A LOVE AFFAIR WITH TRAINS

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What better time to write about trains than whilst aboard a regional train headed to Hazebrouck? I think taking trains is one of my favorite things to do. I find it very relaxing and quite interesting for a number of reasons.

REASON ONE: THE MOTION FACTOR

The train makes a sound that resembles a muted jet engine as it strives to reach its cruising speed. The ride is smooth; the few bumps are more like riding over ocean waves in a sailboat rather than crossing potholes or hitting rocks with a a car or bike. The word “muted” again comes to mind, as though we were riding on a mattress that absorbed every bit of the shock so that only the actual, gentle (if still rapid) movement itself remained. In addition to the wave-riding, horse-riding up-and-down motion is a side-to-side swaying. It is not unlike the Cape May ferry as it slowly barrels along, carrying cars and people across the bay’s relatively calm waters, or a sailboat doing its equivalent of strolling across open waters. It is almost as thought the train takes on a maternal role, cradling and softly rocking its passengers - if not to lull them to sleep, to as least help them to forget about the hustle and bustle of their daily, work-filled lives or about their current status of “commuter” - neither here nor there, between place of departure and final destination. Smooth, swaying, rocking… the train’s motion(s) are quite soothing to me.

REASON TWO: BACK IN TIME

True, trains often cross wide, open fields with nothing but green and tan nature. I love the mix of colors and textures. There are lush, soft grasses that make me think of plopping down on a pillow or running my fingers through a thick, healthy head of hair. Then there are fields of yellow that I imagine like soft, damp chalk that would shed and leave its outer layer with anything that it touched (can you tell I’m a teacher?). Then are are fields of varying shades of browns, tans, beiges, goldenrods… they are stiff but brittle, like hay, or like peanut brittle without the sticky factor. Unwelcoming, they seem dull, lifeless, and indifferent. I really enjoy the vast differences of color and texture in the open spaces that the trains pass.

However, it isn’t all fields being separated and industrialized by train tracks. The tracks also bypass villages. When passing by a village, I always have the impression that I have jumped back in time a hundred (or two) years. I think back to how many villages must have been formed. It starts with a church… a church and just a few houses surrounding it. The church is simple in design and fairly unremarkable (if not a bit dismal) in color and general appearance. It has one steeple, often with a plain, round clock toward the top. The houses (and small shops - a bakery, a small grocery store, a butcher) are made of a dull, gray-brown stone (whether natural stone or concrete) and have red tiled roofs. The roads are narrow and without lines or markings, though they at least have most often evolved from packed dirt to some form of pavement, whether concrete or tar and gravel, and now guide cars rather than horses.

Behind the houses are small, rectangular patches of land often much greener and lusher than the area around it - gardens. They are simple, practical gardens, growing lettuce, tomatoes, herbs. There is often a cord cord strung either between two trees or between house and tree - a clothesline. But there are usually more than a few houses. I can just imagine the villagers congregated in the church hall for a town meeting, deciding to expand and build a few new houses. This is much unlike the vast, modern United States where expansion was the name of the game from the very start, and large quantities of lush, virgin land was hacked horizontally and vertically to make perfect square (or rectangular) tiles of land on which to build houses and stores and factories and hotels between wide, paved, perpendicularly planned roads. No, in these villages, the residents decided to expand only when the need finally arose. Behind the existing little houses and gardens rose a few new houses. The roads, therefore, were often based on circles rather than tiles that left the church more or less the center of the village. Roads in France in general seem to form all BUT right angles. I often lose myself for long periods of time imagining the development and evolution of the villages. When, I wonder, did water pipes and pumps replace wells? In what year did the last saddled horse obligingly carry his master to the town store and home again? I could go on, but you get the idea.

REASON THREE: A DIFFERENT (UNWANTED?) PERSPECTIVE

The train’s path reminds me, in some ways, of back roads or the “back way” to get somewhere. At first, this idea seems absurd. How can the straight, strong, steady, even train tracks be compared to a road that varies in width and texture, to a road that twists and turns and remains part of the landscape around it? Easy - forget the road, forget the tracks, forget the physical and literal. The train, not unlike the back roads, allows one to see things from another perspective. When driving into the heart of a town, you are only driving where politicians and residents and architects and construction workers have all had the chance to carefully plan, create, and execute what you see upon entering. What you see is not random; rather, it has all been carefully designed and controlled in order to give the desired impression.

Now think about what you see when taking the back roads or a train. First of all, you enter not by way of the main road and, therefore, the front; instead, you creep up behind a town, taking it by surprise. For me, it would be like someone surprising me with a visit at about 10:00 AM on a Saturday after a long night out. In no way would they be seeing me at my best. My hair would be an odd mix of standing straight up in random clumps and matted to my head. I would still be wearing whatever of my previous night’s makeup had not come off on the pillowcase. I would answer the door wearing my glasses, an undershirt, and men’s Ohio University basketball shorts. The image I had so carefully constructed before revealing myself to the public (or simply to other people) the previous night long since gone, the person on the other side of the door would see a much more raw, unpolished version of me… not to mention the fact that yesterday’s clothes would certainly be strewn across the floor and yesterday’s dishes in the sink.

It’s sneaky, really - the trains slow to a crawl, doing their version of winding through the maze created by converging and expanding tracks approaching any train station. They catch the city by surprise, passing run-down factories, austere office buildings, faded art deco hotels, and abandoned brick buildings that belong to the SNCF (the national rail service in France) and served long ago as the workplace of men that sat pushing and pulling levers and buttons to switch train tracks before it all became modern, digitized, computerized, switchboard-ized, and practically automatic.

These train buildings, like some of the tracks around them, are overgrown with grass and climbing plants, which found their way up, through, and past busted-out windows and up to the moss-covered sagging roof. I feel like many people would shake their heads and click in disapproval - how could they let such run-down buildings, such eyesores stay standing? I don’t share this mindset. For me, these buildings serve as a link to the past. The fact that they haven’t been altered of renovated makes this past more tangible, more concrete.

There is an entire train station like this in the southeast corner of Lille. The metro shoots up out of the ground to take a higher route as it loops south then west then north, snaking around the city outskirts, mimicking the beltway before diving back underground and then shooting out to the western suburbs. It is a station that was once used for everything cargo. Now, though, the tracks are rusty and powdery instead of black and slick with grease. Grass unevenly intertwines with iron and rotten wood and stone. Entire buildings - four and five stories just like little one-room switchboard buildings - stand (or slouch, really), eroding gradually and quietly. These buildings have histories, have stories (the same word in French, just in case you were wondering), but they stand forgotten…and besides, they are too old and too tired to tell them anyway. The main hall of the train station is still home to SNCF workers, but administrators and other men and women who come to work in suits, carrying briefcases. For them, they have office jobs and it just happens to deal with trains, just as I worked in Human Resources for Davey and it happened to be a tree company.

Anyway, back to the point - train tracks being like back roads. I remember last year coming to Lille from Paris. I came to look forward to the grim buildings of the outskirts of the city - it meant I was almost home. Seeing the ten- or twelve-story Castorama building always brought a smile to my face. It is a dingy, grayish-brown building with square, nondescript windows that you know do not allow enough light through to illuminate the inside. The Castorama sign at the top has also seen better days. The yellow neon lights that outline each letter (well, those that still light up at all) flicker. I have come to anxiously await the appearance of this otherwise dull building, though, because it means that I am almost home.

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