sense, yes? It's a blanket term that encompasses many forms of the written word, as made clear by how Blogger explains what a blog is. The term comes from an amalgamation of the words "web" and "log." Web+log+lazy pronunciation=blog.

It all makes sense, but for my own good, I need to think outside the blog. If I want to to be a writer, I need to write. If I don't want to be a blogger, I shouldn't blog, I should write. So that's what I'm attempting to do. I will write, on blogspot, on my blog, but I will not blog. I will write.

Blogs that Give Blogs a Good Name

• Swiss Miss: This is a design blog with pictures, links and commentary on new happenings in the design world.
• The Goat: The Backcountry.com's blog posts amusing, interesting and educational posts related to outdoor recreation.
• Gusto: Eating with Pleasure: This is my friend Jenny's site. She is a great cook and food culture writer.
• Laughingsquid: It's just funny, darnit.
• Timothy McSweeney's: Also funny, darnit.
• The Forecast: A blog from one of my favorite bands, Railroad Earth, it generally reports on lesser heard happenings in the environmental realm.

These are just a miniscule percentage of the great reading to find out there in the internet ether. They are wonderfully encouraging to all of us bloggers out here trying to move away from the generic.