Green on Green
The clock at the Albany train station is broken, an Oregon winter sundial. This seems to be a cosmic joke considering that it was the railways that forced this continent to synchronize its watches with time zones - before them, every town kept its own stubborn time, until the steam engine made this untenable. I wondered to myself how many days in a row it had read 3:15. Not that it mattered - the train was late and like all trains it simply would arrive when it arrived.
Outside I watched Gaël run up and down the platform and tried to silently count his laps: seven, eight, nine. There is something wonderful about the fact that trips are bookended with acts of motion.
Isn't it curious how we compress family time into a few designated periods throughout the year? This leads to a conundrum: limited time, careful allocation of attention and the mathematics of dividing hours between friends and blood (a line which if we are lucky will blur at times). Only one night with the local crowd. The rest was family time, which was consumed with the intensity of people who understand scarcity. This was our opportunity to introduce Tommy not only to my brother and sister, but his cousin and my new niece. Meeting Isabella turned out to be the quiet centerpiece of the trip for me. Her story is not mine to tell, but her presence here is the kind of miracle that reminds how strong one can be, even one so little. She somehow looks both like Mom and Dad. She has an easy smile and used it in my direction so many times and it had the quality as if she was letting me in on a secret.
The rest of the trip went well. My mother woke up too early to cook the Turkey, my brother made sweet potato pie, green bean casserole and mashed potatoes. We all gathered together, but we forgot to do the "thanks" portion of the dinner - it's ok - this can come in many forms. Most nights we stayed up late talking, catching up on stories from each other's lives over the past year. One night my father stayed up with us and told us stories of my grandfather - a farm polymath who could repair diesel, heal animals, harvest and who could coax life from soil. You feel his presence radiating both through my father and the warmth of the fireplace.
But now we're on the train, and it's moving and the Oregon landscape is unspooling outside the window like God's own cinematography, green on green on green. We sit in the Portland station long enough to see the sky turn pink - just outside the city we pull alongside Columbia into Washington. The river catches the sunset and seems to hold it for hours - a miracle of light and water. We've commandeered the observation car again, our assigned seats long since annexed by more responsible passengers. You can't blame us though.
As I watch the many different versions of farmhouses, fields, trailers and junkyards I can't help, but think this season is a perfect opportunity to view all of America. Not just the version around my home table, but the raw, beautiful sprawl of it, best viewed through scratched plexiglass while crawling along a little under 60 miles per hour. I need more American poetry, art and music in my life.
The whole Thanksgiving pageant already feels like a dream, dissolving in the rearview like morning mist. Already I'm thinking about the next time, how many small moments will pass before we're all together again, how many steps Tommy will take, how smiles Isabella will make, the four of us brothers passing through four full seasons. A year feels like such a long time until suddenly it isn't. But for now, there's this, the sunset, the river, and enough distance between me and Corvallis to start making sense of it all.
Buy the ticket, take the ride. Even if the clock's broken when you start.
Cowabunga dude,
DJ
Written listening to this