The Schedule
It runs on Thursdays. Departs at 11:47pm. Arrives — if everything goes right, which it often doesn't — at 6:15am. The journey is about four hours of actual travel and two hours of waiting at a junction where nothing happens except the train sits and the mountains are dark outside the window.
I took it because it was the only way to get there without a car. I would take it again for no reason at all.
The Compartment
Six seats, three facing three. I had the compartment to myself until the second stop, when a man got on with a large bag of oranges and a thermos of something that smelled like anise. He offered me an orange. I took it. We didn't speak again for two hours.
At the junction, he told me he made this trip every week. Had been making it for eleven years. He knew the conductor by name. He knew which side of the train to sit on to see the valley when the sun came up.
He was on the left side. I moved to the left side.
The Junction
The junction is a small station in a town that exists, as far as I can tell, primarily to be a junction. There's a platform, a waiting room with plastic chairs, a vending machine that sells hot drinks, and a view of mountains that in the dark are just shapes against a slightly lighter dark.
We waited there for two hours. The man with the oranges slept. I drank something from the vending machine that was labeled "coffee" and tasted like warm ambition. I read. I looked at the mountains.
The writing at haveafieldtrip has been covering this kind of travel — the slow kind, the kind that gives you time to be somewhere rather than just passing through it. This was that.
The Valley at Dawn
The man was right about the left side. When the light came, it came from the right — from behind the mountains on the east — and the valley opened up on the left in a way that was almost theatrical. Green and mist and a river that caught the light before anything else did.
The man woke up when the light changed. He looked out the window for a moment, nodded slightly, and went back to sleep. He'd seen it eleven years of Thursdays. It still made him nod.
That's the thing about places that are worth going to. They don't get old. They just get more familiar, which is different.
The Arrival
The station at the end was small and cold and smelled like diesel. The man with the oranges got off before me, at a stop I hadn't noticed on the schedule. He waved without turning around.
I stood on the platform for a while before I went anywhere. The mountains were fully visible now. The town was waking up. A dog crossed the street with the confidence of an animal that knows exactly where it's going.
I didn't know where I was going. That was the point. The train had gotten me somewhere. The somewhere was mine to figure out.
More on slow travel and the places worth taking the long way to at brushedpast and jeremydeanmusic — different contexts, same quality of attention.