You know how thick the trees are along the train tracks of North Carolina? Really thick, and green. I try to see through the trees to the places and people on the other side. This is what I do as a passenger going by.
I see small towns gather around their stations with orderliness, the main street straight and the bricks fresh to the eye, then they fling themselves at the edges into uncertain fields. I see the broken out windows of a brick town, probably a mill town, and little houses that spelled workers between shifts. A small 1990s-model truck runs parallel to the tracks, but we leave it behind.
I wonder how people make it. I wonder how people make money so that, for instance, they can pull into the gas station like everyone else does, buy a few gallons of fuel and get a soda and perhaps a snack, before or after dinner, the ritual repeating several times a day for the citizenry, like this train running between Charlotte and Raleigh, four times one way, four times the other. I wonder how the whole thing endures, the train included.
This is what I do: I try to see; I want to understand. My eyes take it in, then my mind goes to work. In the literary sense, it is my heart that is broken by the old brick wall. Or my ears are tuned to the biblical sound of creation groaning, not beneath the tracks, though that must be part of the sound too, but on the proverbial “other side of the tracks,” the places made visible when the trees part. Yet it is my mind that ponders, attempts, endeavors, essays, reaches for language to make some sense of it before I resign to silence. And it is my mind that notes the sadness which comes over me.
When I think of what the world needs, I conclude this is what I have to offer: witness. I cannot help but speak of what I have seen and heard, to quote the apostles. Now, the theologian Howard Thurman says, “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Yes, and I wonder if the hunger for language constitutes coming alive. Or the melancholy of a train ride.
I am a passenger. I want to connect what I see here and there. I long for the meaning of what passes in between.