Stations

I watch my friend Hilary walk toward the train depot in the stark glaring sunlight of a California afternoon that shouldn’t be this hot. She looks compact and self-contained, wearing jeans and hiking shoes, her white hair pinned up efficiently, all of her things in a backpack except for the book she carries in her hand. There is something fragile and endearing about her, but perhaps it is just the context. The clock tells us she has a twenty-minute wait for her train to arrive, but there’s room on a bench, and no sense prolonging this, so we wave from our car and turn on the ignition.

It has been a short visit, but the hours are filtered through her quiet presence, each day in retrospect a watercolor picture of winding roads, creekside sycamores, a kelp-y shore with seabirds, and Hilary in a reflective mode, contemplating a new season with curiosity and detachment, some mixture of brave and bemused. It occurs to me that when we are not dismayed and exhausted, the unending assault of input brings us all to that point, just watching the spectacle, considering our coping methods, gathering courage. As John O’Donohue said, “It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone". Yes, it’s strange and scary, often heartbreaking, but also wonderful and miraculous.

Her head is down, but I think she waves back. How many visits have concluded at these goodbye stations? How many journeys have begun here? I ponder the partings, the turning away with resolve. I remember this particular station well, the southbound train I always took to visit my mother, the knot of apprehension, the sadness afterwards.

I remember other stations too, buses and trains. Airports, less so…the scale and chaos are too large, the poignancy diluted. But oh, the goodbyes at bus depots, my father’s discomfort with my various decisions, which were not decisions at all but rather efforts to keep moving. I rode the highways and the rails, that’s what I did, and I said good-bye a lot.

One day I boarded a Greyhound, rode for twenty hours, and got off in Panama City, Florida. It was a random choice, a place an old boyfriend had spoken of fondly, not even a fantasy of my own. I made my way to the beachfront at the Gulf of Mexico -- a silly girl, a backpack and bandana type with long brown hair who stood alone on a splintered boardwalk, bewildered. It was all slow motion and alien silence; the air was humid and smelled like fish. I checked into a motel room at four o’clock in the afternoon, drew the blinds, and sat on the edge of a bed wondering why I was there. The next morning, I got back on the bus headed north.

I turned twenty-four on that bus, shivering as night fell and a chill filled the carapace I shared with strangers. A skinny young man with a twang to his talk rifled through his duffle bag, unbidden, pulled out a jacket, and placed it over my shoulders. “You looked cold,” he said.

So many goodbyes. So many strangers. Pie and bitter coffee from vending machines. Driver breaks and shift changes in the middle of the night in unknown towns along the way to wherever we were going. Rain might freckle all the windows and smear the passing lights at dusk and I would lean my head against the cool glass, feeling the vibration, enjoying the sense of passivity and motion. Maybe I just liked the idea that even as I rested, I was moving. Maybe it was all a long time-out, a pause that was a preface to a life.

Eventually, I shunned buses, trading bus depots for train stations, more purposeful and grown-up. I took a train from Syracuse to Chicago, then transferred to a Greyhound bound for Madison to attend a friend’s wedding. A decade later, my Italian relatives gathered to greet me at Napoli Centrale, as though I were a visiting queen. Another time, in a Raymond Chandler state of mind, I bought a ticket for the Coast Starlight at Union Station, with its grand vaulted ceilings and polished wooden benches, the Spanish tiles and art deco motifs, the old-fashioned schedule board with arrivals and departures lit up red and green. And I was just another dame traveling through L.A., but by this point in my history, I knew where I was going.

So my friend Hilary has left, but we have new memories, and before long, we’ll get together on the other side of the pond, at her home in Wales or some meetup point in England. This will involve bus, plane, train, and automobile, a long hyphenation of transport leading to a farmhouse or a garden or a village pub. It’s never convenient, but always worthwhile.

And today is a pocket day, a sweet little pouch of a day tucked between the seams of the week, with no driving or forays into town required, just an invitation to be present. Carey and I went for a Sunday morning walk on the east end of the Ranch, and among other things, we saw a young man walking a plump furry house cat, coots skimming the pond and possibly a Canada goose, butterflies in abundance like orange sparks in the treetops, and a woman in a hot pink leotard with two blue heelers at her side.

The woman, whose name was Nikita, was very friendly; we asked if she was staying here, thinking she might want to go for a walk with us some morning. “I’m not sure,” she said. “If I’m not here, I’m in my apartment in Sweden.” We figured she could find us if she wanted, and we went our separate ways. A little later, as we neared the end of our route, Carey pulled out a bag of marshmallows, a much maligned and under-rated treat we both enjoy. “Squish and eat” it said on the bag, and we did.

Yesterday I posted a picture of Hilary at the goodbye place, and another dear friend, Barbara, surprised me with a photo of myself getting off the train at the Amtrak station at Saratoga Springs last month. “My friend at the hello place,” is how she captioned it, proving that life is all a matter of perspective. And how well I remember looking up to see her, so dear and familiar, waiting there to greet me.

Train station musings, stops and detours, lots of meandering, looking for a theme. In retrospect, I don’t know if it was strength or weakness that prompted my career as a fugitive, but I am grateful for the boy who put his jacket around me, and for a man who told me, amidst the clamor of church bells in an upstate town, to imagine my future self, and friends who offered bicycles and couches and didn’t disdain me for stepping out of an Old World opera whose notes I couldn’t carry. And I am grateful for the place where I finally got off. I didn’t have a map or a schedule, but I found a home in an implausible land I could never have imagined. I know now that if someone loves you, every moment might contain a hello. I know that goodbye places are also starting points.