Following a train of thought to its destination
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 16, 2024
- 551
It’s called “illusory motion,” and it’s the sensation you experience when, as you’re stopped in a car waiting for a train to pass, you feel as if you’re moving instead of the boxcars steadily rolling by.
Even if you understand the science of it all — the fact that the Earth is always spinning and you’re going 1,000 miles an hour even when you’re fast asleep — it’s a rather unnerving, unsettling thing.
We were somewhere between here and there when a train appeared out of nowhere and we had to wait. In the middle of rich Ohio farmland, with soil the shade of coal or a Magic 8-Ball, everything came to a halt as something anachronistic played out, a reminder of songs like “The City of New Orleans” or “Long Train Running.”
There were three of us whose journey was thus interrupted on a sunny November Saturday morning on a lonesome stretch of highway, corn stalks shivering in the chilly breeze even as birds of prey circled patiently, attuned to the possibility of a road kill treat.
One of us answered the call of nature, another fed the monkey on his back while the third stayed put, surveying from his backseat perch the bigger picture, the here-we-are sense of possibility.
For my part, I couldn’t help but put together a quick top 10 list of movies in which train travel played a significant role — I know, I know … it’s weird to be me, but that’s the hand I’ve been dealt.
In no particular order, these were the films that sprang to mind:
“A Hard Day’s Night,” “The Sting,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Dr. Zhivago,” “Risky Business,” “Strangers on a Train,” “The Polar Express,” “Emil and the Detectives,” “Silver Streak,” and “Schindler’s List.”
And then I flashed to an episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “A Stop at Willoughby,” which first aired in 1960. In it, a harried businessman finds himself transported back to the year 1888 and discovers how much happier he is in a place he only knows from his persistent dreams. It’s train travel with a Rod Serling twist.
I haven’t done much in the way of riding the rails, though I did join the jostling mob and squeeze into a New York City subway car, taking it all the way out for a glimpse of Lady Liberty.
And my wife and I secured seats on a train that ran through the mountains of Western North Carolina, one that simply went from forward to reverse when the terminus had been reached. That was all a bit disorienting but, truth be told, held a hallucinating charm.
That’s the thing about train travel that fascinates a lot of folks, the nostalgic, some would say romantic allure of a bygone means of transportation that, back in our nation’s adolescence, linked one coast to the other in an engineering feat that rivaled the Pyramids.
In the eighth grade, when the library held the key to everything, I researched the Silver Spike of Nevada, a ceremonial celebration that marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
What I discovered was the unwavering belief that it could be done, and nothing’s more American than that. If you think about it, the moon landing in summer 1969 was just an evolutionary extension of that can-do attitude, one that knew no boundaries.
Just thinking about it makes me feel all patriotic.
Somewhere, in the vast tonnage of stuff I hauled home from North Carolina, I know I have a valid United States passport.
The question is, how in the world can I possibly lay my hands on it?
From the distant recesses of my recreational past, I recall an admonition that went something like, “Do not exit until the ride has come to a complete stop,” or words to that effect. That’s where my mind has been since the results of the election were finalized.
Will I actually pack up and leave my country just because a majority of people have put a convicted felon in the White House?
If not now, when?
If not for that reason, why?
If the future is so bleak, where?
Nothing to worry about, my friends tell me, using the same reassuring tone a parent might employ when convincing a 5-year-old on a sugar high that it’s past bedtime, so chill out.
Then again, I have no children and therefore have no standing when it comes to channeling my inner Ward Cleaver, though my wife is fond of telling me I’d have been a great dad, had that been my destiny, but I also wanted to play first base for the Yankees.
And how did that work out?
So many questions … and not nearly enough honest answers.
“Do you see an end to it?” I was asked the other morning, as the wait for the train to pass went from understandable to unusual.
“No,” I said, scanning the rural distance with an untrained eye, “but it’s kind of reassuring, the way it just rolls along, in no hurry.”
We were just three good friends, back together again after many years, and all of a sudden, I pictured us leaving the Lexus where it was idling and hopping into a passing boxcar like the hobos of old.
Vagabonds without a cause, riding to wherever tomorrow awaits.
I guess you could call it another case of illusory motion.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where trains remain a viable means of transportation.