In Underland

I'm not sure how to begin this story. Suffice it to say that if writing is a way of processing experience, that's what I intend to do in this post. I'd like for it to be beautiful in a poignant sort of way. I'd like for it to be meaningful, to draw a thread of connection between events and ideas. Sometimes a writer achieves that without consciously trying to, but I have no motivating concept, no point that I'm trying to draw from what I'm going to relate. It's just what happened, and it made me sad and thoughtful and confused.

I took an Amtrak train to Atlanta on Friday to spend the day with the family I worked for last year and their homeschool co-op on a field trip to Legoland. We enjoyed our day, and the family I'd come with stayed in Atlanta while I caught the train back to Clemson with another family from the same co-op. My seat-mate was this family's little boy, John Mark. He spent most of the beginning of the trip making sure I was watching him play his Nintendo and the rest of it asking me if I was hungry. He desperately wanted to be taken to the dining car, and his parents weren't keen on the idea. Much as I sympathized with his deep longing, I didn't budge.

He'd finally quieted down a little, and I was reading a magazine. It was about a quarter to nine when the train began to slow, then stopped. For the first minute or so, no one seemed to notice, but as time stretched on, the passengers grew restless. Someone returning from the dining car said he had seen fire out beside the train tracks. At one point, an attendant hurried through the car carrying three or four fire extinguishers.

As the minutes dragged on, information filtered through the car. I had no way of knowing how accurate it was, because there was only one brief announcement on the PA system explaining that we had hit a car and were waiting for the police to release the train. The man across the aisle from me talked to some policemen in the dining car and told us that 2 people had been killed. Around 11:00 I fished out a notepad and a pen and wrote for the next half hour or so:

There's something particularly tragic in train deaths. Maybe it's the relentlessness of a train's movement. They can't stop. Train drivers can't keep from killing people. There is no indication at all of what to expect. It's like Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum in the boat in Underland.

I wrote down details about my surroundings, like how unexpectedly kind the man across the aisle was to offer me a sip of the very last cup of coffee they handed out before the dining car closed. Or how I looked over at John Mark, curled up in his seat asleep, and thought that children look like angels when they're sleeping. How when you're sitting in a stopped train at night, you can drive yourself half crazy trying to tell if it's inching along slowly, staring out a pitch black window until you're dizzy, convincing yourself you can see the silhouettes of the trees moving against the sky. The hum of the idling engines and the air conditioning and hushed conversations.

We sat completely still for four hours. The relief when the train finally started moving was beyond words, as was the frustration and anger when it stopped again only a few minutes later so that the crew could clear the wreckage of the vehicle off the front of the train. We were stopped for another forty five minutes. I was beyond being sad or pensive; I just wanted to be home. There were a few moments where I really felt like I was never going to, like I was just going to be on that train for eternity. And at the same time I was disgusted with myself for being concerned with a delay when people had died. We made it to the station in Clemson at ten minutes after three. It took me another twenty minutes or so to drive home, on the phone with my best friend so I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel. I dropped into bed at a quarter to four, twenty four hours after I had gotten up to catch the train to Atlanta.

I've spent the last several days processing exactly what it is that I'm supposed to feel about the whole affair. I found out Saturday that three people had been killed, not two. I don't know if I should be more affected by it or less. Honestly, I don't know how affected I am. I only know that it has meaning, and that I was compelled to write it down. Maybe it'll begin to make more sense to me when I come back to read this later.