trains

Friday, July 25, 2008

At the north end of Union Station in Chicago, Illinois, a man with salt and pepper hair and a gentle demeanor looked at my ticket, tore down the perforated line, and handed me a small orange stub with the bold letters, GPK, typed alongside the 2015 that pre-assigned my neighbors for the next 28 hours.  The GPK stood for Glacier Park, Montana, my final destination, and was placed directly above my seat while others said PDX for Portland or FAR for Fargo.  All in all, there may have been 15 different destinations that I saw in the three carts I strolled through giving each cardholder a kind of ambiguous identity.  Was this vacation, or going home, or moving to a new one?  Or maybe it was something similar to my own:  revisiting an old, rugged love…for me, that love is Montana. 

 

I can’t help but find it strange, and a bit ironic, that the cross-country train ride through tunnels, over bridges, beside small towns with bowling alleys and local restaurants, was filled with the migration of a couple hundred people going and moving across the ever-changing landscape of Northern America, and yet its original purpose for my personal migration to PDX was abruptly postponed, keeping me in the all-too-familiar landscape of Memphis. 

 

Fourteen months ago, I parked my Jeep in front of 3116 Waynoka. The backseats were filled with clothes and furniture and pictures to decorate the new walls of my newest residence.  I was immediately introduced to a clan of kids that would become daily residents themselves:  QuiQui, Kinisha, Dria, and Kenny.  The girls who were six, five, and four respectively, carried some tee shirts, a pillow, and a pair of shoes up the stairs to Apartment #4.  Even Kenny, better known as Big Daddy, who at the time was 2 years old and a hefty 35 pounds, waddled my Nalgene bottle for the cause. 

 

I had just moved from Colorado and had an earnest need and desire for community and neighbors who didn’t hide behind security gates or TV screens.  Beads of sweat marked that summer along with the pain of losing friends, and mothers of friends, and learning to long for new and different things in love.  I lived with a group of people who knew the worst and best of one another. Marked by such vulnerability, intimacy was natural and love was being tilled in the core of our hearts.  Seasons came as months passed and that love planted its seeds and began to gradually burst its swelling need of existence through the course concrete of our flesh. 

 

When it happened, when love blossomed and spoke its words in prayer or lavished its arms around sweaty children, it was the love of God.  Only. 

 

I saw this up and down our street, in the front and back yard, on cookie sheets, plastic bowls used as drums, sidewalks meant for chalk.  And for three gracious months in the winter, I saw this in Nepal:  God’s love.  Seventeen children invited me and Britta into their family in Southern Nepal as they taught us Nepali (‘dee-nu-nah’), showed us the most proficient technique to extract lice from scalps, took us by the hand, threw their hands around our legs, and put their hands together for a cheerful, consistent, “Namaste.”  We loved and were loved deeply in those short months. 

 

I came back to Memphis for what was to be a short few months in preparation for my final departure to the Northwest.  The West had captured my romantic spirit with its mountains and waters, a land that forced its residents and visitors outdoors to learn from nature rather than television or the internet.  My affection was much akin to the ‘love affair’ John Steinbeck references in Travels With Charley, as he wrote as a hypnotized wanderer entranced by the woos of Montana. 

 

I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it … It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur.  The scale is huge but not overpowering.  The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.  Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

 

And so I had followed every step to find myself back there in the land of mountain and big skies, but alas, my steps found themselves nailed to the ground, instead, in Tennessee.

 

For two days I sat and talked and watched people from all different homes walk off the train in small and big towns across Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana.  Some were by themselves like me, others in small groups who played cards and watched DVDs on small DVD players.  You could tell how the other slept during the night by the degree of desperation for coffee in the morning.  I was able to finish a novel, start two others, write, and work on my scrapbook in those cumulative 48 hours. 

 

Just when productivity was beginning to bore me, I began to see the outline of peaks.  It’s the similar effect of driving from Utah toward Las Vegas:  45 miles away you can swear that fire is erupting in the desert only to realize another 20 miles in that it is actually the lights of Vegas…a forest fire’s worth of illumination.  And in the 45 miles from the initial sight of Glacier’s range, small mounds became glorious, heaven-made masses of rock.  In the interminable passing of those minutes, I pressed my face against the window and smiled with childlike giddiness.  I wanted to jump out and give it, something, a huge hug…and so, 30 minutes after I myself stepped off the train onto Montana land, I gave that hug and happiness to Britta. 

 

It is still strange in some ways that I’m not going on to Portland; in fact, it’s still strange on some levels that I’m not back in Glacier.  But, I saw enough PDX tickets of people making that their new home or old home or momentary place of residence.  Those mountains and that coastline can be for another day.  This day I have Glacier, and the love I know here will do nothing but encourage the steps I have left in Memphis.